Palestinians in Israel
Ben Gvir's party hands a campaign book to children at schools
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Image credit: Itamar Ben Gvir, 2022 — Alon Nuriel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 · License
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Activists of Otzma Yehudit, the party of Israel's national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, stood at school gates across Israel on Tuesday morning, the first day of the school year, handing pupils a free illustrated children's book about their minister.
The book is called "The Minister Who Didn't Stop." It was launched at a party conference in Netanya the same day and, the Israeli news site Ynet reported, went to print at a cost of tens of thousands of shekels from party funds.
Its cover draws Ben Gvir as a comic-book character beside the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, standing on a police car. His office said it is "proud to launch the children's book," which tells the story of his achievements across four years in the ministry.
The Movement for Quality Government in Israel petitioned to stop the distribution, arguing it breached election law on three counts: campaign material given as a gift, children drawn into a campaign, and public assets used for it.
The chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Justice Noam Sohlberg, addressed only the first count, accepted assurances from the party and rejected the petition. Ynet reported that activists were sent lists of the schools to stand outside.
The record the book celebrates#
For the two million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the four years the book celebrates are measured differently. Ben Gvir's ministry holds the police, and the police record in Arab towns is the central fact of daily life there.
The Abraham Initiatives, which keeps the count Israeli institutions do not, recorded 252 Palestinian citizens killed in criminal violence in 2025, the deadliest year since it began counting. Its mid-2026 tally passed 140 in the first half of the year alone, a rise of about twelve per cent on the same period, and by August the organisation's running total for the year had passed 160.
Alongside the toll sits the enforcement gap the same monitors document: police solved roughly twelve per cent of homicides in Arab communities this year, against about 65 per cent when the victim is Jewish.
Ahmad Tibi, the longest-serving Palestinian member of the Knesset, has put that gap to the minister repeatedly through the term, saying plainly that he does not care about the dead.
The party handing out his book on Tuesday is courting the youngest slice of his electorate, and it chose the first morning of the school year to do it.
