Ultranationalist Israeli minister outlines plans for new national guard

Israel’s ultranationalist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has set out his plans for the creation of a national guard, proposing a force that would fall under the direct control of his ministry.

The proposal, which will be discussed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet on Sunday, calls for the new armed unit to be deployed across the country and says it will be used to fight “nationalist crime, terror and to strengthen governance where needed”.

Ben-Gvir, a settler previously convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation, has long argued for a national guard, arguing that it was needed to combat lawlessness.

However, civil rights groups have expressed concern about the prospect of such a force being subordinate to Ben-Gvir, who until a couple of years ago kept in his house a picture of a Jewish supremacist who gunned down 29 Palestinians in a mosque in 1994.

After the proposal was published late on Wednesday, a few hundred people gathered in central Tel-Aviv to protest against the plans.

Noa Sattath, head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which this week wrote to the country’s attorney-general about the plans, said she feared the new force could be deployed against Palestinian citizens of Israel or to quell anti-government protests.

“You have to see the context: this is part of a plan by Ben-Gvir to have unprecedented political influence over the security services,” she said.

“If such a body is to be established, we must be assured that there is oversight over this body by a security professional and not by a political figure.”

A separate national guard unit set up by the previous government is under the control of Israel’s police force. Its existence has led critics to question the need for the new force being proposed by Ben-Gvir.

Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party was promised the national guard in the agreement it struck with Netanyahu’s Likud following last year’s parliamentary election, as they combined with other ultrareligious and ultranationalist parties to form the most rightwing government in Israel’s history.

Ben-Gvir said this week that he had won a pledge from Netanyahu to address the matter in cabinet in exchange for accepting the prime minister’s decision to pause a deeply contentious judicial overhaul in the face of massive street protests and a national strike.

“The National Guard will be established. The budget I demanded for the Ministry of National Security will be passed in its entirety,” Ben-Gvir wrote on Twitter on Monday. “No one will succeed in changing the people’s decision.”

The plans he set out did not spell out the budget for the national guard. If it was accepted by the cabinet, a committee would have 60 days to deliver proposals on how to establish the new force.