Netanyahu's Far Right Built Infrastructure, Not Just Rhetoric — And Infrastructure Outlasts Elections

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir used cabinet positions to rewire Israeli institutions from the inside. Even if ejected from government, their bureaucratic and legal changes create structural facts that successors lack the political will to reverse.

Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition partners Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir face potential exile from government as opposition figures manoeuvre to unseat the prime minister. But the story isn't about whether they leave — it's about what they built while they were in.

Smotrich, granted finance minister and a parallel role inside the Ministry of Defence as part of the 2022 coalition deal, used his dual portfolio to establish a separate Settlement Administration and accelerate illegal settlement expansion across the occupied West Bank. In August 2025, he announced the revival of the E1 settlement plan, boasting it would bury "the idea of a Palestinian state." Ben-Gvir, as national security minister, reshaped the Israeli police force to reflect his own hard-right ideology and imposed sweeping restrictions on Palestinian prisoner conditions. Analysts draw a critical distinction between the two. Arie Perliger of the University of Massachusetts Lowell argues that Ben-Gvir's power is "populist and performative" — opposition actually suits him, reinforcing the Kahanist narrative of establishment betrayal. Smotrich's power, by contrast, is bureaucratic. Cut him off from budgets, portfolios, and settlement policy control, and his machinery stalls. The two face asymmetric consequences from the same political outcome. Roi Zur of Essex University notes that their combined base — roughly 10 percent of the Israeli electorate — is stable and will persist for years. Smotrich's Religious Zionist movement dates to the 1967 war. These are not protest movements that dissolve when a leader loses a portfolio; they are entrenched political formations with generational roots. The institutional damage runs deeper than personnel. Perliger warns that reversing the changes introduced by both ministers "requires sustained political will" he is sceptical any opposition government would muster. The facts on the ground — new settlements, restructured police, degraded prisoner rights — are self-reinforcing. Each new settlement creates constituencies that defend the next one. In June 2025, Ireland and the Netherlands imposed travel bans on both ministers; other Western countries froze their assets. Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin cited their "desire to see the elimination of Palestinians from Palestine." International sanctions targeted the individuals, but the institutional changes they enacted sit outside the reach of travel bans. Former Palestinian parliamentarian Aida Touma-Suleiman frames the shift bluntly: "Netanyahu and his allies haven't just given permission to be racist; they've made it almost proof of patriotism — it's expected." The normalisation of anti-Palestinian violence — over 74,000 killed in Gaza, unchecked settler pogroms in the West Bank, a death penalty law targeting only Palestinians — represents a social transformation that no cabinet reshuffle can undo. The far right didn't just occupy ministries. It rewired them.