Ben-Gvir and the importance of hate
Whatever one thinks of him, Ben-Gvir expresses a Jewish rage that has been long repressed.
I confess that I never thought I would ever find myself writing a defense of Itamar Ben-Gvir. Nonetheless, there are times when even those one opposes most passionately must be defended.
Such a case is the scandal prompted by Ben-Gvir’s remark last week that “My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria, is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs. The right to life comes before freedom of movement.”
Ben-Gvir was immediately savaged for allegedly saying that Jewish lives are more important than Arab lives. Well-known Israel-hater fashion model Bella Hadid, for example, proclaimed, “In no place, no time … should one life be more valuable than another’s.”
More serious was a statement from the U.S. State Department: “We strongly condemn Israeli minister Ben-Gvir’s inflammatory comments on the freedom of movement of Palestinian residents in the West Bank. We condemn all racist rhetoric; as such messages are particularly damaging when amplified by those in leadership positions and are incongruent with advancing respect for human rights for all.”
All of this, one is compelled to point out, was nonsense…