Itamar Ben-Gvir
I tell you the second fact first because I want you to hold it in your mind for everything that follows.
Last week I visited Ashdod port. Four hundred people were kneeling on the ground. Hands bound behind their backs. Foreheads to the concrete. They came from forty countries on fifty boats. Three hundred tons of cargo in the holds. Medicine. Baby formula. Surgical supplies. Bandages.
Among the kneeling: a doctor from Ireland. The sister of a president. A retired ship captain. A parliamentarian's aide. Foreheads to my concrete. Wrists bound with my zip ties. Called terrorists by my loudspeaker. Every one of them carried medicine. Not one of them carried a weapon.
I walked among them with a flag. My staff played the national anthem on loudspeakers. I told them: "Welcome to the State of Israel." I told the Prime Minister: "Give them to me for a long, long time. Give them to us for the terrorist prisons."
I filmed this. I posted it to my social media accounts. Voluntarily. With a caption.
I know what a terrorist looks like.
At seventeen I joined a movement founded by Meir Kahane. The state of Israel banned that movement. Designated it a terrorist organization. In 1994, a man named Baruch Goldstein walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and opened fire during morning prayers. He killed twenty-nine people. Wounded one hundred and twenty-five. He was a member of our movement.
I kept his portrait in my living room. Next to my family photographs. For years. Visitors would ask about it the way they ask about a vacation photograph. I had an answer ready. I always had an answer ready.
I removed the portrait when I entered politics. Not because I changed my mind. I didn't change my mind. I removed it because the frame didn't match the office furniture. Because a photograph on a wall is a liability. The belief behind the photograph is not. The belief travels without frames. It doesn't need a wall.
At nineteen I ripped a piece from a prime minister's car. The hood ornament from his Cadillac. I held it up to a television camera and I said: "We got to his car. We'll get to him too."
Three weeks later, they got to him. Two bullets. A rally in Tel Aviv. The prime minister fell and the country changed and I was not charged because I was not the one who fired. I was the one who demonstrated that the car was reachable. That the man inside was reachable. Someone else demonstrated commitment. I demonstrated possibility.
I tell you this so you understand the trajectory. Hood ornament at nineteen. Portrait on the wall at twenty-five. Conviction at thirty-one. Ministry at forty-six. Death penalty at forty-nine. Ashdod this week. Each step further from consequence. Each step closer to the thing that has no name because the man who names things is me.
I was convicted at thirty-one. Incitement to racism. Support for a terrorist organization. Two convictions. Court record. Public file. Everyone could see it. Everyone did see it. Reporters wrote about it. Opposition politicians cited it. Human rights organizations referenced it in formal complaints.
And then I became a cabinet minister.
I want you to understand the distance. Convicted supporter of a designated terrorist organization. Minister of National Security. Eighteen years between those two facts. In those eighteen years, nobody stopped me. Not the courts. Not the political parties. Not the intelligence services. Not the international community. Not the Americans. Nobody at any point between "convicted of supporting terrorism" and "in charge of national security for nine million people" said: no. That word. The one that costs $32 million in America now. Nobody said it.
I know what a terrorist looks like. He looks like a nurse from Dublin carrying bandages in a cargo hold. He looks like a retired teacher from Norway with baby formula.
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