Pete Hegseth and Itamar Ben-Gvir Photo by Getty Images

Robert Zaretsky April 28, 2025

One tends to exhibit his bare and tattooed torso and sweeps back his hair with pomade. The other tends to keep his torso wrapped in white shirts and his hair short and tousled. One is clean-shaven with jutted jaw; the other is bearded with a jutted midriff.

But these differences are only skin deep. Below the epidermis, there lie striking similarities. Both men have a fatal attraction to guns (usually pointed at others, when not pointed at their own feet) as they do for macho posturing. Both suffer an equally fatal fascination for ethno-nationalism (fatal not for them, but for those of different colors or faiths), as they do for religious crusades (rather ironic, as only a millennium ago, one of them was the victim of the other’s multiple crusades).

Both also have unusual heroes. One praises Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish extremist who murdered 29 Palestinians in 1994, while the other extolls Lieutenant Clint Lorance, found guilty at his court martial of murdering two unarmed Afghans in 2012, then pardoned by Donald Trump in 2019.

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I am referring, of course, to Pete Hegseth and Itamar Ben-Gvir. These men, one our Secretary of Defense, the other Israel’s Minister of National Security, are both responsible for the security of their nations and, corny though it sounds, the security of their countries’ founding ideals. And yet, the former has been setting fire to the ethical norms and essential guardrails of the American military, while the latter is answerable for fueling the frenzy of Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel.

This brings us to two similarities that both men share that run deeper — much deeper — than their skin, tattooed or not: intemperance (quite literally as well as figuratively in Hegseth’s case) and incompetence.

We’ve all been afflicted, at one time or another, by incompetence. It is a trait — or better yet, the absence of a trait — that occurs whenever we find ourselves in a situation where we lack the necessary, well, competence or skills to master. Sometimes we rise, hardly aware, to a position or role in a bureaucracy where, according to Laurence Peter, the famed educator who coined the term “the Peter principle,” we famously reach the level of our incompetence.

At other times, rather than unwittingly rise to this position, we instead thrust ourselves ahead of others more competent than we are. In his great dictionary, Samuel Johnson slams those who eagerly seek positions they are too inept to manage. This is why he defines competence as a “fortune as, without exuberance, is equal to the necessities of life.” In other words, exuberance — what we can call ambition — drives our pursuit of roles that demand more of us, both temperamentally and intellectually, than we possess. Think of it as the Peter Principle on steroids.

This brings us to the other quality shared by Ben-Gvir and Hegseth — intemperance — that makes for misfortunes less for themselves than for so many others. For the meaning of this word, let’s turn not to Johnson and his dictionary but Dante and his Divine Comedy. In the first book, The Inferno, the Roman poet Virgil guides Dante through the nine circles of hell. The outermost circles are a dismal landscape littered with a variety of people guilty of the sin of intemperance: the Lustful, Gluttons, and Hoarders, along with the Spendthrifts, Wrathful, and Slothful.

Though both Hegseth and Ben-Gvir exemplify several of these qualities, the category of the Wrathful best captures their character. In this “swamp that has the name of Styx,” Dante gazes in wonder at “muddy people moving in that marsh, all naked, with their faces scarred by rage. They fight and bite and claw each other continually.” These are the souls, Virgil tells Dante, who were “overcome by anger.”

Or, to our point, hatred unleashed at others. Hatred less of an individual than a group, hatred more of a type than the human being standing before you. When this animosity fuses with incompetency, the explosion that follows slams most everyone except the person who lit the fuse.

Consider Hegseth, who still enjoys the full-throated support of the president who nominated him to his post. His slaphappy role in “Signalgate” and “Signalgate: The Sequel” could have cost the lives of American servicemen, while his ham-handed application of anti-DEI policies has hurt those who wish to take out Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from a military library and helped those who have a hankering for Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

As for Ben-Gvir, where to start? Let’s take just two especially egregious examples. First, there was his arrest and imprisonment of Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After seven months of incarceration, which raised a global outcry and during which Abu Salmiya appears to have been repeatedly tortured, Ben-Gvir finally released him without charge. Then, as is often the case with the incompetent extremists, he fobbed the blame on the Israeli intelligence service Shin Bet. Or consider Ben-Gvir’s decision to distribute guns to Israeli citizens, including settlers in the West Bank. When he claims that “guns save lives,” the corollary is that those guns will take the lives of Palestinian civilians who refuse to surrender their farms and homes to the settlers.

And so, here we find ourselves in a fallen world. We cannot turn, like Dante, to Virgil as our guide, but must turn instead to ourselves and those who share our insistence on competence and moderation, to find our way out.

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