W
ith Israeli elections roughly two months away, the country’s far-right political scene has grown crowded and increasingly combative, as a cluster of small parties compete for a shrinking pool of hardline voters by pushing their rhetoric further to the edges.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has built his public profile in part on provocation, regularly sharing footage of himself mocking or confronting Palestinian prisoners, publicizing threats against a prominent detainee, and championing legislation that broadens the use of the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terrorism-related offenses. As campaigning intensifies, his messaging has escalated further still.
A recent AI-generated video posted to his campaign account depicted numbered Palestinian prisoners in uniform being funneled along a conveyor belt into a fenced, watchtower-ringed compound, growing visibly gaunt and distressed as the sequence progressed, captioned to suggest a promise fulfilled. The clip drew more than four million views before it was taken down. Ben Gvir has also repeatedly called for prison conditions for Palestinian security detainees to be stripped down to the bare legal minimum.
As the minister overseeing both police and prisons, Ben Gvir wields real institutional power, and his rhetoric has become closely tied to how Israel is perceived internationally. He is widely seen as the most prominent figure among Israel’s far-right politicians, but he is far from alone. Under Israel’s electoral system, parties must clear a 3.25 percent threshold to win seats in parliament — any votes cast for parties that fall short are effectively discarded. That dynamic is fueling fierce competition among right-wing contenders, each trying to carve out distinct, hard-edged positions to survive the cutoff.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has made expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank a centerpiece of his platform, framing the effort as a way to foreclose any future Palestinian state. His campaign features a plan to reshape the demographic makeup of the Negev and Galilee — regions with sizable Arab populations — by importing West Bank-style settlement tactics: relocating roughly a million additional Jewish residents to the areas and building around 40 new communities along with numerous individual farms.
Retired Brigadier General Ofer Winter has entered the race with a newly formed party, drawing support from religious Zionist and right-wing circles. At his campaign launch late in August, he ruled out any future Palestinian statehood and framed emigration as the answer for Gaza. His running mate, Yoseph Haddad, an Arab Christian activist known for his outspoken pro-Israel stance, has said Arab Israelis deserve representatives loyal to their own community rather than to Palestinian population centers, and has voiced open disdain for existing Arab political leadership. Haddad has said he hopes to become the country’s next minister of public diplomacy and the first Arab member of the security cabinet.
Further along the spectrum, Avi Maoz’s Noam party has built its identity around opposition to Jerusalem’s Pride parades, secularism and feminism, though it is not projected to reach the electoral threshold on its own. Moshe Feiglin’s Identity party faces the same long odds. Feiglin, a longtime far-right activist with past ties to Netanyahu’s Likud party, has called for Gaza’s destruction and the relocation of Palestinians to other countries, previously declaring that “every child in Gaza is the enemy” while arguing for full Israeli resettlement of the territory.
The proliferation of far-right parties poses a genuine threat to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition prospects, since votes split among multiple small parties could be lost entirely if any of them miss the threshold. Netanyahu has warned that such fragmentation could cost the right-wing bloc the election outright, and he has released a series of video appeals urging Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Winter to merge into a single unified list rather than run separately.
So far, none of the three have shown signs of stepping back from their individual campaigns. Instead, each continues to sharpen his own message, leaning further into hardline positions as the race for a limited bloc of far-right votes grows tighter — a trend that shows no sign of reversing before Israelis head to the polls.
(Source: CNN)
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