The Unknown Assailant Has Excellent References
Itamar Ben-Gvir does not shoot Palestinians. He does not stand at checkpoints, raid homes at night, burn orchards, block ambulances, or pull the trigger when a body falls. This is precisely why his political role is so often misunderstood. He is treated as a provocateur, an extremist, or a dangerous minister, while his more consequential function remains obscured: he helps construct the environment in which violence becomes easier to perform, easier to justify, and harder to attribute.
The modern architecture of political violence no longer requires a clear order. An order leaves evidence: an author, a recipient, a time, and a chain of command. An architecture is more efficient. It distributes weapons, lowers thresholds, identifies populations as permanent sources of danger, weakens investigation, prepares the vocabulary of self-defence, and waits for an interchangeable local actor to occupy the position already prepared for him.
This is the figure missing from most discussions of Ben-Gvir: the unknown assailant. The assailant may remain personally unidentified while being perfectly identifiable at the structural level. The state may not know which settler fired, which soldier interpreted movement as danger, or which armed civilian decided that suspicion justified force. It nevertheless knows whom it armed, whose fear it authorized, whose testimony it will privilege, whose death it will describe as an operational incident, and which investigation is unlikely to disturb the political order.
The unknown assailant is not a gap in the system. He is one of its products. His anonymity is not merely the consequence of insufficient evidence; it is a political advantage. The state receives the territorial, disciplinary, and psychological effects of violence without having to assume full authorship of any single act.
This is also why opposing Ben-Gvir is easier than opposing the order he represents. He speaks too openly. He says settlement where others say security presence, migration where others say demographic reality, execution where others say deterrence, and revenge where others prefer the language of sovereignty. His vulgarity allows the political centre to appear moderate without abandoning the field he has defined.
The disagreement often resembles the distinction between causing serious bodily injury and inflicting damage that remains just below the threshold of that legal classification. The body is still impaired, its movement restricted, and its future capacity reduced. What changes is the description, and with the description the possibility of innocence.
That is increasingly how the argument over Gaza is conducted. Ben-Gvir proposes Israeli residential neighbourhoods, first for police officers and soldiers, then for civilians. His critics may call the proposal premature, unrealistic, or diplomatically ruinous. Yet many do not reject permanent Israeli control, the subordination of Palestinian political life, or the transformation of military presence into territorial permanence. They object less to the injury than to the moment at which it becomes impossible to deny what has been done.
The same mechanism governs the language of migration. Ben-Gvir speaks of encouraging Palestinians to leave Gaza, while more respectable figures avoid the word expulsion. Yet if housing, infrastructure, security, economic viability, and political continuity are systematically destroyed, departure can later be described as voluntary simply because no formal deportation order was issued. One need not break the bone directly if one can damage the joint until the limb no longer bears weight.
His demand for more civilian weapons, more security squads, and more permissive rules of engagement extends the same logic. One population is armed, authorized, and protected; another is exposed to its suspicions and interpretations of danger. The dispute then concerns not whether violence is distributed asymmetrically, but how professionally that asymmetry should be administered.
This is where the unknown assailant becomes indispensable. Ben-Gvir does not need to order every shooting. His political success begins when an order is no longer necessary. The weapon is already present, the target already marked, the threshold already lowered, the justification already available, and the likelihood of punishment already reduced.
The familiar formulas arrive after the event. The circumstances are unclear. The shooter felt threatened. The actor operated independently. An investigation is underway. A procedure may have been exceeded. Each statement may be factually possible, but together they sever the act from the architecture that made it more probable.
The wrong question is therefore whether Ben-Gvir instructed someone to fire. The correct question is what he has done to make firing more available, more legitimate, and less punishable. This is responsibility at a higher order: not authorship of the individual act, but production of the conditions under which such acts become recurrent.
His description of Iran as a “Nazi regime” belongs to the same architecture of classification. He is not only defining the enemy; he is also defining what cannot be Nazi. Once the adversary is placed inside the category of absolute evil, actions against it become automatically defensive. Diplomacy becomes appeasement, restraint becomes naivety, and escalation becomes historical responsibility.
At the same time, Israeli practices in Gaza are removed semantically from the field of comparison. Forced departure becomes voluntary migration, permanent control becomes security, settlement becomes presence, collective punishment becomes pressure on Hamas, armed civilian domination becomes community defence, and execution becomes justice. The unknown assailant then becomes evidence that no political assailant exists.
Nazism is no longer recognized through structures, practices, or consequences. It is assigned by location. It exists elsewhere, on the other side, among those against whom violence has already been classified as defensive.
This is the deeper function of historical victimhood when converted into political immunity. The injunction not to turn the victim into the accused appears morally self-evident, but it can transform the victim of a specific event into a permanently innocent collective subject. A Jewish actor may merely cross a line; a Palestinian actor confirms a prior classification. One remains within victimhood even after the act, while the other may enter guilt before any act is established.
Ben-Gvir did not invent this structure. He speaks it without embarrassment and gives it administrative form. He is useful not because he stands outside the system, but because he stands at its visible edge and makes everyone positioned one step behind him appear restrained.
Ben-Gvir now describes this function in his own words. He claims that his presence in the security cabinet pushed Netanyahu toward actions the prime minister had previously not dared to take, or had perhaps only dreamed of taking. He no longer presents himself as the representative of a narrow ideological enclave, but as “everyone’s Itamar,” a politician for secular Israelis, traditional Israelis, the periphery, the haredim, and the national mainstream. His ambition is not merely to enter the state from its extremist margin. It is to convert the margin into the state’s common sense. More seats, in his own formulation, mean greater power to encourage Palestinian emigration from Gaza, reject external restraint, and speak to Hamas “through the crosshairs.” He is not hiding the mechanism. Electoral representation is being offered as a way to lower the threshold of violence. The unknown assailant is no longer merely protected by the state; he is being organized as a constituency.
By demanding explicit expulsion, he makes indefinite coerced displacement look moderate. By proposing settlement in Gaza, he makes permanent military control appear temporary. By dreaming of executions performed by victims’ relatives, he makes institutionalized vengeance appear civilized. By distributing weapons and enlarging the right to shoot, he makes the subsequent shooting appear private.
The centre can therefore oppose him without leaving the political field he has calibrated. It can say not so quickly, not so openly, not without legal review, not at such diplomatic cost. What it rarely says is not this destination, not this architecture, not this method of producing violence without an author.
There are no innocent spectators in such an order. There are architects, executors, administrators, translators, critics of tone, and institutions that know enough to avoid knowing too precisely. Some prefer to break the body openly. Others prefer to impair it while preserving the official claim that it still functions.
Some want to issue the order. Others build the conditions in which the order is no longer necessary. The unknown assailant remains unknown because everyone else has supplied his references.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
