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stage actors known for leftist views, and handed out eggs to throw at marchers in gay-pride parades. For Purim, he would dress up as Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer. In 2011, he invited the press to a public pool in Tel Aviv, where he appeared with forty Sudanese migrant workers. He bought them all tickets to enter the pool, and, while cameras rolled, handed them swimsuits. “I want all the pampered Tel Avivians to understand that if we give human rights to the Sudanese they will come here,” he told reporters. Laughing, he called out to the migrants, in English, “Swim! Swim!”
He has been surprisingly frank about the purpose of his agitprop. “I use Kach summer camps and Rabin memorials . . . so that you would come and interview us,” he told an Israeli media-watchdog publication in 2004. “The ideology itself you would never cover.” Ben-Gvir has spent years cultivating journalists who report on the Jewish settlements, becoming what one described as their “pet extremist.” He keeps a notebook with a running tally of reporters and the news items he feeds them. Chaim Levinson, a longtime journalist for Haaretz, told me, “When you are pressured by your news desk to find a hilltop youth”—a nickname for the most hardened settlers—“you call Itamar.” Last year, during a wave of deadly attacks, Ben-Gvir received more screen time on television than any other Knesset member, except for the Prime Minister.
Ben-Gvir “was always aware that it was all a kind of show,” Mikhael Manekin, a veteran left-wing activist, said. Many Israeli liberals took this to mean that he was not an ideologue, Manekin added, “but the fact that he could joke with you didn’t make him any less dangerous.” When Manekin brought groups to tour Hebron, Ben-Gvir regularly showed up to confront them. “He would throw eggs, and curse, and yell at us,” Manekin said. “And then, when the tour was all over, he would come up to me, smiling...