There is a particular kind of political character who does democracy an enormous, if unintentional, favor: he refuses to lie about what he is. Most authoritarians at least have the manners to dress their appetites in the language of security, tradition, or reluctant necessity. Itamar Ben-Gvir has never bothered with the costume. Asked, in effect, whether the starving, besieged population of Gaza deserved to go on living, Israel’s Minister of National Security did not reach for euphemism. He said the Israeli military should be killing “30 to 40” Palestinians a night, and when pressed on the humanity of the people he wanted dead, he clarified: “They’re not even people.”
Sit with that for a moment, because the temptation with a man like this is to let the sheer volume of his output — the prison tours, the taunting of handcuffed detainees, the Twitter brawls with his own prime minister — wash over you as background noise, the ambient weather of Israeli politics. It shouldn’t. A cabinet minister with operational authority over the police and prison system of a nuclear-armed state has said, on the record, that an ethnically defined population is not human. That is not a gaffe. That is a thesis statement. And a man does not arrive at that sentence by accident.
Ben-Gvir did not spring from nowhere, and it would be a small mercy to the reader — and a genuine act of intellectual cowardice on my part — to pretend he’s simply a freak weather event in an otherwise temperate political climate. He is a disciple of the Kach movement, the outfit founded by the American-born rabbi Meir Kahane, whose defining policy proposal was the removal of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories by whatever means necessary. Kach was banned. Not by some fringe human rights tribunal in The Hague, but by Israel’s own Knesset, which outlawed it as a racist and terrorist organization in 1994. The United States State Department reached the same conclusion. This is not a smear cooked up by hostile foreign media; it is the settled judgment of the Israeli state itself, on the record, in statute.
Before he was old enough to rent a car in most jurisdictions, Ben-Gvir had already been convicted multiple times — for incitement to racism and for supporting a terrorist organization among his charges. For years he kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the American-Israeli who murdered twenty-nine Muslim worshippers at prayer in Hebron in 1994, hanging in his living room. He was, by his own account, too extreme even for the Israeli army, which declined to draft him. This is the résumé. It is worth reciting because his defenders — and Israel’s foreign minister is very much among the reluctant ones now — like to describe him as an aberration, a loose cannon who somehow rolled onto the deck of an otherwise seaworthy ship. He is not a loose cannon. He is exactly, precisely, down to the last rivet, what Kahanism was designed to produce, now issued a government car and a security detail.
I could fill this newsletter with a highlight reel of Ben-Gvir’s greatest hits and still not exhaust the footage, so let’s confine ourselves to the entries that matter most, because they are not personality quirks — they are policy.
He championed the Knesset bill making the death penalty the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of terrorism in military courts, a piece of legislation that manages the neat trick of being both morally grotesque and legally incoherent, since Israeli military courts convict at a rate that would make a Soviet tribunal blush.
He staged, for the cameras, the humiliation of detained Global Sumud Flotilla activists — handcuffed civilians, paraded and mocked, an Israeli flag waved over them for the photo op — while intoning that “the kindergarten is over.” The stunt drew condemnation from the UK, France, Italy, Canada, and even the government he serves in; Netanyahu himself called it “not in line with Israel’s values,” which is the diplomatic equivalent of a father telling reporters his son is “going through a phase” after said son has been arrested for arson.
He has toured, on camera, a newly constructed execution wing, and visited Palestinian women held in a security wing to gloat at them about the deterioration of their prison conditions, informing them, and by extension us, that “the prison kindergartens are over” — a phrase he apparently likes enough to keep recycling, which tells you something about the size of his emotional register.
And then there is the number that ought to end every argument about proportionality before it starts: as of this year, Gaza’s Health Ministry — whose casualty figures independent demographic researchers publishing in outlets like The Lancet have found broadly consistent with other data sources, and which an Israeli army official privately conceded were in the right neighborhood — puts the dead at more than 70,000, with over 20,000 of them children. Not “children” as a rhetorical flourish. Twenty thousand individual human beings who had not yet had the chance to be anything other than young, dead now, in a war being prosecuted by a government in which Itamar Ben-Gvir sits at the table where the decisions are made.
The charitable case for Ben-Gvir — and I will steelman it, because a polemic that won’t engage its strongest opponent is just a tantrum with footnotes — runs like this: he is a minister, not a general; his job is domestic policing, not battlefield command; his remarks are the overheated rhetoric of Israeli coalition politics, where every minor party leader postures for a base that rewards machismo, and none of it should be mistaken for actual policy input. He’s a symptom, this argument goes, of Netanyahu’s governing arithmetic — a man kept in the tent because his four Knesset seats are the difference between a governing majority and early elections, not because anyone actually admires him.
I find this argument persuasive right up until the point where it becomes an excuse, which is roughly one sentence in. Yes, Ben-Gvir is a symptom of Netanyahu’s arithmetic — vultures, as a rule, do travel in flocks, and a prime minister who needs Kahanists to stay in office has told you everything necessary about the coalition he has built. But “he’s a symptom” is not a defense; it’s an indictment with extra steps. International law does not grade incitement on a curve for domestic political convenience. The Genocide Convention’s Article III criminalizes direct and public incitement to genocide as its own offense, entirely independent of whether the inciter personally commands troops. A cabinet-level official calling for the nightly killing of civilians and declaring an ethnic group “not even people” is not overheated coalition theater. It is the paper trail that international tribunals have, in other contexts — Rwanda’s RTLM broadcasters were convicted on exactly this theory — treated as criminal in its own right.
Nor does “he’s just a minor minister” survive contact with what he actually controls: national police, prisons, and border security, the levers by which state violence against a civilian population is administered day to day. Radovan Karadžić was a psychiatrist and failed poet before he was a war criminal. Bureaucratic mediocrity has never been a defense at The Hague, and it shouldn’t become one now because the mediocrity in question happens to hold Israeli citizenship.
The case for Nuremberg 2.0 — and why it must be a courtroom, not a mob
Here is where I want to be as precise as possible, because precision is the entire difference between justice and its criminal impersonation, revenge. When I invoke Nuremberg, I am not reaching for a synonym for “very bad man.” I am pointing at a specific historical mechanism: an actual tribunal, with actual rules of evidence, actual defense counsel, and — this is the part people conveniently forget — actual acquittals. Hjalmar Schacht walked free at Nuremberg. The system worked precisely because it was not a lynching dressed up in legal language; it was the opposite of a lynching, which is exactly why it retains moral authority eighty years later while the various extrajudicial settlings-of-scores from the same era are remembered, when they’re remembered at all, as crimes.
That is the model, and it is the only model worth defending. Ben-Gvir should face investigation and, if the evidence supports it — and on the public record alone, a serious prosecutor has more than enough to open a file — prosecution for incitement, under international jurisdiction, via an ICC referral or a universal-jurisdiction case in a third country, the same mechanism that has been used against Pinochet-era officials and Rwandan génocidaires. If convicted, he should face the penalties the law prescribes, up to and including capital punishment where the underlying offense is incitement to genocide — the same standard applied to the actual Nuremberg defendants, several of whom were hanged not for pulling triggers but for the speeches and the propaganda that got other men to pull them.