The normalisation of extremist and hateful politics by far-right leaders like Ben-Gvir, whose video humiliating Flotilla activists spread widely online, reflects a deepening acceptance among a large segment of Israeli youth of the belief that only brute strength can safeguard a nation encircled by hostile forces.

If you want to understand Israel's Jewish society, ask anyone on the street what they think of the Global Sumud Flotilla activists. The vast majority - voters from right to centre - will call them anti-Israeli, antisemitic, or Hamas agents. Only a small left-wing minority sees them as human rights activists concerned about Gaza's humanitarian crisis.

Yet even many of those same Israelis, who regard Flotilla activists with contempt, were troubled by now-viral visuals of their tortured bodies at Ashdod’s port on May 20, 2026. Most Israelis were outraged by the video of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir striding into an improvised detention centre, waving an Israeli flag over hundreds of bound, kneeling activists and shouting: “Welcome to Israel. We are the landlords here.”

Israeli media reported an unprecedented wave of European ambassadorial summons. Italy and Spain formally called in their Israeli envoys for reprimands; Germany's ambassador declared the treatment meted out to the detained activists as "wholly unacceptable"; the President of the European Union said he was "appalled”. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee - not a figure known for criticising Israel - called Ben-Gvir's conduct "despicable”. Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rebuked him, calling the Ashdod spectacle “not in line with Israel's values and norms."

In Netanyahu's telling, the incident was not a moral failure but a public relations one. "The sin," as one analyst put it, "was not the humiliation of the activists; the sin was broadcasting it to the world."

These condemnations, however, carry little weight. European leaders and the Israeli press know that a day without fresh reports of torture and humiliation of helpless Palestinians, mostly farmers and shepherds, is cause for celebration. Jewish militias have already driven at least 59 Palestinian communities from their land, predominantly Bedouin and herding villages in the West Bank, with the full backing of Ben-Gvir's police.

Netanyahu's rebuke targeted the optics - the video that Ben-Gvir himself posted on social media - while he continued to tolerate, and in some respect actively backed, the minister's provocations at the Temple Mount. He dismissed the Attorney General's January 2026 warning that Ben-Gvir was "inappropriately intervening in police operations through a continuous system of pressure" and unilaterally altering the religious status quo at one of the region's most sensitive sites.

The Temple Mount - known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam - has been governed since 1967 by a fragile arrangement. Israel controls security while the Jordanian-backed Waqf administers the site. Non-Muslims may visit but are officially forbidden from praying there. Under Ben-Gvir, that line has been openly crossed. He has declared it his explicit policy to allow Jewish prayer at the site, stating publicly: "Jews prayed on the Temple Mount. That's the ministerial position."

Police have grown increasingly lax, permitting Jewish visitors to pray and prostrate themselves. On April 12, 2026, Ben-Gvir visited the site and was filmed singing near the Dome of the Rock, even as Jordan's Foreign Ministry called it "a desecration of its sanctity, a condemnable escalation and an unacceptable provocation." Abroad, such shifts have drawn polite statements and little else.

The Ashdod video was not an impulsive outburst. It was staged humiliation - a performance of Jewish power echoing Rabbi Meir Kahane's core message that Jewish survival requires visible dominance, not merely administrative enforcement. When I met Kahane in the 1970s, he was on the security services' watch list. Today, his ideological heir, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who as a teenager coordinated Kahane's outlawed Kach youth movement, oversees the police.

Ben-Gvir, now 50, built his political career as a provocateur. As a teenager he was convicted for inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation. The army deemed him too dangerous to conscript. He first came to public infamy when he stole the Cadillac emblem from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's car, declaring on camera: "Just as we got to his car, we'll get to him too."

Weeks later, Rabin was assassinated. Ben-Gvir entered Israel’s parliament Knesset in 2021 and became National Security Minister after the 2022 elections, gaining control of Israel's police. His TikTok fluency and confrontational style have made him the most watched Israeli politician of his generation.

The ballot box illustrates these developments. Pre-election polling shows Ben-Gvir's appeal resonates powerfully. An April 2026 survey of Israelis aged 18–22 placed his party, Otzma Yehudit, as the third-largest among young voters, projecting 14 Knesset seats - double its current strength. A separate February 2026 analysis found that first-time voters aged 18–21 entering the electorate were more right-leaning, more religious, and more conservative than the generation before them - a cohort large enough to sway the equivalent of up to 17 Knesset seats.

It is worth noting that Netanyahu leads the centre-right Likud, while Ben-Gvir leads the far-right Otzma Yehudit. They are rivals in some respect but bound together in the current coalition, each dependent on the other's support to govern.

This trend is striking. Across much of Europe and North America, younger generations lean liberal and progressive. In Israel, the opposite holds: multiple surveys indicate younger Jewish Israelis are more hawkish on security, more nationalistic, more religious, and less supportive of liberal-democratic norms than their elders.

Several forces explain this pattern.

Demography. The share of religious Jewish communities has grown substantially owing to higher birth rates, gradually reshaping social norms and political preferences. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, the ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) population grew at roughly 4.2 per cent annually and numbered approximately 1.45 million in 2025 - 14.3 per cent of Israel's total population, up from 750,000 in 2009. By 2050, projections suggest Haredim could make up nearly a quarter of all Israelis.

Education. The state school system has grown increasingly conservative and nationalistic, reflecting decades of predominantly right-wing education ministers who shaped curricula emphasising Jewish identity, if not Jewish supremacy.

Media ecosystems. Mainstream and social media often amplify nationalist narratives and government positions, especially during conflict. Ben-Gvir's operation is particularly adept at this. He posted the Ashdod video himself, in real time, as a deliberate act of political communication rather than a leak.

Lived experience. Many young Israelis came of age amid recurring violence - the Second Intifada, Gaza rocket fire, stabbing attacks, and most searingly, October 7, 2023. For them, politics is filtered through personal security rather than diplomacy or liberal ideals.

This generation matured after the collapse of the Oslo Accords, through years when negotiations yielded few visible results. Many have never known a period when peace felt plausible. That reality has deepened scepticism towards conciliatory politics and strengthened faith in nationalist ones.

Ben-Gvir's ideology precisely fits these trends. He excels at short, combative, emotionally charged communication built for TikTok, Instagram, and Telegram. Younger audiences respond to visceral authenticity over institutional tone. His rhetoric is deliberately provocative and media-centric, designed to dominate the conversation. He is also distinctive among Israeli politicians in one crucial respect: where others treat international condemnation as a cost to be minimised, Ben-Gvir treats it as a dividend. Each European summons and UN statement becomes, in his telling, proof of the concept that Israel is surrounded by hostile forces and that only unapologetic strength earns respect.

Viewed this way, the Ashdod spectacle was not a misstep but a message. The symbolism was unmistakable: the state, embodied by a triumphant minister and a waved flag, standing tall over kneeling adversaries who were, according to him, rightfully abducted. The image compressed a worldview into a single frame - sovereignty as dominance, security as the humiliation of the other, legitimacy as the capacity to impose order by force.

International reprimands are unlikely to blunt such messaging. The EU president's expression of being "appalled," Ukraine's foreign minister's statement that the footage was "incompatible with respect for human dignity", all of such external condemnation may only validate Ben-Gvir's narrative of a besieged people asserting their will against hostile elites and foreign interference.

Performance politics - with humiliation as proof of sovereignty - aligns with a rising generation's anxieties and aspirations. The Ashdod video was both a campaign and a creed: a promise that the future will be won not by humanitarian initiatives, but by a national flag held over those compelled to kneel.