Let me introduce you to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Israel’s far-right Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party, the minister of national security, and an almost cartoonishly evil man. You’ll have heard his name before: he made international news when he filmed himself taunting bound activists who had been detained trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. But you might not be familiar with many of his recent shocking comments, because they haven’t been widely covered by much of the US media.
Let’s start with an AI-generated video that Ben-Gvir posted on Twitter/X on Sunday and then deleted. It shows portly Palestinian prisoners being loaded on to a conveyor belt and going into a detention camp, then emerging emaciated. The caption is “we promised – we delivered!” which seems to be a reference to the national security minister’s promise to worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners. An ambitious goal, considering conditions are already hellish: Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has likened the prisons where Palestinians are kept to “torture camps”.
I’m being diplomatic with my summary of this latest video, by the way. I suggest you go watch it yourself to fully take in how awful it is. (It may have been deleted, but it lives on online). If the podcaster Hasan Piker had tweeted something similar, with Israelis as the subject rather than Palestinians, it would be front-page news. US lawmakers, all of whom seem to be obsessed with Piker, would be demanding that the podcaster be punished.
Ben-Gvir, by the way, has some imaginative ideas for punishment. One of his sick fantasies is to put crocodiles in moats around prisons where Palestinians are held to stop prison breaks. The plan is now on hold because Israeli rights groups have said it is cruel to crocodiles.
I can’t stress enough that, in any discussion of Palestinian “prisoners”, it’s important to remember that many of these people have not gone through any sort of due process. Thousands of prisoners, including about 200 children, are held under “administrative detention”: a technocratic name for a dystopian practice.
To quote the B’Tselem definition: “In administrative detention, a person is held without trial without having committed an offense, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. As this measure is supposed to be preventive, it has no time limit. The person is detained without legal proceedings, by order of the regional military commander, based on classified evidence that is not revealed to them.”
In other words: if you are Palestinian, heavily armed Israeli soldiers can come into your house in the middle of the night, drag you into a de facto torture chamber despite the fact that you haven’t committed a crime, and hold you there indefinitely without telling you why you’re being held or informing your family where you are.
When you hear the word “prisoner”, people like Ben-Gvir want you to think of dangerous terrorists who deserve everything they get. In reality, many are people like Layan Nasir: a 23-year-old woman who was taken away at gunpoint from her parents’ home for no clear reason and only made international news because she is a Christian.
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But back to Ben-Gvir, who presides over prisoners. One of the minister of national security’s greatest achievements is a racist death penalty law that, because of the way it is worded, exclusively applies to Palestinians. Last month Ben-Gvir posted a video of a gallows complex where Palestinians convicted of terror offences will be hanged. For his birthday in June, he celebrated with a noose-themed cake.
Ben-Gvir doesn’t just want to hang his enemies; he wants more bloodshed in Gaza – which is still very much a killing field despite a so-called ceasefire. “I think we should be doing 30 to 40 targeted assassinations [in Gaza] per night,” Ben-Gvir recently said on a podcast. “Not just those who pose an immediate threat. There are people there who don’t deserve to live … They are not even people.”
I could go on and on: Ben-Gvir is a busy man. He recently filmed himself entering prison cells containing Palestinian women and taunting them. On the same podcast where he urged nightly killings in Gaza, he went on to say that he thought Israel should occupy the entirety of Gaza. And, on Monday, he stormed the al-Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem, accompanied by extremist settlers and with the protection of the Israeli military.
This is something he does regularly: it is a blatant provocation and a contravention of an agreement that gives Muslims exclusive rights to worship at al-Aqsa while Jews pray at the Western Wall.
Ben-Gvir and others like him, however, want to change the decades-old status quo and have Israel control everything. “We are in charge here in Jerusalem and all of the land of Israel,” Ben-Gvir said during a 2023 visit to the compound.
Ben-Gvir is so shameless that there is no way to spin his conduct. He has been condemned and sanctioned by politicians and governments around the world. Nevertheless, Israel’s apologists have tried to cast him as a fringe figure. “Ben-Gvir’s statements do not reflect the policy of the State of Israel and should be condemned by all who care about Israel’s future,” the American Jewish Committee stated in August, after the politician’s comments about settlement in Gaza.
Some of Ben-Gvir’s peers have also tried to distance themselves from the extremist. The foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, condemned the video where Ben-Gvir taunts foreign activists saying: “You are not the face of Israel.”
Make no mistake: Ben-Gvir may be an embarrassment, but he is no anomaly. He is very much the face of modern Israel and his vision for the country accurately reflects the reality on the ground.
“Israeli policy is directed toward making life unbearable for Palestinians wherever they live, so that their emigration can be described as an act of free will,” the Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote in Haaretz this week. “‘Erasure’ is the nightmare solution being written into reality every day.” Settler violence is escalating, more land in the West Bank and Gaza is being seized, and there has been widespread dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society.
Hass writes: “Together, these and similar forces are creating the material, ideological and psychological infrastructure within Israeli-Jewish society for another mass expulsion of Palestinians and for what might accompany it: mass slaughter.”
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I’m quoting Hass because she is a brilliant journalist. But, I’ll be honest, I’m also quoting her because I’m part-Palestinian and she’s Israeli. I’m quoting Hass because, by virtue of being Israeli, she is seen as someone worth listening to. The world has made it very clear that it doesn’t want to listen to Palestinians, that we are barbarians who should not be believed.
And it is this sort of widespread dehumanization that has resulted in the complete shamelessness of a man like Ben-Gvir. He did not come into power in a vacuum: he was helped into his position by an international community which has afforded Israel complete impunity. He has been aided and abetted by international media organizations that have helped demonize Palestinians, cast doubt on our claims, and manufacture consent for erasure and expulsion.
He has been bolstered by lawmakers who tell us that we must defend Israel at all costs. And now, in the wasteland that is Gaza, in the nightly pogroms by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and in Ben-Gvir’s brazen bloodlust, we are seeing the inevitable outcome of this unconditional support. Ben-Gvir is no aberration; he is the international community’s creation.
