The two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers facing sanctions from the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway are critical to the political survival of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 2022 Netanyahu formed the most rightwing government in Israel’s history, brokering a coalition with Bezalel Smotrich, whose Religious Zionism party has 14 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose Jewish Power party has six seats.
They account for just 20 of his coalition’s 67 seats in parliament but carry outsize influence because if they quit – which both repeatedly threaten to do – the government will fall.
Netanyahu is currently on trial for corruption and fending off calls for an official inquiry into the 7 October 2023 attacks, and keen to avoid early elections.
Here are short details of both men’s lives and careers before entering government.
Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister
Smotrich is a messianic settler who was born in the occupied Golan Heights in 1980, now lives in the occupied West Bank and has repeatedly called for Israeli settlers to return to Gaza.
He believes Jews have a divine right to all land that made up biblical Israel. A commitment to expanding the area controlled by Jewish Israelis – both in de facto terms and through legal annexation – runs through his personal and political life.
In 2005, he was arrested by the Shin Bet security services and questioned for weeks about his role in protests over Israel’s plans to withdraw from Gaza, allegedly on suspicion of planning to block roads and damage infrastructure to try to block the withdrawal.
He was released without charges being brought, set up an influential rightwing NGO focused on control of occupied land and won his first parliamentary seat in 2015.
Smotrich is a self-declared “fascist homophobe” who backed segregated maternity wards separating Jewish and Arab mothers and called for government reprisal attacks on Palestinians. He once organised an anti-gay “Beast Parade” protest against Gay Pride.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, security minister
Ben-Gvir embraced extremism so young that Israel’s domestic security forces barred him from serving in the country’s army as a teenager.
Born in 1976 to a family of Iraqi heritage in a small town outside Jerusalem, he became a far-right activist while still at school, and continued while studying law.
By his early 30s he had been convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organisation. Those convictions did not stop him from becoming a lawyer, and he specialised in representing Jewish Israelis charged with terrorism-related offences.
For years his living room was decorated with a portrait of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994. Goldstein, like Ben-Gvir, was an admirer of the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane.
Having spent most of his life as a figure on Israel’s political fringe, Ben-Gvir was given the security portfolio when he joined Netanyahu’s government. He now controls the police forces that once arrested him, and the jails where he was once held.
