Ben Gvir: you can leave Hebron, but Hebron doesn’t leave you

There’s something almost endearing – if not surreal – about watching Itamar Ben Gvir on the rooftop of a restaurant in Lower Manhattan telling a small audience of American Jews that his views have evolved. For a man long synonymous with hardline zealotry, his debut US tour was part repentance, part provocation, and entirely reflective of the contradictions now baked into Israel’s right-wing establishment.

Ben Gvir arrived in New York not with the official fanfare, but with the noise and chants of the protesters outside. The National Security Minister, once barred from IDF service due to his radicalism and infamous for the Rabbi Meir Kahane photo in his living room, now says he no longer believes in expelling all of the Arabs: ‘I don’t agree with everything Rabbi Kahane wrote. When I was young, I used to think we had to kick out all of the Arabs and today I think the situation is more complex,’ he said. ‘You can’t take away from Rabbi Kahane what he did in the Jewish Defense League. He worked and was murdered as a Jew.’ Yes, perhaps this is progress, but it is hardly the transformation he makes it out to be.

He offered the familiar reassurances to about 30 attendees while protesters chanted from below. His views are derived, he said, from ‘one source – my love for Israel.’ He supports freedom of protest, he claimed, pointing to the man who burst into his talk shouting ‘get the fuck out of New York, Itamar,’ musing in response that ‘in Syria and Egypt, you cannot shout like this.’ And there is was: a performance of moderation, offered in American idiom, dressed for export.

It is hard, though, to square his rebrand with recent history. If Ben Gvir has undergone a political epiphany, it’s a remarkably rapid one. This is the same National Security Minister who, just months ago, sought to expand police immunity, directed a blunt crackdown on Arab communities, called for collective punishment in Gaza, and openly supported settler violence in the West Bank. If he has undergone the moral evolution he claims to have done, it must have begun somewhere between Mar-a-Lago and the rooftop of that restaurant in Manhattan.

This raises the question, though: does he really believe what he says? Are we expected to believe that a man who has long championed Jewish supremacy, who has made a political career of provocation, has now – like some sort of nationalist Scrooge – awoken from a bad dream? It’s possible, but enormously unlikely and deeply convenient.

His policy instincts certainly haven’t softened, though: he used the trip to promote Trump’s Gaza emigration plan – this doesn’t sound like the man who used to think the Arabs should be expelled – in a proposal that would see Palestinians ‘encouraged’ to leave; he called for the bombing of Hamas food supplies and suggested that – contrary the Trump administration – electricity to Gaza should be cut entirely. These are not the views of a man rethinking his worldview. These are the views of a man repackaging it.

The split between Ben Gvir’s supporters and his doubters was plain to see: a small crowd inside applauded, while a larger one outside demonstrated against him. There was one moment at the event that cut through his performance, when a former Israeli Air Force pilot, now living in the United States, told Ben Gvir that he left the Holy Land because of ‘people like you’ – because of his racism, his criminal record, his refusal to serve in the IDF, but most of all, his refusal to back a hostage deal. ‘What do you offer to people like me? How can you give me back hope?’

The answer the pilot received, though, was glib: ‘If you want to return to Israel, now is the right time.’ No reflection, no remorse, just a line to move the conversation along. Clearly, he had come to the US to be seen, not to listen.

Israelis abroad who feel alienated by a government that has grown increasingly extreme noticed. And so, too, should the Americans who applauded on that rooftop – not because Ben Gvir deserves rejection at every turn, but because every act of ‘sincerity’ should demand utter scrutiny.

Ben Gvir didn’t come to New York as a changed man. He came as the same man in a different suit; and for many, that’s still no welcome sight.