Everyone is talking about the hangman’s noose cake that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir received from his wife, but most critics appear to be missing the real point.
The uproar in the Israeli media was ostensibly justified. Many wondered how a nation that champions the sanctity of life – distinguishing itself from an enemy that glorifies death – has reached a point where a popular leader turns a hangman’s noose into a positive symbol. Others emphasized the painful gap between the minister’s poor, even negative, record on fighting crime and securing public safety, and the casualness with which he celebrates his latest provocation.
Yet all failed to touch upon the core issue, focusing instead on the marginal subject, the minister himself. The real issue is not Itamar Ben-Gvir – it is the relationship between our era’s chaos and information overload and the elected officials it produces.
The most profound work on this subject is Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public.
Gurri outlines a pessimistic analysis rooted in the understanding that today’s massive information overload – unprecedented in human history – generates three central phenomena: the rise of the “shouting class,” the emergence of “perpetual negation” (the public’s immense capacity to reject the status quo without a corresponding ability to offer a positive alternative), and a deep erosion of the legitimacy of governing institutions.
Chaos politics in a collapsing institutions
Today, the people who are supposed to legitimize those institutions have a front-row seat to every flaw and failure, which forces governments to choose between entrenchment and dispensing promises of meaningful reform that, once they fail to materialize, only deepen the crisis.
Within this vicious cycle, the first politician to become a true “native” of the chaotic media world was Donald Trump, though a remarkably similar talent can be seen in Ben-Gvir.
With extraordinary media instinct, Ben-Gvir doesn’t merely put out fires – he masters the realm of chaos. He understands that institutions are indeed faltering, and so he signals to the public that he is not part of them, going so far as to openly degrade those very institutions. He enlists himself in the cause of “perpetual negation,” building his power by rallying against phenomena that most of the public despises, rather than through on-the-ground achievements that would require far harder work.
Employing a strategy associated with Steve Bannon – Trump’s former confidant and a strategic mastermind – Ben-Gvir knows how to “flood the zone.” He doesn’t try to extinguish media fires; he decides where the next ones will start. The noose cake is just one example of how Ben-Gvir operates not in the field of statecraft, but in the media arena, where he dictates – with exceptional skill – what and who we will be talking about.
The question we must therefore ask ourselves is not merely who this minister is and how he operates, but what Israeli society is. What is our political and media structure, and how can we change the dynamic dragging us toward the abyss?
This requires a long journey of repair, beginning, above all, with dismantling the convenient lie that a voter’s only alternative is to support a bad candidate from their own camp or one from the opposing side.
The responsibility lies with every voter to hold their representatives accountable and replace them with the best people who share their values.
A right-wing voter who watches the rise in crime with genuine concern cannot excuse themselves by claiming things would be worse under the Left. They must ask: who are the right-wing representatives actually worthy of a chance to lead real change?
Only when every political camp engages in that kind of internal soul-searching can we begin to tackle the enormous challenges before us.
The writer is the CEO of the Ribo Center.