From Fringe to Mainstream: How the Unacceptable Becomes Ordinary |
This week, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a grotesque video mocking detained aid flotilla activists in a performance seemingly designed less for governance than for social media applause from his political base.
Quite apart from one’s views of the flotilla itself, the spectacle was juvenile, humiliating, and strategically disastrous. It handed Israel’s critics exactly the imagery they wanted while further normalizing a style of politics built on provocation, humiliation, and performative cruelty.
What disturbed me most was not the video itself. It was how unsurprising it felt. The rise of Ben-Gvir reflects a broader pathology that increasingly transcends ideology, geography, and tribe.
There is nothing respectable about Ben-Gvir’s style of politics. The disturbing part is not that such extremism exists. Every society has extremists. The disturbing part is that it was gradually mainstreamed. Institutionalized. Absorbed into governing power.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Faustian bargain to preserve his coalition and political survival helped move figures once considered far outside respectable Israeli political life into the center of state power.
That is how normalization works. Not by transforming extremists into moderates. But by slowly transforming institutions into places willing to accommodate them.
To be fair, many Israelis — including figures on the political right — condemned the video quickly and forcefully. And that matters. Healthy societies are supposed to produce moral antibodies against this kind of behavior.
But the fact that such conduct now emerges from within the governing structure itself would have been politically unimaginable in Israel not very long ago. And once institutions begin accommodating extremism, the process rarely stays confined to one ideology or one country.
The disturbing truth is that modern extremism rarely enters respectable society wearing a swastika or waving a black flag. It arrives dressed in the language of justice. Human rights. Liberation. Resistance. Security.........