Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of Chaos – As unrest roils the country, a controversial figure from the far right helps Benjamin Netanyahu hold on to power. | The New Yorker

Late last year, as Israel swore in the most right-wing government in its history, a despairing joke circulated online. A picture broken into squares to resemble a CAPTCHA—the test designed to tell you from a robot—depicted the members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. The caption read, “Select the squares in which people who have been indicted appear.” The correct answer involved half of them. It was the kind of message that has become typical of Israel’s center and left in recent years: grim, cynical, ultimately resigned.