On Wednesday night, as the guest at a banquet in New Haven, Connecticut, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made light of his waistline—a rare joke from a man whose utterances are more often vile than funny. Even so, he managed to blend the two. He said that when he assumed office in 2022, he took steps to make the food served to Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons less abundant and less palatable. “They were eating like this,” he said, gesturing at the feast his American hosts had laid out. He put an end to that, in addition to imposing other discomforts. Now, he says, his wife eyes his torso (softly rounded, like an overripe pear) and tells him he should consider a couple of weeks as an inmate himself.
Many would like to see Ben-Gvir in prison for reasons other than dietary. He is the most right-wing and, by some measures, the most unpopular member of the Israeli cabinet—an embodiment of the fear among secular liberals that the country’s present and future belong to religious zealots who would rather brutalize Arabs than make peace with them. At every stage in his career, Ben-Gvir has favored Israeli expansion into land inhabited by Arabs, and he has favored the use of force to defend that expansion. He has, at various times, brandished weapons at Arabs and lionized Jewish terrorists, including Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Arabs as they prayed in Hebron in 1994. The government led by Benjamin Netanyahu needs the support of Ben-Gvir’s party, Otzma Yehudit, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party to avoid falling apart. And that means that every time Ben-Gvir speaks—which he does often, and provocatively—he inspires fury and dread among those who think neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a future as long as Ben-Gvir can veto any measure that might lead to peace.
Ben-Gvir doesn’t travel often internationally, perhaps because the only place where he is more unpopular than within Israel is outside it. He was received at JFK airport by Israeli hecklers and quickly proceeded to Florida. There he toured the state’s most enchanting sites: Mar-a-Lago, a Russian-owned gun shop, and a maximum-security prison in the Everglades. In New Haven, he said he supported President Donald Trump’s plan to clear out Gaza and develop it. He said Israel had much to learn from America and singled out the willingness to kill murderers as an attractive and enlightened American innovation. (Israel abolished the death penalty in 1954.)
Ben-Gvir came to New Haven to address a gathering of Shabtai, a Jewish society whose members and guests are mostly Yale students and faculty. Yesterday’s Yale Daily News said the event was off the record, but no one asked any such condition of me, and in any case the event could not have been off the record, because it was was being recorded openly by the hosts and by Ben-Gvir’s people, and Ben-Gvir himself exhorted those present to tell others what he said.
He sat down about six feet from me, and I passed the table’s bottle of mineral water so he could fill his glass. My gesture was rebuffed: sealed bottles only, please. Ben-Gvir has reportedly faced multiple assassination plots, including one last year that involved a rocket-propelled grenade. Death by San Pellegrino seemed improbable, but I cannot begrudge him his caution.
Ben-Gvir gave a stump speech—a story of a political awakening, told so as to cause a similar awakening in his audience. Born in 1976, he grew up in a secular family, then embraced religion with unusual fervor. That fervor was reactionary from the start, a result of his outrage at the First Intifada and the alleged softness of Israel’s government when it consented to the creation and recognition of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords. Ben-Gvir had to pass through a gantlet of protesters to get in the building, and when he described his own raucous youth we could hear the protesters still thumping buckets and playing their vuvuzelas outside. I thought I detected a subtle smile. He has heard worse. He has been worse.
In the 1990s, he said, he was arrested so many times that judges shifted from stern to paternalistic. Eventually one told him he should stop being a defendant and start being a lawyer. That judge, Ben-Gvir said, was Aharon Barak, the most distinguished living Israeli jurist and the architect of the legal system that Netanyahu’s government has been trying to dismantle, with Ben-Gvir’s enthusiastic support. Ben-Gvir took Barak’s advice and became a lawyer. “Every lawyer should spend some time in prison,” he said. He built a career defending other right-wing extremists accused of terrorism, arson, and other attacks.
He mentioned repeatedly that he lives in Hebron, but never quite made clear to what extent his own extremism had led him to settle there, and to what extent living in the West Bank’s most contested city has made him extreme. The city, which is the burial site of the Jewish (and Christian and Muslim) prophet Abraham, is a rancorous labyrinth that carefully separates Jews and Arabs because when they mix, the results are unpredictable and often violent. It is therefore hellish for everyone. But the restrictions that mattered to him pertain only to Jews. “I can move freely around only 3 percent of Hebron,” he told the group. “An Arab can move around 97 percent of Hebron.” That, he said, is real “apartheid.” (Israelis are forbidden by military order from entering most of Hebron, because it is under control of the Palestinian Authority. But the presence of checkpoints and other restrictions sharply circumscribes the lives of Palestinians, even in areas they nominally control.)
On Gaza, Ben-Gvir claimed credit for foresight, and said he had advocated assassinating Hamas leaders even before October 7. After October 7, he became less sentimental. He said Israel’s war in Gaza had been too meek. When asked whether there was any proper limit to the violence that could be inflicted there, he said vaguely that he preferred not to kill children. His obsession with the caloric intake of Palestinians—a running theme of his remarks—came up several more times, as he called for Israel to “bomb their food supply.” The wall behind Ben-Gvir at Shabtai’s headquarters had been covered with images of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on October 7. Some of the hostages are now dead, and others were released malnourished. “If the hostages do not eat, neither will Hamas,” he said.
Attendees pressed him on this point, and one said that seeing the images of gaunt Holocaust survivors made him particularly uncomfortable at the prospect of withholding food from civilians in war. An older attendee remarked that he had known actual ex-Nazis, and that the postwar friendship between America and former Axis powers suggested that Israel should find friends among Palestinians, rather than treat them all as permanent enemies.
Ben-Gvir called concerns like these “naive,” and rather than distinguish Palestinian civilians from terrorists, he conflated them. He said the revelry after October 7, and the participation of ordinary people in the looting and violence, demonstrated that the distinction between the leadership of Hamas and ordinary Palestinians was illusory. He rejected any comparison between starving Jews after the Holocaust and starving Palestinians, and said that “the Jews did not rape anyone; the Jews did not kill anyone.”
The most direct question came from an attendee who wanted to know about Ben-Gvir’s attitude toward Baruch Goldstein. In 1995, when he was 18 years old, Ben-Gvir described Goldstein as his “hero” and dressed up as Goldstein for Purim. Until recently, Ben-Gvir displayed a portrait of Goldstein prominently in his living room. He removed it in 2020, only after the center-right politician Naftali Bennett said that no politician would be welcome in his Knesset coalition who chose to decorate his home with Goldstein’s likeness. “For the sake of unity and a right-wing victory in the elections, I’m removing the photograph in my living room,” Ben-Gvir wrote on Facebook. In New Haven, he took a softer line for a more skeptical crowd. “People change,” he said. “I oppose what Goldstein did.” He framed his transformation as moral, and said he was not who he was when he was 17. Getting married and having six kids mellows a man out, he said. His whole answer took no more than a couple of minutes.
I told Ben-Gvir that I found his contrition perfunctory and unconvincing, and I challenged him, if he was sincere, to prove it. I asked him to tell us all what it was like to idolize a murderer—and then to tell us what he would say to his younger self, or someone still in the thrall of a terrorist, to persuade him to give up violence and mellow out sooner rather than later.
He couldn’t even bring himself to pretend. He just asserted that he had changed. “I’m sure you did things when you were 17 that you are not proud of,” he said. (He removed the portrait when he was 44.) And he said again that time and family make a difference—but he added not a word about the inherent value of human life, or the disgrace brought upon religion and country by someone who massacres civilians, especially in a moment of total vulnerability.
The evening ended soon after, and when Ben-Gvir left the building, he reentered his milieu: a crowd of protesters, angry and loud. In the photos of his exit, he is flanked by security but unmistakably comfortable with the hullabaloo, even relishing it. He seemed more ready to confront a baying mob than to answer simple moral questions. The photos of him during this confrontation show him signing V for Victory, and looking happier and more energized than he’d looked inside.
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