It’s Noon in Israel: Ben Gvir: All Pain for No Gain
Also, the Shin Bet's newest challenge, the voters that will decide this year's elections, and more.
It’s Thursday, May 21, and before we get to today’s stories, a quick Iran update. With the holiday of Shavuot set to begin tonight, many Israelis assumed the war would resume, given the region’s recent habit of timing dramatic escalations precisely with Jewish holy days.
Last night, a “tense” phone call took place between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump regarding a frozen military operation codenamed “Heavy Hammer.” Initial reports paint a predictable picture: Netanyahu pushing to reignite the conflict, while Trump is more hesitant, wanting more time for diplomacy and economic pressure. For now, it seems Trump is sticking to his approach. Regardless, Israelis will be celebrating tonight, but with an air of distinct caution.
Now, onto the news.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir taunts detained flotilla activists at Ashdod Port on May 20, 2026. (Screenshot/Ben Gvir’s X account)
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is a reputational arsonist. Yesterday’s fire involved the minister visiting a detention center holding the latest batch of Gaza flotilla activists. There, he paraded around the bound and bowed detainees, waving the Israeli flag and blasting the national anthem.
Are the participants in this flotilla criminals and determined enemies of Israel? Yes.
Were some of the activists associated with ISIS? According to my sources, yes.
Should we shed a single tear for them? Absolutely not.
And were the embassies that summoned Israel’s ambassadors to reprimand them for Ben-Gvir’s actions the truest friends to begin with? No.
But despite all of that, what Itamar Ben-Gvir did is a complete scandal—for three reasons.
First, it is a brazen subversion of established policy. The government had already decided to deport these participants. Like it or not, that was the directive. For a minister to go rogue and hijack the situation reeks of cheap political theater—a desperate grab for attention that directly sabotages the government’s agenda.
Second, this stunt is the political equivalent of the Davidka, Israel’s notoriously loud but functionally useless mortar from the Independence War—all noise, zero payload. In practice, Ben-Gvir’s photo-op achieved absolutely nothing, yet the diplomatic bill is staggering. It runs on the exact same playbook as his poorly planned death penalty law for terrorists: it will likely never result in a single execution, but it guarantees that Israel suffers maximum international blowback and disastrous headlines. If the goal was deterrence, I’m highly skeptical of its effectiveness. I can think of few things more guaranteed to fuel an activist’s anti-Israel obsession and ensure their booking on the very next flotilla than a forced, front-row seat to Ben-Gvir’s cheap political theater.
Third, it actively sabotages vital, ongoing diplomatic efforts. Israel has been staring down the barrel of severe EU sanctions after losing the protective veto of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. As Ben-Gvir was busy planning his stunt, Israel secured a critical victory: the Czech Republic agreed to step in and veto the sanctions in Hungary’s place. The Czech commitment has not been withdrawn, but why would one possibly want to make the lives of our diplomats and allies that much harder? Just as the international pressure was naturally defusing, Ben-Gvir dragged the world’s hostile glare right back onto Israel.
Yes, the detainees may be criminals. But to the rest of the world, they just see a vulgar politician—one already synonymous with everything critics hate about Israel, with a Hague arrest warrant hanging over his head—screaming at captives of unclear guilt.
I wish I could say it was an unfortunate mistake. But it was entirely by design.
An explosive drone launched by Hezbollah is seen near the Israeli border with Lebanon during a Hezbollah attack in northern Israel. (Ayal Margolin/Flash90)
One evening, at his home in Jerusalem, David Zini heard bursts of gunfire coming from a nearby Arab neighborhood of Sur Baher. “It was something on a company-to-battalion scale,” he later told his staff. “I thought about calling the head of the Shin Bet, [Israel’s internal security service], but then I remembered that it’s me.”
As if the organization didn’t have enough on its plate with the war against Hamas, “mowing the lawn” in Judea and Samaria, securing the prime minister and the state’s top leadership, and defending democracy and the elections, two new threats have emerged. Their true significance has yet to be fully internalized by most security practitioners: drones and weapons smuggling.
Five years ago, only technological-military powers—Israel being one of them—could track a figure from afar, hover in the air above, and drop explosives on their heads. Today, 14-year-olds can do it. The street price for a fragmentation grenade is about $150; for a drone, it’s $300.
Security guards searching for a gunman who might assassinate the prime minister must now also look to the skies. Who is supposed to defend the airspace? Who provides the intelligence? Is a drone departing from southern Lebanon to murder a senior figure in Israel the responsibility of the Air Force or the Shin Bet? In late 2024, a failure equivalent to the assassination of Rabin occurred, minus the lethal result. A Hezbollah drone flew leisurely from Lebanon to Caesarea and exploded without warning or sirens outside the window of Netanyahu’s bedroom. It was only by sheer luck that it struck a nearby tree first; only by luck that the family was not home. No one paid the price for this insane blunder, and the structural lessons were never internalized.
A similar blurring of lines applies to arms smuggling. While the Shin Bet enters Arab villages in Judea and Samaria night after night just to confiscate, say, two weapons in the Binyamin region, company-to-battalion quantities of arms are smuggled in every single month. Officially, the claim is that the issue is criminal and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the police. In practice, if there are hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons in the country—and according to some estimates, a million—it is a massive national security issue.
Similarly, the threat of smuggling into Gaza has yet to be fully grasped. A few months ago, a terrorist with a brand-new phone was discovered near the Yellow Line. Where did the phone come from if the man hadn’t visited Hamas-controlled Gaza? Surveillance suddenly revealed brand-new Audi vehicles in Gaza, which certainly didn’t arrive via drone but were instead hidden inside “humanitarian” aid trucks. And what about the heavy drones landing in Gaza? Who guarantees that they will stay there and not take off by the dozens for an aerial raid on one of the bases or communities still licking the wounds of October 7?
At the beginning of the previous decade, a “Magna Carta” was drafted to divide authority among Israel’s various intelligence agencies. The digital domain, the aerial domain, and the criminal-security domain now require it to be entirely rewritten. When an Iranian operative in Tehran uses Telegram to handle a Jewish spy, instructing him to buy a drone and crash it, one cannot cling to old jurisdictional definitions, hoping the Shin Bet will catch him using its outdated tools. We all learned the catastrophic price of falling between the cracks of an expired Magna Carta on October 7, when the cost of the decision for Military Intelligence (AMAN) to stop running human agents in Gaza became devastatingly clear. A new edition is desperately needed, and its drafting is currently underway.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.
People cast their vote during the Labor primaries at a polling station in Tel Aviv, 2024. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
Who decides elections? Undecided voters, of course. But who exactly are they? In the United States, for instance, in recent cycles, it was suburban women. For them, the fear of uncontrolled immigration crashing directly into their neighborhoods and further price hikes at the supermarket outweighed the claims of Trump’s misogyny and the desire to see a woman in the Oval Office.
And who is the precise demographic that will decide the elections in Israel? That is the big question. I will say upfront that we don’t have an answer yet. It is not customary in Israel to conduct the kind of detailed polls or exit polls on election day that break down voters by age, education, and place of residence. But there are some highly interesting clues in the weekly polling. For example, if Israel were divided into states, Netanyahu would win all the electoral votes of the 02 area code (the Jerusalem district). This is the only district in the country where a clear majority wants him to stay (55 percent to 28 percent), compared to a massive proportion that wants him gone in the 09 area code (the costal plain region), home to Naftali Bennett and about a million other opposition voters (65 percent to 15 percent).
The regional divide sharpens further when asked if Israel is winning the war. Again, in Jerusalem and its environs, an overwhelming majority (52 percent to 21 percent) believes it is, and decisively. But in the 04 area code—the northern district absorbing all of Hezbollah’s attacks—the situation is inverted: 48 percent claim Israel is not winning, twice the number of those who think otherwise.
Men support Netanyahu more than women (37 percent of them want him to stay, compared to only 28 percent of women). They are also one and a half times more likely to believe Israel is winning the war. The level of optimism is significantly higher among those under 50 than those 50 and older.
In short, it is highly possible that the voter who will decide the elections is actually a woman, aged 30 to 50, who supported the coalition in 2022 but currently lives on the outskirts of the central Dan region or in the North. She voted for Netanyahu, is angry with him now, wants tangible results and quiet, and will carefully evaluate whether she got what she wanted within five months at the absolute most.
We are taking a break for Shavuot. Will be back on Sunday.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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