Aesthetic Containment of Bezalel Smotrich

I’m lying on the reformer, mid-Pilates session, in a new workout set already soaked through. My thighs are shaking, breath shallow, but I’m still talking—urgent, fast. “This is the year of the short kings,” I say, pushing through another set of leg lifts. “Kendrick took his time—staged a four-act assassination that won a Grammy and landed the Super Bowl. Zelensky didn’t confront the tyrants—he knew how it would look on replay.”

Physically unassuming men—composed, deliberate, emotionally controlled—have become a kind of cultural fantasy. They offer strength without spectacle. Presence without chaos. And for women, especially, they’ve redefined what it means to be desirable in uncertain times.

And that’s when another name surfaced. Smotrich.

The thought, which has remained with me since October 7th—when everything became untethered—has sharpened into a question: how does political restraint get performed—packaged as calm, authority, spiritual discipline—when it’s often just domination in a quieter key?

And Smotrich…” I switch sides. “…contains theocracy inside yeshiva bro meme-core and deadpan messianism.”

My friend stops mid-rep. She blinks. “Wait. One of those is not like the others.”

I grin. “I know. I was just thinking…”

I’ve been having transgressive thoughts.                                

I smile like it’s still a joke. But then I grow quiet. “We can’t talk about it here,” I say, glancing around the Pilates studio in Boca Raton. “It’s not just inappropriate—it’s almost a chilul Hashem.”

Because it is.

This is what happens when you think from inside the body instead of hovering above it: people call it performance or exhibitionism, but it’s neither. It’s simply presence—and that presence, in a woman, makes people wildly uncomfortable.

This is a moment of deep grief and rage, where ideological lines are rigid, and anything that dares to mix eroticism with politics—especially when it involves someone like Smotrich—risks being seen as unserious, provocative, even blasphemous. There’s a real fear right now of losing moral clarity—and I may only be endangering our moral psyche by offering ambiguous desire.

This is the same man who argued vehemently against negotiating the release of our hostages—and then, with no shame, posted “Shavua tov […] baruchim ha’ba’im habayta!” (Good week […] welcome home!) on social media every Saturday evening during Phase 1 of their release. This is the same man who gaslit a nation while holding a gas can in each hand. To even mention him like this, even ironically, feels shameful. Not because I believe in ideological purity—God knows I’ve wandered—but because it’s not tactful. He’s not orbiting within the moral realm of Am Yisrael—he’s working against us.

And yet.

I look at Smotrich—with his boyish handsomeness and compact, self-contained frame, a vessel for divine masculinity—and he reminds me of an adolescent crush. I feel a jolt in my faulty wiring and a low hum beneath my ribs—an erotic charge I didn’t choose. So, instead of ignoring that dissonance, I’ve chosen to drag it into the light.

There is an eroticism in recognizing yourself in someone whose world you reject—an ache that comes not from agreement, but from shared radiance. With men like Smotrich, I don’t see a partner—I see a mirror. Not a clear one, but a shard of something ancient that reflects the same light I carry from the same fire. Not the soft glow of agreement, but the blinding fire that once cracked Sinai open. We hold the same desire for the land, the pull of destiny, the belief that Jewish survival is sacred and non-negotiable. But where my light bends towards compassion, complexity and coexistence, his snaps into certainty, exclusion and control. Still, the ember is familiar, and I feel it humming under my skin. And that is the seduction—not the ideology, but of recognition. Of seeing your own passion, your own longing, your own unyielding commitment to the Jewish story staring back in a form you can’t embrace, but can’t ignore.

So no, it’s not a crush. It’s a sublimated firestorm of intellect, eroticism and a refusal to be erased.

Some will never understand that—because when I get aroused by complexity, they hear confusion. When I play with danger rhetorically, they hear disloyalty. And when I flirt with archetypes, they say: You want to — the MK from Beit El.

In 2019, Smotrich released campaign ads that appeared to have been thrown together in Microsoft Paint with clip-art clown cats: it was yeshiva bro aesthetic—deadpan religious Zionist irony. The final frame of each ad featured a ballot marked with טב, the two-letter party symbol he chose for his faction. It doesn’t spell טוב (tov, good)—but he wants you to think it does. The resemblance is intentional: a semantic smirk. Just Smotrich and a few good guys—his bloc, including the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit. That wasn’t just branding—it was bait dangled for the Left to gag on.

He weaponized sincerity, kitsch, and infantilized imagery to soften his authoritarian message. That cat meme campaign wasn’t just kitsch—it was a containment device, a lo-fi Trojan horse smuggling theocratic authoritarianism under millennial irony. His energy wasn’t about dominance—it was about positioning himself as the sincere underdog, deliberately unserious, but disarmingly effective. And it worked in large part because of who he was—39 years old, father of seven, still boyish, handsome, and carrying the stature and energy of an adolescent yeshiva boy braiding the absurd with the sacred to hide the danger.

And this is probably why I can’t look away from Smotrich. There’s something familiar—generational. The irony, kitsch and lo-fi humor? It’s the aesthetic framework of our adolescence. He leans on meme-core aesthetic with a tone that ping pongs between childish and apocalyptic. He rebrands rigid fascism as quirky populism, striking the provocateur’s pose with the same smirking ease I’ve seen a thousand times in right-wing men of our age.

When I see Smotrich—it is not as a man, nor a politician, but as a fully-formed ontology. A wholeness I reject—and yet, it still sparks. Erotic ontology is not about alignment, it’s about the seal within. I want to wrestle him like Yaakov in the night, bloody and breathless, demanding a name. I want to press my palms against the edge of his ontology and walk away limping, knowing I have seen something that exists—truly exists—even if it could never hold me.

Eroticism, at its core, is not about sex. It’s that feeling of: “I’m awake in the presence of this.” Most of his ideological peers are so bombastic they kill that alertness—cartoonish, rabid. But Smotrich is not. His aesthetic performs constraint, masking violence with irony and composure—and that’s exactly what makes him dangerous.

Smotrich’s voice is emblematic of his politics—chronically inflamed and tight. He speaks without diaphragmatic support, producing glottal speech that makes him sound like he’s perpetually recovering from truth-telling under siege: messianic exhaustion. That containment is cultivated in the yeshiva tradition of spiritual restraint, where not only women’s voices are deemed dangerous—kol isha erva (the voice of a woman is nakedness, Berakhot 24a)—but men are also taught to self-regulate. And with that voice, he speaks of the land as something to possess, dominate, consecrate. Every outpost and hilltop reinforced is another vocal cord drawn tight. He contains the land the same way he contains his breath: harshly, righteously, without softness or seduction.

And what he contains with his breath, he continues through his bloodline.

We welcomed our firstborn—both sons—at the same age. I named mine Zev Eliyahu—a wolf who would need a prophet’s vision to navigate the wilderness of the Galut. He named his Bnaya—“God builds”—a settler’s prophecy, more than symbolic.

What kind of future does a name like Bnaya prepare a boy for when your father is Bezalel Smotrich? And what kind of ideology does it take to believe that God is the builder, and the land something to possess—physically, and in narrative and memory?

By 2005, that name was already a promise in fulfillment. Smotrich was a law student and a new father, who had chosen his moral architecture—based on land, masculinity and memory—with the aid of 700 liters of gasoline. I was a junior at NYU—just back from Tel Aviv University—caught between campus protests over Gaza and faculty debates on Israeli policy. His world was firestarter politics. Mine, the hysterics of moral theater.

But even then, I sensed what kind of world was forming—and what kind of son it would take to navigate it. Smotrich named his to build the future; I named mine to walk through it with vision. He consecrated his son to possession. I prepared mine for navigation.

The naming of his son was the clearest sign of his ideological inheritance. It came before the attempted arson, before the Knesset, before the lo-fi meme-core politics. It was Beit El, distilled. Those later choices—meme-core deadpan, kitsch minimalism, clown cats on campaign ads—weren’t departures. They were the aesthetic evolution of the same containment logic: rebranded not only to match the media language of the 2010s, but to disarm his severity with generational familiarity. The irony isn’t just cultural—it’s theological camouflage.

When I read Smotrich’s 2017 manifesto, Israel’s Decisive Plan, I wasn’t surprised by the content—I already knew the architecture. What startled me was how seductively rational it sounded:  Smotrich cloaks messianic theology in the tone of rational governance. He contains the ecstatic vision of redemption and channels it into policy, architecture, and law. This contained vision is more powerful because it’s not easily dismissed. The plan outlines three options for Palestinians: stay and accept erasure, leave, or resist—in which case, “the IDF will know what to do,” and with that, the subtext doesn’t whisper: the land belongs to the Jews, and resistance will be met with lethal force. That’s not policy—that’s a threat.

In January 2025, the inheritance of containment made real, his son Bnaya—now a man and a father—initiated the process to build his home atop the ruins of a demolished Bedouin village.

The seduction of shared aesthetic memory—the lo-fi kitsch, the clip-art Paint cats, the wink of the “Woltrich delivers values” campaign ad—was never just deadpan irony. Stripped bare, it revealed itself as an aesthetic form of containment, too: cutesy visual concealing theocratic authoritarianism. At its core is tiered personhood, theologically sanctioned—not by halacha and certainly not by Zionism, but by sacralized nationalism, a subset of theocratic authoritarianism—a theology in which the state becomes a vessel of covenant, and its leaders divine agents. In this framework, negotiation is irrelevant—power is sacred, and possession is preordained.

This containment is what also renders Palestinian personhood a reactionary impulse—not something to recognize, but something to erase. When possession is preordained, Palestinian identity becomes subversion—and any competing claim an affront to the covenant. For Smotrich, it’s not enough to possess the land physically, but in memory and narrative, too.

I kept rereading one sentence—this plan is the most just and moral by any measure—and I felt my chest tighten. Not because I believed him, but because I recognized the technique: the certainty. The same certainty that had once entranced me, like standing near a fire, dazzled by its glow, not yet knowing it could burn. At Sinai, fire revealed. With Smotrich, it blinds.

Still, I felt the erotic charge of clarity in chaos. In the wake of October 7th, certainty can feel like teshuva. And yet that instinct—to tether ourselves to the most unyielding force in the room—is the exact instinct Zionism was meant to correct. Zionism was never meant to be the messianic endpoint; it was always the human beginning.

And this is what Smotrich has betrayed. He has taken Rav Kook’s vocabulary and hollowed it of its moral architecture, using it to justify theocratic authoritarianism.

In its true form, Zionism is not the architecture of dominion—it is the journey of return with the Shechinah. It is the refusal to abandon the divine presence that walks through the wilderness, wanders with wolves, grieves in exile, and insists on the dignity of all who dwell in the land. It is the refusal to abandon the divine presence that grieves with the people, not the land. Lo azvo et ha’am (she [they] did not abandon the people, Eicha Rabbah 1:1). But Smotrich did. When he refused to negotiate for the hostages, when he sacrificed human dignity for theological purity, his message was clear: the land is holy, the people are expendable.

Certainty isn’t illumination—it’s blinding. It is the fire that overexposes everything, bleaching out complexity, contradiction, and doubt. I have longed for certainty, but when I found it, there was a glare—harsh, flattening, unforgiving.

That glare flattens reality—stripping away contradiction, ambiguity, and moral friction—until all that remains is something to act on without feeling too much. It shields us from grief by sparing us the burden of holding conflicting truths.

And in that blindness, we don’t just fail to see the people quietly enacting the very policies laid out in the Decisive Plan—we promote them. From across the ocean, we elevate what should be fringe ideology and help turn it into governing logic.

And when Zionists remain silent as that erasure is carried out in our name, we forfeit the right to speak of justice. Smotrich does not represent Zionism. He represents theocratic authoritarianism. And we must name it as such or risk losing our moral clarity and the soul of the movement that brought us home.

When we let the Smotriches of the world hide behind the word, we reinforce their framing, making it harder for people with a conscience—Zionists—to claim the space. And “anti-Zionists,” ironically, strengthen the most dangerous elements of Israeli politics by refusing to name their project precisely.