On June 17, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Bezalel Smotrich of the United Right alliance as minister of transportation and a member of the Security Cabinet, the inner government forum tasked with defense and diplomacy policies. The newly named minister of education, United Right Chair Rabbi Rafi Peretz, was also named to the Cabinet, albeit as a nonvoting observer.

Unlike Peretz, who served in the past as a career officer and fighter pilot, Smotrich evaded full military service. He enlisted at the age of 28 for 18 months under an arrangement for yeshiva students after graduating law school. Most Israelis are obliged to go into the army at the age of 18 for three years. A month after his enlistment, he took time off to run for the 18^th Knesset in 2009, completing his service after failing to be elected.

Prior to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Smotrich and four other young Israelis were detained by the Shin Bet security service for three weeks on suspicion of planning to block major roads to hamper the pullout. He was not indicted. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak published a photo of Smotrich in prison uniform this week, tweeting: “An abomination. The pet of the [racist] Kahane supporters, the man who initiated the [anti-gay 2006] 'March of the Behemoths' in the Cabinet?! He will send our children to war?! Netanyahu has lost it. Totally.”

Chair of the left-wing Meretz Party, Knesset member Tamar Zandberg, reacted cynically to the appointment. “Wait a minute. Smotrich in the Cabinet means going to unnecessary wars, but not on the Sabbath?” Netanyahu, she added, put a “messianic war-monger into the State of Israel’s Cabinet.”