By Emily Rose and Hannah Confino
TEL AVIV, Oct 20 (Reuters) - He celebrated his 50th birthday with a cake decorated with a noose. He says he plans to surround jailed Palestinians with crocodiles. In videos, he berates foreign activists captured at sea trying to bring aid to Gaza, forced to kneel at his feet with their faces pressed to the ground.
To much of the world and to many Israelis, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the bellicose face of Israel's far right, is a figure from the fringe of politics, despite over four years in power as police minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.
But with an election due next week, polls show a boost in his Jewish Power party's support, reaching beyond its core of militant settlers in the occupied West Bank, to younger, urban voters who might once have considered him beyond the pale.
According to an opinion poll by Agam Labs at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, not only are Jewish Power supporters younger than the average Israeli voter, but as many as a third of them will be voting for the first time.
"I used to think he was a bit crazy, but then I actually looked at what he was saying, and it all made sense," said Gavriel Marmon, an 18-year-old student and first-time voter from Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem.
Marmon points to Ben-Gvir's sponsoring of a law passed in March that makes hanging the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of attacks on Israelis, which Ben-Gvir celebrated with the noose cake and a noose lapel pin. The bill is likely to be struck down by the Israeli courts, in part because it would not apply the same punishment to Jews.
Ben-Gvir is even making inroads in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, long the bastion of Israeli liberalism. Odelia Kedmi, 41, said his policy to expand permits for Israelis to carry guns had "put air in my lungs".
"It's almost like President Trump's peace through strength," said Kedmi, whose sister survived the attack by Hamas militants on the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, that triggered the Gaza war. "But peace through Jewish strength."
'TOXIC COMBINATION FOR HARDLINE ATTITUDES'
Israel's October 27 election is the first since the 2023 Hamas-led attacks. Many Israelis blame failures by Netanyahu's government for the deadliest attacks in Israel's history, and polls show the prime minister's own Likud party on course to lose around a third of its 32 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.
Yet it is still too early to say whether Netanyahu's opponents can finally unseat the most right-wing government in Israel's history, thanks to a shift of many voters, especially the young, even further to the right.
Opinion polls show both Netanyahu's bloc and the main Jewish-led opposition parties, led by that of former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, falling short of securing a majority.
But Ben-Gvir's Jewish Power, which in 2022 relied on a joint list with two other far-right groups to be sure of making the threshold to win seats, is now forecast to win eight or more seats standing on its own.
That would put it roughly on par with the rump of the former Labour Party that governed Israel for generations, now known as the Democrats, the only major Jewish-led party that still backs a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict.
GLOBAL CONDEMNATION OVER BEN-GVIR ACTIONS AS POLICE MINISTER
On Israel's crowded right, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the governing coalition's other main far-right figure, has faced wobbles for vacillating over an exemption from military service for religious students, resented by many nationalists.
But Ben-Gvir, staking out the furthest right-wing turf of all, has seen no similar threat to his backers' enthusiasm. On the campaign trail, he speaks in terms of Jewish pride, and vows more conquest of land he says was promised in the Bible.
"We have returned home after two thousand years of exile and we need to be proud," Ben-Gvir said to cheers from supporters at a town hall in Tel Aviv this month. "We have to be proud and conquer Gaza, because it's all ours."
Ben-Gvir, who declined to comment for this story, was known as a hardline extremist long before Netanyahu brought him into government.
He was convicted in Israel in 2007 of racist incitement and support for a banned terrorist group, for holding up a sign backing Meir Kahane, a slain rabbi jailed in both Israel and the United States for plotting and carrying out violent attacks.
For years Ben-Gvir was known for displaying a photo in his house of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish gunman who killed 29 Palestinian worshippers in an attack on a Hebron mosque in 1994. He said he would take the portrait down in 2020, in what he called a gesture to deprive a rival right-wing figure of an excuse to exclude his followers from his bloc.
Since taking charge of prisons under Netanyahu, he has boasted of tougher conditions for Palestinians, cutting food to the barest minimum. Many prisoners have since emerged emaciated.
He also drew condemnation after he released a video of himself mocking detained Gaza flotilla activists, forced to kneel with their hands bound following their interception in international waters.
Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway added him and Smotrich to their sanctions lists last year for inciting violence in the West Bank. The EU has debated a similar move although it has yet to reach consensus.
The foreign condemnation is a badge of honour for supporters. Jewish Power is unconcerned about Israel's image in the West, Yishai Fleisher, a Ben-Gvir adviser and settler spokesperson, said at the town hall.
"We might as well first have our region respect us and accept us, and then the rest of the world will understand: Israel is here to stay."
(Reporting by Emily Rose and Hannah ConfinoEditing by Rami Ayyub and Peter Graff)