Jonathan S. Tobin
Israel Hayom, Nov. 3, 2022
“While there has been a flurry of articles in the legacy media and liberal Jewish outlets seeking to depict Smotrich, and especially Ben-Gvir, as enemies of both democracy and decency, it will have been a mere foretaste of what is likely to follow the election.”
The votes in Israel’s latest Knesset election are still being counted, but the exit polls confirmed the worst fears of the Biden administration. While Israel isn’t getting the same kind of obsessive attention it has received at times in the past, there’s no question that President Joe Biden and his foreign-policy team have strong opinions about who should be running the Jewish state that are echoed by most Democrats and the liberal mainstream media.
They liked interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid and feared the possible return to power of Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. The prospect of not only a victory for Netanyahu and his Likud Party, but the formation of a government with a prominent role for the Religious Zionist Party and one of its controversial leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is enough to set the hair of Democrats and the foreign-policy establishment on fire.
Ben-Gvir was a supporter of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s in his youth and has a well-earned reputation as a right-wing provocateur who often clashed with the police. The attorney/activist moderated his views somewhat however, as he became more politically viable. But he is still treated by both Israeli and American liberals as anathema and a mortal threat to democracy. … source