Itamar Ben-Gvir

Itamar Ben-Gvir

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Itamar Ben-Gvir is a far-right Israeli activist, lawyer for far-right Israeli activists, convicted criminal, Jewish supremacist, and the current National Security Minister for the thirty-seventh Israeli government, led by the slightly less extreme Benjamin Netanyahu. While Netanyahu leads the much larger Likud party, Ben-Gvir leads a smaller faction in Israeli politics called Otzma Yehudit ("Jewish Strength" or "Jewish Power"), which Netanyahu required a coalition with to form a right-wing government (and to prevent his own potential conviction for corruption).

Ben-Gvir was convicted in Israeli court for inciting racism and for supporting a Kahanist terrorist organization. As National Security Minister, his responsibilities include oversight of the national police, oversight of the border police stationed in the West Bank, and management of important religious sites. Some of his goals include deporting rival legislators, defunding Arab-Israeli communities, and granting immunity to Israeli soldiers who shoot at Palestinians. Apparently, about 1/3rd of Israeli soldiers found this to be a political platform worth voting for in 2022.

Background

Ben-Gvir was raised in an affluent suburb in Jerusalem. In terms of Israeli politics, his parents were moderate conservatives. His mother had previously fought with the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization. His father, who was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, worked for a gas company and sold produce. Itamar Ben-Gvir began his turn into Anti-Palestinian politics after the First Palestinian Intifada. After this, he joined the youth wing of Moledet, a minor far-right party that advocated population transfer of Palestinians and Lebanese out of Samaria, Southern Lebanon and Gaza, Palestine. He later became a youth leader in Kach, a party affiliated with the Jewish Defense League and founded by Meir Kahane; Kach was later banned in Israel.

In the 1990s, Itamar Ben-Gvir appeared on television with an emblem torn from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's car. He stated then, "We got to his car, and we'll get to him, too." A few weeks later, Rabin was assassinated. Ben-Gvir later became an attorney, apparently at least in part inspired by his own efforts to defend himself in court — some of the judges he met while challenging dozens of indictments encouraged him to study law. After becoming a lawyer, he used his skills to defend other far-right activists in court.

Ideology

As far back as his youth, Ben-Gvir was considered extreme enough by the Israeli authorities that they refused to recruit him to mandatory military service. His role model and "saint" (as he put it himself) is Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist rabbi who moved to Israel from New York City in 1971. As such, Ben-Gvir is considered an adherent of Kahanism. Outlining an anti-democratic stance, Meir Kahane argued that "the idea of a democratic Jewish state is nonsense" because non-Jews would become the Israeli majority in the future — unless a population transfer occurred. Kahane also referred to Arabs in particular as "dogs".

Another figure that Ben-Gvir apparently respects is fellow Kach member and mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron massacre in which 29 Palestinian Muslims were killed and 125 people injured. On his first date with his wife (also a Kahanist), he brought her to Goldstein's grave. He has also previously kept a portrait of Goldstein in his living room, and dressed up as Goldstein for Purim. When he was young, Ben-Gvir "handed out eggs to throw at marchers in gay-pride parades".

As top cop

Israelis protesting against the proposal to let Ben-Gvir directly run a "National Guard" in April 2023.

As Israel's national security minister under Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir became known prominently for multiple racist statements and provocations against Palestinians and Israel's Arab population; desiring militias run under his sole authority, bypassing the police and military; and adapting ultra-hawkish stances during the 2023 Israel–Hamas war.

In March 2023, Netanyahu, on trial for corruption at the time, attempted to push through a massive, independence-limiting overhaul of Israel's judicial system. These measures were hugely unpopular and resulted in massive crippling protests across Israel. As a result of the protests, Netanyahu decided to pause the reforms. However, Ben-Gvir threatened to leave the government if the pause took place. Netanyahu promised to establish a national guard under Ben-Gvir's ministry in exchange for support of the pause. Critics described this national guard proposal as a potential "private, armed militia that would be directly under Ben-Gvir's control", separate from the country's military and police forces, with fears on what this would mean given Ben-Gvir's ultranationalism.

In late June 2023, after a Hamas terrorist attack, young Israeli settlers retaliated by torching a number of Palestinian villages. Ben-Gvir called the settlers that engaged in violence "sweet boys" and also engaged in whataboutism, wondering why Shin Bet supposedly refused to investigate "crime and murder in Arab society".

On multiple occasions, Ben-Gvir has visited the Temple Mount, which also hosts a mosque known as Al-Aqsa. Due to this site being of particular holy significance to Judaism and Islam (and thus a site of repeated confrontations between members of the two religions), these visits were seen as provocative and a challenge to the "status quo" of the site's administration by Jordan. Ben-Gvir even directly challenged this "status quo" in one visit (which occurred days after Jewish nationalists marched through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's walled Old City with shouts of "Death to Arabs" and other slogans) by declaring that Israel "was in charge".

Ben-Gvir has also hand-waved away incidents where ultra-Orthodox Jews spat at Christian worshipers and pilgrims, insisting that such was not a criminal case. In the past, Ben-Gvir justified spitting towards Christians as "an ancient Jewish custom."

In August 2023, Ben-Gvir made claims that his right "to roam the roads" of the West Bank were "more important than the right of movement of the Arabs." This blatantly racist statement sparked not only reactions from the Palestine Authority (who called it proof that Israel was "an apartheid regime of Jewish supremacy"), but also opposition party leaders — after the remarks, Yesh Atid MP Karine Elharrar described Ben-Gvir as "the authentic representative of the most racist, messianic and Kahanist government we've ever had." Even the United States government condemned Ben-Gvir's racist rhertoric.

This rhetoric, of course, was hardly surprising. As an MP, Ben-Gvir wanted to grant immunity to Israeli soldiers who shot at Palestinians; dismissed the notion that Jewish violence against Arabs could be called terrorism; and desired to deport rival lawmakers as well as anti-Zionist groups like Neturei Karta.

2023 Israel-Hamas war extremism

During the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, Ben-Gvir adapted an extremely hawkish position (tinged with his usual racism). For instance, Ben-Gvir was very hostile towards a temporary cease-fire that occurred in late November 2023, threatening to leave the governing coalition unless the war resumed. Ben-Gvir was also vehemently opposed to humanitarian aid to Gaza, calling fuel aid gifts to "the enemy" and stating that such humanitarian efforts "broadcast weakness".

While Netanyahu's promised Ben-Gvir controlled "national guard" ended up being controlled by Israeli police, in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks, Ben-Gvir skirted around this by calling for civilians to "go, arm yourself" to defend themselves against future terrorist attacks. To help Israelis arm themselves, Ben-Govir successfully pushed to greatly loosen firearms restrictions. Ben-Gvir even purchased 10,000 rifles to help arm "civilian security militias" in Israeli border towns. (The later effort resulted in the head of the firearms permit body to resign after an Israeli paper revealed that Ben-Gvir's ministry was using unqualified personnel to approve the permits.) Critics worried that these weapons would be used by extremist Israelis in the (UN-declared illegal) settler movement to commit violence against Palestinians. There were also general worries that pushing so many weapons out there would fuel non-political gang-related gun violence

Under Ben-Gvir's watch, during the conflict, his ministry severely cracked down on social media posts. A mere single status update on Facebook expressing solidarity with Gaza could result in an arrest. (In a sign that many of these arrests were bullshit, only a handful of the arrests resulted in indictments.) In contrast, Ben-Gvir dismissed heightened deadly violence during the conflict by Israeli settlers against Palestinians as "graffiti" — a position that was so extreme, even Netanyahu rebuked it.

On December 12 2023, Joe Biden specifically called out Ben-Gvir in remarks detailing that Israel's "indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza was eroding conflict support of Israel by the European Union and others.

Calls for ethnic cleansing

On January 1 2024, Ben-Gvir endorsed rebuilding settlements in the Gaza strip and encouraged "the migration of the (Palestinian) residents of Gaza", declaring that such a "solution" would be the "correct, just, moral, and humane solution." These remarks came shortly after similar remarks by the similarly racist and extremist politician Bezalel Smotrich; Smotrich advocated for "the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees" and predicted that "Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip,” including through the establishment of settlements.

These calls for "voluntary migration", which some saw as actually a call for ethnic cleansing, were slammed by the then-leader of the Arab-Israeli political party Ta'al, Ahmad Tibi, as comparable to the Nazi nationalistic territorial expansion concept of Lebensraum; Tibi also declared that such rhetoric was "inciting genocide." The Biden administration also directly called out Smotrich and Ben-Gvir for "inflammatory and irresponsible" rhetoric, affirming that in the US's view, "Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land".

The comments by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich underscored concerns in the Arab world that the end game of the conflict was to drive Palestinians out of land where they wanted to build a future state, enhancing the suspicion that, as Likud minister Avi Dichter stated in November 2023, Israel was rolling out a "Nakba" for Gaza (Nakba being the name given to the violent displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people when Israel was established in 1948). Smotrich and Ben-Gvir were among those Israeli officials whom the South African government cited as having made expressions of genocidal intent in their application for proceedings to the International Court of Justice.

Despite the widespread international rebuke, both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich (and several other politicians, including some from Netanyahu's Likud party) attended a conference led by the radical Israeli settler organization Nachala on January 28 2024. A massive map at the conference outlined the organizers' vision for settlements in Gaza — as expressed by the director of Nachala, Daniella Weiss, the conference envisioned a future in which “all of [the] Gaza Strip is a part of the state of Israel, of the land of Israel" and where the "presence of Arabs in Gaza" would "end". Ben-Gvir was one of the key speakers of the conference, declaring that there was a need to "encourage emigration" by Gazans and that to prevent future Hamas terrorism attacks, "we need to return home and control the land" of Gaza. Like the previous allusions to ethnic cleansing, this conference was widely condemned by multiple Israeli politicians, including prominent members of Israeli's war Cabinet.

Systematic prisoner abuse

Ben-Gvir's ministry oversees Israel's prison system. Unsurprisingly, during Ben-Gvir's time in office, several reports emerged of systematic prisoner abuse (including sexual assault) and starvation. Between October 2023 and July 2024, the human rights group B'Tselem claimed that at least 60 Palestinian prisoners have died in detention. Ben-Gvir acknowledged his role in the grim transformation of Israel's prison system, claiming that he was "proud of his prison policy" of tightening conditions "to the minimum required by law". While he denied starving the prisoners, he acknowledged that his policies called for "reducing conditions, including food and calories".

Shin Bet director Ronen Bar was nonplussed about the deterioration of Israel's prisons under Ben Gvir — in July 2024, Bar warned that Israel's "incarnation crisis" was threatening Israel's national security and foreign relations, and that Israel was having difficulties repelling claims ("at least some of which are well founded") that Israel's prison conditions violated international law.

In July 2024, Israel was facing increasing allegations of torture at Sde Teiman detention camp, of whose alleged abuses were of such gravity that critics compared them to the well-known abuses at Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, one similar incident to Guantanamo Bay's torture tactics occurred when allegedly several IDF soldiers severely sodomized a Palestinian detainee, prompting the IDF to detain several soldiers pending an investigation. Ben-Gvir responded to this detention by denouncing it, calling the detention shameful and calling the accused soldiers "our best heroes". Referring to complaints regarding conditions at detention facilities, in the grand tradition of torture apologia, he proclaimed that "the summer camps and patience for the terrorists are over."

External links

• "Ben Gvir details role of his National Guard to 'fight terror, restore governance'", The Times of Israel.
• "Why Israel's Police Force Is Troubled by Ben-Gvir's Shadow Militia", Haaretz (archived).
• "Israel advances plan for 2,000-member national guard demanded by far-right minister", Jewish Telegraphic Agency.