Ben-Gvir Can’t Bring Himself to Pretend

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1. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir doesn’t travel often internationally, “perhaps because the only place where he is more unpopular than within Israel is outside it,” Graeme Wood writes. On Wednesday, “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. [Thursday’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.

   “… 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.

   “… 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.”

   Read more: [https://theatln.tc/i0fjVifN](https://theatln.tc/i0fjVifN) 

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