Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on April 15. Photo by Jonathan Shaul/Flash90/Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman April 21, 2025

This is who should meet with Israel’s National Security Minister on his visit to the United States this week: No one. Not a soul.

By shunning Itamar Ben-Gvir, an extremist acolyte of Meir Kahane — who opposed citizenship for Arab Israelis and whose party was designated a terrorist organization by the United States — American Jews would send a clear message to people who may be confused about whether there’s a difference between supporting Israel and supporting its current government.

Because the die-hard anti-Israel crowd, the ones who oppose its very existence, think that Ben-Gvir’s vision is Israel. Period. To them there’s no such thing as a “liberal Zionist,” because the very essence of the Zionist project is conquest, expulsion and subjugation — exactly what Ben-Gvir preaches. If American Jews want to show, once and for all, that Israel is much more than that, they will refuse to engage with a man who is doing his best to make all the most vicious anti-Zionist claims a reality.

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That’s why it’s unfortunate that Ben-Gvir is scheduled to deliver two talks at Yale University’s Shabtai Society, the university’s premier Jewish intellectual salon.

Giving Ben-Gvir a platform that will inherently suggest his policies and opinions can be treated as legitimate — where he can play statesman, despite being just an extremist in a sportscoat — is a terrible mistake.

“I admire Ben-Gvir,” Rabbi Shmully Hecht, the society’s co-founder and rabbinical director, told JTA. “Itamar promotes what he believes is best for his people that democratically elected him.”

It’s true that Ben-Gvir’s far-right bloc received 14 seats in the 2022 election, a historic win for parties that were for decades pariahs in Israeli politics. But history is replete with examples of politicians who use democratically elected roles to undermine democracy. And make no mistake, that’s just what Ben-Gvir is out to do.

After all, he began his public career by advocating for extrajudicial action against an elected official. As a teenager in the 1990s, he stole the Cadillac emblem from the car of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. “Just as we got to his car,” Ben-Gvir told a reporter shortly before Rabin’s assassination, “we’ll get to him too.”

And since he began his political career, he has worked to advance the ideas of violent Jewish supremacists who would take radical steps to further suppress Israel’s Arab minority, not to mention the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

“We see and hear more and more people who believe that Kahane was right,” Ben-Gvir, who is 49, said at a 2015 memorial service for Kahane. “We want the ideas of Rabbi Kahane in power.” For years, Ben-Gvir displayed a photo in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish terrorist who murdered 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994.

This is a man whom the IDF refused to accept, on grounds of his political extremism. A man whom, in 2007, an Israeli court convicted of racist incitement and support, via his Kahanism, for a group on both the Israeli and U.S. terrorism blacklists. A man whom, as a cabinet member, is so intent on the idea of the Israel resettling Gaza that he has openly boasted of scuttling hostage deals between Hamas and Israel, ensuring the region will sink deeper into violence.

What is poorly understood in the U.S. is that Ben-Gvir’s dream of a Jewish supremacist state is the opposite of the one envisaged by Israel’s founders, laid out in the country’s Declaration of Independence, and supported by generations of American Jews: a Jewish homeland that is just, secure and free for all its citizens.

Yes, it’s an aspirational vision, as was America’s founding declaration, signed 100 years before a bloody war would bring an end to slavery. It is equally far-sighted and pragmatic.

But the students who shut down a speech by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, disrupted a Columbia University class because it was taught by an Israeli professor, or boycotted Sleeping Beauty because it stars Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress, don’t believe that. To them, all Israelis are racist interlopers who want to expel the Arabs and occupy every inch of land.

If a figure as eminent as a rabbi at Yale can legitimize a viewpoint as extreme as Ben-Gvir’s, well, that adds fuel to their fire. If a Jewish educator grants a hechsher (the kosher seal of approval) to a Kahanist, then he’s making the job of the Israel haters easy.

Mainstream Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federations of North America, as well as We Are All Hostages, which advocates for Israeli hostage families, understand the value of drawing such lines. They are not meeting with Ben-Gvir.

When these groups defend Israel, there must be no question which sort of Israel they mean. Not that which Ben-Gvir would see become reality, but that founded in a spirit of peace and justice. It is true that for a portion of the haters, no distinction will ever matter — they will never be brought around. But for the majority of Americans, for the open-minded middle, distinguishing between the vision of a democratic Israel and a Jewish supremacist one is crucial.

And for Israel, it is existential.

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