Instigators of Electoral Backlash: Israel’s Ben-Gvir and Our Own Stephen Miller

One of the iron laws of politics isn’t really a law of politics at all. It’s Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there’s an equal but opposite reaction.

Consider Tuesday’s election in Israel, which differed from previous elections chiefly in the high level of voter turnout by Israel’s Arab population. The two Arab parties look to have won 19 of the incoming Knesset’s 120 seats—enough to deny a majority to either of the two Jewish blocs, and to create at least the possibility that Gadi Eisenkot, who heads the anti-Netanyahu bloc, might try to form a government with Arab party support.

The unprecedented level of Arab turnout, however, should not have been greeted with such surprise. To the destruction of Gaza, the Netanyahu government has added what amounts to a policy of violent attacks on West Bank Palestinians and the de facto unleashing of a violent crime wave within Arab communities inside Israel proper. These latter two policies have been the particular handiwork of nationalist fanatic Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security minister, who controls the nation’s police forces in both the West Bank and Israel. In the West Bank, his police forces have either stood idly by or joined the attacks on Palestinian civilians to seize their property and drive them from their villages and towns. Within Israel, his police forces have largely scrapped law enforcement programs within Arab communities, which has led to somewhere between a doubling and a tripling of the murder rates there. A CNN report has documented that while the police solve 65 percent of the murders of Israeli Jews, they solve just 15 percent of the murders of Israeli Arabs—a gap that has emerged only since Ben-Gvir took command of the cops in late 2022.

Ben-Gvir, once a member of Kach, which Israel designated as a terrorist organization, for many years displayed a photo of Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians at prayer in a mosque, on his living room wall. In late 2022, in order to form a majority in the Knesset that would keep him as prime minister, Netanyahu brought Ben-Gvir’s party into his government, and made him Israel’s top cop.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, Netanyahu, borrowing a page from President Trump, has charged unnamed foreign powers with somehow boosting the vote of the Arab parties. It’s pretty clear, though, that those parties’ surge was really just Newton’s third law in action; that a primary “author” of the surge was Ben-Gvir.

And like Netanyahu, Trump is about to experience a similar working out of Newton’s law. One of the major developments that every poll suggests we’re about to see in next Tuesday’s midterm elections is the repudiation of Republicans by Latino voters, who now constitute a little more than 15 percent of the electorate and a lot more than that in swing states like Texas. They’re bread-and-butter voters, but they’ve also witnessed Trump’s ICE agents run amok, seizing their law-abiding friends and relations, disrupting and terrorizing their communities. That’s the particular handiwork of Trump’s own Ben-Gvir: Stephen Miller, a man as consumed by his hatreds as Ben-Gvir, both of whom give Heinrich Himmler a run for his money.

I don’t know the outcomes of next week’s midterms, of course, but it’s certain that we’ll see massive flight from the Republican column by Latino voters, for which Miller will bear the same kind of responsibility as Ben-Gvir bears for Israel’s Arab surge. And that Trump and Netanyahu bear for deliberately investing national police power in the hands of racist fanatics.

They’ve counted on their ability to violate the laws of human decency with impunity. But they can’t violate Newton’s law of motion.