Ben-Gvir touts bombing food depots while at Mar-a-Lago

Michael F. Brown Power Suits 30 April 2025

Itamar Ben-Gvir posted to X a photo of himself at Mar-a-Lago to demonstrate his proximity and access to the Trump administration. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer was among those present.

Itamar Ben-Gvir X

The most infamous racist in the Israeli government arrived in the United States on 21 April.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, was previously convicted in 2007 in an Israeli court of supporting a terror organization and inciting racism.

Strikingly, this occurred in a court system that has done enormous harm to Palestinian rights for decades.

A longtime supporter of the mass murderer of Palestinians Baruch Goldstein and a proponent of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza, Ben-Gvir enthusiastically embraced President Donald Trump’s proposal earlier this year to remove Palestinians from the coastal territory.

In response to the US president’s idea, Ben-Gvir tweeted: “I commend US President Trump for the initiative to transfer residents from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt. One of our demands from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to promote voluntary emigration. When the president of the world’s greatest superpower, Trump, personally brings up this idea, it is worth the Israeli government implementing it – promote emigration now!”

There is, of course, nothing “voluntary” about “emigration” for Palestinians in the midst of US-assisted Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan should want to prosecute Ben-Gvir for promoting war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

Ben-Gvir bragged in January about disrupting efforts to secure a Gaza ceasefire and at the same time pressed to “completely stop the transfer of humanitarian aid and fuel, electricity and water to Gaza.” Implemented weeks later by the Israeli government, this policy of stopping humanitarian aid is leading directly to malnutrition and “catastrophic danger” for the people of Gaza, particularly children.

The national security minister’s meetings with Republican officials, right-wing Jewish community leaders and academics were intended to normalize anti-Palestinian racism in a country already far down that path.

In recent weeks, mirroring the Israeli practice of detaining Palestinians without charges, the increasingly lawless and intentionally chilling Trump administration has targeted Palestinian and allied students for arrest without initially having criminal charges ready – or even an arrest warrant.

These students face eventual deportation from the US as free speech rights rapidly are undercut for advocates of Palestinian freedom and equal rights. Both this administration and the Biden administration have supported Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza as the country has lurched from promoting war crimes in Gaza to criminalization of Palestinians in the US.

Fellow travelers

Traveling with Ben-Gvir was Yishai Fleisher, a spokesperson for Israeli settlers in Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

Fleisher has promoted the dispossession of the Palestinian people with his settlement activity and vilified Archbishop Desmond Tutu – one of the great freedom fighters of the last 50 years – as an “anti-Semite.” Writing just hours after Tutu’s death, Fleisher bragged of the Israeli apartheid state: “Tutu is gone but Israel is still here.”

Also traveling with Ben-Gvir was Akiva Hacohen, a settler from the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, who is described by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as “an activist with a criminal record who was once monitored by the police and the Shin Bet security service.”

As part of a plea bargain, Hacohen was sentenced to three months in prison for the “spies affair.” Hacohen and other extremists had established an “outpost war room” to monitor movement by the Israeli army that might lead to the dismantlement of settlement outposts that not only international law regards as illegal but that the Israeli government regards as illegal too.

Ben-Gvir confronted

Activists from UnXeptable, an organization that promotes the contradictory idea of “a vibrant liberal Jewish democracy,” protested the minister upon his arrival in the US.

They may acknowledge that Ben-Gvir is an extreme bigot, but still advocate for an Israel that by their own definition discriminates against Palestinians. Their wording is like advocating for a white, Christian American democracy.

At Mar-a-Lago, Ben-Gvir attempted to display his proximity to the Trump administration as he met with Republican officials at Trump’s Florida home. Shortly thereafter, he tweeted, “I had the honor and privilege of meeting with senior Republican Party officials at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. They expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”

This is open advocacy for war crimes and starvation.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer and Congressman Lloyd Smucker were in attendance along with what a Ben-Gvir spokesperson called “dozens of senior businessmen from Miami.”

Trump was not present.

Earlier in the visit to Florida, the convicted racism inciter and terrorism supporter Ben-Gvir stopped by what Fleisher referred to as “Jewish-owned gun store in the Miami area.”

Highlighting, inadvertently or not, the racial dynamics of policing in Israel (anti-Palestinian) and the Deep South (anti-Black), Ben-Gvir visited the Miami police chief. Ben-Gvir has moved to worsen living conditions for Palestinian prisoners and has overseen a system rife with torture.
On 23 April, Ben-Gvir spoke to approximately 100 students and 30 faculty at Shabtai, a Jewish discussion society, near the Yale University campus.

Trump-adjacent Yale administrators had threatened students protesting the previous evening with “immediate disciplinary action.” Students did, in fact, disperse the night before Ben-Gvir’s appearance under intimidation that starts with the Trump administration but is dutifully carried out by university administrators.

Nonetheless, Yale removed the club status of Yalies4Palestine due to its organizing. University officials said the organization had “sent out calls over social media for others to join” the protest.

Trump, supporters of Israel’s Gaza genocide and easily cowed university administrators are eviscerating students’ First Amendment rights. Meanwhile, groups like Betar USA say they are sharing information with government officials to get foreign students thrown out of the country. On top of all this, according to Julia Angwin in The New York Times, “the so-called Department of Government Efficiency … is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration – the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.”

Protesters turned up again on 23 April to protest Ben-Gvir’s speech, this time outside of the Shabtai-hosted event. Ben-Gvir taunted demonstrators upon arrival, grinning widely, and late in the evening he emerged, taunting once again with vigorous waves and what his office called a victory sign.

His office also reported water bottles were thrown at him.

Ben-Gvir quickly took to X to put his spin on events. “Against the pro-Palestinian protesters at Yale University who support the Nazis in Gaza – we will win. The people of Israel live!”

Of course, he omitted protesters’ alarm about his open racism, torture oversight and dedication to ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

Ben-Gvir showcased his racism during a New Haven, Connecticut interview. “There is no Palestinian people,” he claimed with no response from Daily Wire journalist Kassy Akiva. “In fact, it was just a group of Arabs that tried to hurt me,” apparently referring to the bottles thrown at him and others who attended.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht, a co-founder of Shabtai, spoke ahead of the event about Ben-Gvir.

He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was proud to host the Israeli minister.

In an email, apparently shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Hecht wrote, “I admire Ben-Gvir” before reportedly “comparing him favorably to [New Jersey Senator Cory] Booker and another Democratic senator, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.” (Booker is a co-founder of Shabtai and a long-time friend of Hecht’s.)

Hecht also contended that “Itamar promotes what he believes is best for his people, that democratically elected him.”

According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Several Shabtai members objected to Hecht’s comments, in which he praised both Ben-Gvir as a ‘bold, resolute leader’ and the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, whom Ben-Gvir admires.”

Open about his racist embrace of Kahane, a notorious anti-Palestinian advocate of ethnic cleansing, Hecht, who also founded Yale’s Chabad center, asserted, “Ben-Gvir, like Meir Kahane, warned Israelis, the Jewish people and the West of the dangers of radical Islam and the Jihadists.”

He then maintained, “Sadly, they have been rejected by naive liberals who delusionally presume Westerners can make peace with the likes of ISIS, al-Qaida, Hamas, Hizballah and the Iranian mullahs. October 7 must be the last war of Israel. Only bold, resolute leaders like Ben-Gvir can assure [the] same.”

Championing advocates of Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is, it seems, now normalized by the co-founder of the Yale society. In fact, Congressman Jerrold Nadler criticized Ben-Gvir the day after the Yale event as a “racist, terrorist, Jewish supremacist.”

On the one hand, Hecht invited Ben-Gvir to speak near Yale and in New York City, but on the other hand he has circulated a poorly received petition to Halachically excommunicate 10 Jews he regards as having “incessantly badgered, harassed, antagonized and misrepresented the state of Israel in their public writings and talks.”

Named on his list of unacceptable Jews are Thomas Friedman, Peter Beinart, Jeremy Ben-Ami, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Tony Kushner, Simone Zimmerman, Max Berger, Alissa Romanow and Yisroel Dovid Weiss.

This is not simply Hecht promoting free speech in an effort to expose students to a wide range of views, no matter how despicable. Hecht has chosen and openly made clear he sides with Ben-Gvir and Kahane for Jewish supremacism rather than advocates for equal rights between the river and the sea or even mere supporters of a two-state solution.

New York

Kahanist Meir Weinstein reported Ben-Gvir sang last Thursday night at Chabad World Headquarters “may the temple be rebuilt speedily in our times…”

This would require that Israel build a synagogue in place of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque. Ben-Gvir, like new Congressman Randy Fine, is seemingly keen to precipitate a religious war in the region.
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik condemned protests against Ben-Gvir, tweeting against what she described as “heinous violence last night outside the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn.” She called for “an immediate federal investigation into these dangerous organizations and their funding networks.”
Stefanik ignored a terrifying attack on a lone woman walking away from the protest who was physically attacked multiple times by a mob of Ben-Gvir supporters shouting “death to the Arabs.”

The images, though only minimally covered by mainstream media, were both powerful and unsettling. The video contrasted significantly with months of efforts by corporate media to suggest that students protesting the Gaza genocide are anti-Semitic while creating an environment that helped Trump move in authoritarian fashion against students and universities.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, an opponent of Palestinian rights, did release a statement which noted, “Initial reports indicate that one female protester was isolated from her group, harassed by counter-protesters, and suffered injuries. In another incident, a second woman was surrounded and subjected to vile threatening by counter-protesters.”

Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of Within Our Lifetime, a group opposing Zionism and US imperialism that calls for liberating Palestine, referred to Adams’ statement as a “diversion” that ignored “the presence of war criminal Itamar Ben-Gvir at Chabad Lubavitch.”

She tweeted: “The mayor’s failure to mention Ben-Gvir or his role in provoking this violence is exactly why these Zionist mobs are emboldened. As long as genocidal figures like Ben-Gvir are given free rein in this city, these attacks will continue.”

The New York Times, citing police, said six people were taken into custody and one was charged with “assault, harassment and criminal mischief.” The other five were issued with court summonses and released.

Whether they were supporters of Palestinian rights or supporters of Ben-Gvir, or both, was unclear.

More confrontations occurred Sunday morning in Gravesend in Brooklyn, New York even as a related event with Ben-Gvir at Congregation Shaare Zion was canceled.

The website of Congregation Shaare Zion touts the visits Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, formerly Israel’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi and spiritual leader of the Shas political party, made there despite his calling Palestinians “snakes” and Arabs “evildoers” and his claim that “God is sorry he ever created those sons of Ishmael.”

In the same sermon, which managed to simultaneously attack Palestinians, Arabs and Jews, he reportedly said that Jews killed in the Holocaust died because they were reincarnations of sinners. Among anti-Muslim and anti-Black comments made by Yosef, he also once said, “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the people of Israel.”

Unsurprisingly, that’s a place Ben-Gvir sought to speak.

Among Washington’s genocide promoters

On Monday Ben-Gvir met with Congressman Brian Mast, an anti-Palestinian racist who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Mast has accused all Palestinians of being “Arab Nazis” and has said “there are very few innocent Palestinian citizens.”

Author Laila El-Haddad encountered Ben-Gvir in the Rayburn House Office Building and called him a war criminal and accused him of killing her family in Gaza.
Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of CODEPINK, also confronted Ben-Gvir, near the office of Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, who chairs the new Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus. Benjamin accused him of being a war criminal and ethnic cleanser.

She told The Electronic Intifada that she was “horrified to see war criminal Ben-Gvir in the halls of Congress. But what a great coincidence, it was advocacy day for Muslim groups, so he was confronted by people who know what a racist and genocider he is.”

Jewish Insider reports that beyond Mast and Tenney, Ben-Gvir met Monday with Congressmen Jim Jordan and Mike Lawler.

All of them are Republicans. Democratic support for the Gaza genocide is a bit more discreet, though still quite open.

In both the case of El-Haddad and Benjamin, bodyguards looked as though they were there not just to intimidate but to hold back the irate and bigoted blusterer Ben-Gvir. He came across very much as an out-of-control bully and an individual completely complicit in the Gaza genocide – which he is.

The national security minister claimed to Jewish Insider that his delegation “did not meet with anybody from the Trump administration. That wasn’t the main goal,” though the initial expectation was that he would meet with Kristi Noem, who directs the US Department of Homeland Security.

Ben-Gvir’s US jaunt, intended to inflame emotions, makes clear to even more Americans that he is intent on pushing people apart and destroying Gaza in Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault.

For all the victory signs he flashed, Israel is losing the fight for hearts and minds in the US – as the polling shows. Genocide and apartheid have a way of doing that.

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Michael F. Brown

Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.