This summer, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir stood beside a freshly dug trench at Ketziot Prison in the Negev and told the cameras, “This is where the crocodiles are supposed to be.” The moat, roughly 170 meters long, was dug around one of the prison’s special detention wings, and Ben-Gvir said the idea was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-closed Alligator Alcatraz detention center in Florida. Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman reclassified Nile crocodiles so they could be kept at the prison. Then an animal rights group, Let the Animals Live, petitioned the court, which issued an interim order blocking the plan.
In August, Ben-Gvir sat down with former hostage Rom Braslavski for the first episode of his podcast, October 8. There he called for targeted killings in Gaza, “taking down 30 to 40 every night,” not limited to those posing an immediate threat. Then he went further: “There are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
Lines like these have made Ben-Gvir the most reviled Israeli politician in London, Brussels and The Hague. Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway sanctioned him in June 2025, and the Netherlands barred him from entering the country a month later. His past statements have been cited before the International Court of Justice as alleged evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent.
On Sunday night in Jerusalem, Yishai Fleisher, a Knesset candidate on Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit list, was asked to answer for all of it. The question came from the evening’s moderator, Pesach Wolicki, who read the podcast quotes aloud and then laid out the charge.
“This is one example of Ben-Gvir making inflammatory statements that have been amplified by our enemies, causing damage to Israel’s reputation and standing internationally,” Wolicki said. “Most of these statements are not even reflective of Israel’s policies and therefore inflame criticism of Israel with no benefit whatsoever.” Wolicki credited Ben-Gvir’s security record, including arming law-abiding citizens and reforming the prison system, then turned to Fleisher: “Why should we trust that Ben-Gvir will not cause even more damage to Israel’s reputation and strengthen our enemies should his influence grow in the next government?”
The audience applauded the question. But then it applauded the answer.
The exchange came at the Knesset Elections Town Hall hosted by Israel365 News at Jerusalem’s Begin Center on Oct. 4, three weeks before the October 27 Knesset election. Candidates from 10 parties with a realistic chance of entering the next Knesset took part in two panels before a packed auditorium.
Fleisher, an American-born immigrant who has spent years as the international spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron, is running on the Otzma Yehudit slate. He told the crowd that his work in Hebron puts him in constant conversation with “real Hebron Arabs.” That vantage point shaped everything he said next. Fleisher did not apologize for Ben-Gvir, and he did not try to soften him. He explained who Ben-Gvir is actually talking to.
Fleisher opened with a confession. “When I heard that Itamar Ben-Gvir wanted to put alligators and crocodiles around the prison system, I thought, he must have fallen off his chair. Something must have happened to this guy. That is the weirdest thing I ever heard of,” he said. “And then suddenly it was explained to me by Arabs that they’re scared of this thing.”
That, he argued, is the key to understanding Ben-Gvir.
“He’s looking at and speaking to the East, not the West,” Fleisher said. “Our endless conversations with the West have yielded nothing. Our appeasement has yielded nothing. Here comes a guy who’s literally scaring the jihadis for the first time. They tell me that.”
For decades, Israel’s public language has been aimed at Western capitals: proportionality, restraint, explanations of every strike. Fleisher’s point is that Ben-Gvir has chosen a different audience entirely. “His whole posture is towards freeing Israelis from appeasement and pushing bad guys to understand that we’re the baal habayit,” he said, using the Hebrew term for the master of a household. “We’re the owner of this house. They’ve got to know that we mean business.”
Ben-Gvir made the same argument himself at the Ketziot moat. Speaking of Gaza and Judea and Samaria, he said, “In the Middle East, we gotta be crazy. That’s how it works.” He closed with an Arabic flourish: inshallah, crocodiles.
Fleisher contrasted Israel with Europe. “When the jihad looks around the world, they look at England and the Netherlands and Belgium and France, and they think, ‘We’re going to get these guys because they’re all a bunch of softies,'” he said. “And then they look to Israel and they’re like, ‘Well, it’s not so easy after all.'” Ben-Gvir, he said, “is speaking towards an audience that needs to hear from us and needs to be scared.”
Earlier in the evening, Fleisher opened his remarks with a story from the campaign trail. At a café in the south, he met a man who spent years as a photographer for the Israel Prison Service and the police.
“One day I’m taking pictures. I see one of the worst terrorist prisoners walk up to one of the guards,” the photographer told him. “And the prisoner says to the guard, ‘Give me your phone. Get out of the room.’ The prison guard handed him the phone and left the room.”
When the photographer asked what was going on, the guard replied: “They rule the prisons, not us.”
According to Fleisher, that world is gone. “Everything has changed there. It’s a hell for terrorists. They don’t want to go there,” he said, adding that the Arabs he speaks with in Hebron tell him the same thing: “Ben-Gvir’s prisons, we don’t want to get into.”
Fleisher then turned Wolicki’s premise around. “Is Ben-Gvir hurting our international reputation?” he asked. “The genocide narrative. Is that Ben-Gvir? No.” Israel’s critics, he argued, will always find a villain, whether it is Netanyahu or the so-called settler youth. With or without Ben-Gvir, they “try to take us down narratively around the world.”
“Here comes one guy who’s speaking straight and strong,” he said. “The enemies are afraid, and that’s a good thing.”
Fleisher’s case rested on results as much as rhetoric. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, he and his son lined up at 6:30 a.m. to ascend the Temple Mount, where they joined hundreds of Jews for “three and a half hours praying, bowing down fully, blowing the shofar and the silver trumpets.” Everyone there, he said, “the police, the Jews, the Arabs,” knows that “one man made that reform.”
He told the audience that his insurance agent recently called to boast about cutting his car insurance by 400 shekels. The real reason, Fleisher said, is that car theft has dropped below 2006 levels, when Israel had half as many cars on the road. He credited 4,300 new, better-paid police officers and a tripling of Jewish gun permits. “Criminals are afraid,” he said. “We’re running on our record.”
Fleisher saved his sharpest line for his closing statement.
“Ben-Gvir, you can like him, not like him, but you don’t have to marry your daughter to him. You don’t have to have him over for Shabbat lunch,” he said. “He is a hammer. He gets it done.”
“Not everybody can change the reality on the Temple Mount. A lot of people can talk about it, but somebody can get it done.”
Every voter, Fleisher told the room, has one vote. “The question is, where are you going to give that one vote? To the guy that’s the hammer, who’s going to make you safer, or to the guy that talks nice and has great ideas but doesn’t have that special skill to get it done?”
