The Biden administration and U.S. Jewish organizations have issued condemnations of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s statement Wednesday that the rights of Jews trump those of Arabs.
The State Department called Ben-Gvir’s remarks “inflammatory,” saying the United States condemns all racist rhetoric and that “such messages are particularly damaging when amplified by those in leadership positions.”
Organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the Israel Policy Forum also attacked the minister from Otzma Yehudit, saying he promotes hatred and racism. But the fiercest attack on Ben-Gvir was in Israel, at the hands of his partners in the government, who made sure to brief journalists Friday afternoon that the national security minister had created a “PR and diplomatic terror attack” after video of him declaring that the rights of Jews take priority over those of Arabs was translated into English and viewed millions of time worldwide.
The model Bella Hadid shared the video on her Instagram account, which has about 65 million followers. The American news anchor Mehdi Hasan also shared it on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a message seen by about 1.8 million users. Ben-Gvir tried to repair the damage in a long English-language post on X, but sources in Israel who work in public diplomacy admitted that it was too little, too late. “Millions of people saw the video of him speaking. Ten seconds of pure racism. What does it help us if a few thousand read the ‘megillah’ he posted afterward?” a senior Israeli official told Haaretz.
Ben-Gvir’s remarks join the growing debate in academic and legal circles in the West on whether the situation in Israel today is similar to that of Apartheid-era South Africa. Proponents of this comparison, which has been growing in support in light of the seeming irrelevance of the two-state solution, claim that de facto, Israel has two legal systems, one for Jews and another for Arabs, with various degrees of discrimination between Arab citizens with Israel’s pre-1967 borders and the Palestinians in the West Bank.
In recent years, Jewish organizations in the United States have spent millions of dollars in efforts to refute these claims and to prevent the entrenchment of the Apartheid comparison in academic, legal and political discourse. Those who support this theory were labeled as antisemites and haters of Israel. The previous government, which included, for the first time in decades, an Arab party as a member of the coalition, was very beneficial for these organizations. They saw proof for their claims in Mansour Abbas, the head of the United Arab List, who fought for civil equality from within the coalition and modeled Arab participation in the national government.
The current government, in contrast, has become a huge problem for these organizations. In February, it was Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who spoke about destroying a Palestinian village. Later came a string of acts of violence by settlers against Palestinians, with the support of Knesset members from Smotrich’s far-right Religious Zionism party. Now, we have Ben-Gvir’s remarks, which landed like ripe fruit in the hands of proponents of the Apartheid comparison. A senior Israeli cabinet minister, who is in charge of the police, is recorded saying, in a catchy, pithy sentence, that the rights of the Jews prevail over those of Arabs.
Abraham Foxman, the legendary national director of the Anti-Defamation League organization and one of the most important voices in American Jewry in recent decades in the fight against antisemitism, sounded particularly discouraged by the conduct of Ben-Gvir, and, even more so, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “[I]f your Minister of Internal Security, Ben Gvir’s, most recent racist statement that his family’s right to drive around the West Bank ‘is more important from the Arabs’ freedom of movement’ doesn’t mandate you to fire him, what will? He speaks for your government!” Foxman wrote in a tweet addressed to Netanyahu.
Netanyahu refrained from commenting on the brouhaha for almost a day, while millions of people around the world were exposed to Ben-Gvir’s remarks. Shortly before the start of Shabbat Friday evening – presumably timed to prevent a coalition crisis – his office issued a statement that did not include a clear distancing from Ben-Gvir, but only a general, noncommittal and inaccurate guarantee of Palestinians’ freedom of movement.
The foreign-policy figures who attacked Ben-Gvir correctly described the damage that he caused, but looked over the fact that the “PR terror attack” was born not in Ben-Gvir’s interview with Channel 12 News Thursday evening, but seven months earlier. It began when Netanyahu appointed the person who is most associated in Israel with the Kahanist right to an unprecedented position of influence in the government.