Ramla

[chanting]

At the covered market in Ramla's old city, Itamar Ben-Gvir chases votes, half-hidden in a pack of security guards and fresh-faced young fans waving the giant blue flags of his far-right party, Jewish Power.

[chanting] Israel's national security minister is a divisive figure in a divided country.

As a teenager, he was judged too politically extreme to serve in Israel's army.

And now we're in this stage where Ben-Gurion is kind of attacking Netanyahu from the right.

And one thing that I, you know, I covered, I was out in the field last week and I covered Ben-Gurion's, you know, jaunt through the marketplace in Ramleh, Arab Israeli city.

And what was interesting is that Ben-Gurion, even though he was in the government, in the government on October 7th, and he was part of the failure that allowed, you know, this disaster, this terror attack to happen.

He has kind of kept himself clean.

He was very nice.

He said he had the logs, but they were in a storage unit in Ramle, and his brother had the key, and the brother was in Cyprus for the season, and he'd sort it when he got back.

So at this point, there's a man in Beit Shemesh, a storage unit in Ramle, and a brother in Cyprus.

And a lift that's still running.

I ride it every day.

It's that the man who has the file doesn't work there anymore.

Which is the finding, actually.

The strong law meets the storage unit in Ramle.

Why? It's a reincarnation of a wicked Jew who probably used to eat in the fast days.

One time when they became religious, they move from Ramle to Jerusalem.

Ramle you have some religious people, but it's not considered a religious town.

Jerusalem, most of it is religious, most, not all.

So they ask, [coughing] "Should we move to Jerusalem?" The answer was yes, move to Jerusalem.

My uncle, he didn't know what to do.

He did not know what to do.

So, [lip smack] he decided to give the dog to his son that lives still in Ramle.

Yayal Sinvar, following a series of shorter occupation detentions in 1982 and an eight-month imprisonment beginning in 1985 for his activities with the predecessor formation of what became Al Majd, which targeted collaborators, was imprisoned from January 20, 1988 until October 18, 2011, again due to his leadership within Al-Majd and his efforts squelching these collaborator networks within Gaza.

And he spent time not only in one prison, but in Ashkelon, Ramla, Nafha, Hadarim, Beersheba prisons before his release through the Wafa al-Arhar exchange, the Gilad Shalit exchange, which served as the precedent to the Tufan al-Aqsa exchange.

While in the occupation's carceral system, Sinvar served as the chair for the Supreme Leadership Committee for Hamas Prisoners for two organizational terms, and he fraternized with prisoners from not only Hamas, but from myriad political factions.

There's a very famous photograph of him from his imprisonment where he is standing next to Marwan al-Baruti, for instance.

to maintain, he said, the organic relationship between prisoner and jailer.

These were his words.

He and his comrade, the aforementioned Ruhi Mushtaha, retaliated when they were in Ramla prison by pouring hot water on the guards in response to ill treatment, and they instructed their comrades to throw soap and oil on the floor to hinder the advances of the other guards.

They, from within the walls of the Hadarim prison, a different prison, planned abduction or capture of occupation soldiers for exchange with Palestinian prisoners.

The big danger is from the inside.

And just to clarify, when you say the inside, are you referring to Judea and Samaria or even broader Israel, the mixed cities of Lod and Ramleh, the Galilee? What do you mean by the

inside? I'm talking about all of Israel, from the Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Jordan Valley, or as people like to say, from the river to the sea.

It includes all of Israel.