The racism and sadism of Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir explains a lot regarding the bizarre actions and language coming out of Jerusalem, both carrying out mass killings of Palestinian civilians, committing serious war crimes and providing the most ludicrous, insulting public accounting of their behavior. Today, Ben-Gvir, along with his colleague in crime, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, attacked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his small concession to Washington, to allow Gaza two trucks of fuel a day. A profile of Ben-Gvir should leave any one left in the West with a shred of morality. A profile of Smotrich will follow.
As head of the National Security Ministry over the last 12 months, Ben-Gvir oversees the Israel Border Police in the West Bank. The settler violence in the West Bank over the last year now goes largely unopposed by the Border Police. Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party espouses ideologue Meir Kahane, and the notorious Kahanist Benzi Gopstein shared the leadership with Ben-Gvir. (More on Gopstein below.) They won 6 seats in the 2022 legislative election, propelling Ben-Gvir into Netanyahu’s cabinet.
Born in 1976, as a teenager Ben-Gvir joined Meir Kahane’s youth movement, run by the Kach and Kahane Chai party. (The Kach political movement itself had been outlawed as a terrorist organization in 1988 by the Israeli government.) He became the youth coordinator of Kach. He was active in protests against the 1993 Oslo Accords. He was exempted from IDF service in 1994 due to his extreme right-wing background. In 1995, he brandished the hood ornament stolen from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car, issuing the threat: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.” He made that remark only weeks before Rabin’s Nov. 4 assassination by another Kahane ideologue, Yigal Amir.
Ben-Gvir was convicted of racism in 2007. As a lawyer, most if not all of his clients are far-right Jewish activists accused of terrorism and hate crimes. This includes the infamous Benzi Gopstein, a student of Kahane charged in the 2015 firebombing of a Palestinian family in Duma, burning to death an 18-month-old child, and leaving 80-90% burns on its father and mother, resulting in their deaths within weeks. (Meir Kahane’s grandson, then a teenager, was arrested and charged as the leader of young terrorist thugs.) Ben-Gvir defended Gopstein as “the Israeli Dreyfuss”!
Ben-Gvir was also present at a wedding shortly afterward the firebombing, where the guests ritually stabbed a photo of the murdered toddler Ali Dawabsheh. Ben-Gvir’s smirking explanation: “No one realized these were photos of a member of the Dawabsheh family.” (Evidently it was just a wedding celebrated by stabbing a photo of an anonymous toddler?)