Israeli government cabinet member, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s hand-selected minister of national security. As such, he is in charge of Israel’s prison system. That makes the Palestinian internment video he has just posted doubly troubling. Ben-Gvir, never shy about fomenting hatred and heat, has raised a blistering level of international controversy by creating and posting the following pathetic and deeply disturbing AI video, promoting an obviously Hitlerian final solution for Palestinians as a campaign promise:
I guess making videos like this is what Ben-Gvir does for entertainment when he’s not trying to stir up riots on the Temple Mount, which he is also good at. The conveyor belt makes the fat Palestinians look a bit like sides of beef going into a slaughter house. In the very least, the Palestinians are going into a concentration camp but coming out as emaciated as holocaust victims. Clearly, Ben-Gvir made them fat at the start of the video so it would be clear they came out the other side looking like skeletons because he is campaigning on making Israel’s prisons harsher for Palestinians—not everyone, just all of them.
That beady-eyed snake in the grass named Benjamin Netanyahu gave Gvir this big national security post to get him to join his Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party to Netanyahu’s government in order to establish a governing majority. Netanyahu, a man who, himself, seems to be trying extra hard to court controversy and stir hatred, may have chosen him because that is exactly what he wants to have running national security and prisons for Palestinians, or perhaps Bibi was just so greedy for power that he’d join anything to himself like a whore in order to form a government. There is not much daylight between their two parties. Therefore, it’s unlikely Bibi will do what needs to be done here, which is to spit this hate-monger out of the Israeli government, as that would dissolve his government.
The thing to particularly become aware of here is that Ben-Gvir did not rise to power in a vacuum. Other far-right parties in Israel are competing for votes by promoting increasingly extreme visions. Moreover, this is hardly just a Jewish phenomenon as we can easily see the same thing has happened under extremist president, Donald J Trump, and his Warhead Pete Hegseth, who could be called America’s Ben-Gvir.
American and Israeli German-style concentration camps
I’ve argued almost all my life we need to get illegal aliens out of the country; so, I’m not against removing illegal aliens, but start by arresting and jailing the Americans who illegally hire them because that cuts right to the heart of the problem! Without those Americans providing jobs for them, many of the illegal aliens will leave on their own. Treat the aliens with dignity because most of them are simply desperate to stay alive and feed their families, and they did good work for the US while here, even if many, I believe with reason, resented the suppression of wages they cause. To the extent you do it by capturing aliens and deporting them, do it humanely and kindly where possible.
Why should you punish someone who was a good worker, WANTED by an American employer, whose crime was being desperate for work to survive? That doesn’t make her an evil person just because she’s illegal. In fact, she’s probably a very kind person with a child she needs to feed, and a US employer lured her into working for him because he wanted cheaper labor than what he’d have to pay to entice Americans to that kind of work.
Israel’s situation, of course, is much different than the US alien worker situation, though Israelis have hired Palestinians for decades because they are cheaper labor, too. It’s much harder to treat people humanely when they have been blowing you up in cafes and on buses; but that doesn’t excuse an Israeli government official from producing a teaser that promotes Adolf Hitler’s final solution as the right one for Palestinians or acting like this: (I mean the conveyor belt might as well have been box cars stuffed with the people you hate.)
Ben-Gvir …
made international news when he filmed himself taunting bound activists who had been detained trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
He also rose to his present position by promising …
to worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners. An ambitious goal, considering conditions are already hellish: Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has likened the prisons where Palestinians are kept to “torture camps”….
Ben-Gvir, by the way, has some imaginative ideas for punishment. One of his sick fantasies is to put crocodiles in moats around prisons where Palestinians are held to stop prison breaks.
Well, that just sounds exactly like Trump’s Alligator Alcatraz. If they are truly terrorists, they may need alligators around them to keep the rest of us safe; but we know most of the people in Trump’s internment camps were not; and no doubt many of the women G’vir was harassing in another report were not either.
From October 2023 until June 2026, at least 104 Palestinian inmates died in Israeli custody, according to Haaretz, while Physicians for Human Rights Israel said the number was at least 94 Palestinians.
B’Tselem has reported that Palestinians have been subjected to sexual violence, abuse, humiliation, inhumane living conditions and denial of medical care under Israeli custody.
That’s the treatment he’s already giving them, and he’s campaigning on making worse. However, it sounds a lot like many of Trump’s new US concentration camps, except maybe for the sexual violence; yet he uses his office to shelter those who used Epstein Island for that.
The Israeli rights group said: “Ben Gvir and [Israeli Prison Service] officers put the abuse of prisoners on display, with the media playing the role of mouthpiece to the minister’s racist and violent ideology, with little to no criticism of the crimes and grave human rights violations involved.”
That’s a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
In May, for the first time in its history, the UN put Israel on a blacklist of countries accused of committing sexual violence in warzones. Mention was made of the role of the Israeli Prison Service in the assaults.
Do religious paraders like Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu really think God would be pleased with men presiding over a government like this? Is that the Israel God envisioned in Jewish scriptures?
“Rape and gang rape, in some cases repeated, were perpetrated against nine victims, the majority from Gaza.”
That part sounds like Trump’s America, too, especially like Epstein Island, which might as well have been a prison island for the girls, while this part sounds like Trump’s MO with aliens:
Thousands of prisoners, including about 200 children, are held under “administrative detention”: a technocratic name for a dystopian practice….
When you hear the word “prisoner”, people like Ben-Gvir want you to think of dangerous terrorists who deserve everything they get. In reality, many are people like Layan Nasir: a 23-year-old woman who was taken away at gunpoint from her parents’ home for no clear reason and only made international news because she is a Christian.
Some ultra-conservative Jewish extremists in Israel—say, of the Hassidic type—have become violent toward Christians, too—not just Palestinian Christians, but American Christians and especially Jewish Christians. (Yes, they exist in Israel … perilously.) They throw rocks at Christians on their way to church and even vandalize churches.
What was just described for Gvir above, of course, has been Trump’s approach with illegal immigrants—to make people think everyone who was being arrested and placed in concentration camps in Florida was a terrorist or a rapist, even if the worst thing they did, outside of coming illegally into the country, was to pick pumpkins or watermelons or make beds or wash dishes for a lot less than Americans would need to earn in order to get them to take those jobs. For that, their children got torn from their hands, just as Ben-Gvir has done. Pity the innocent children who have no idea where their parents are or why the past year of horror has happened to them in America!
Ben-Gvir doesn’t just want to hang his enemies; he wants more bloodshed in Gaza – which is still very much a killing field despite a so-called ceasefire. “I think we should be doing 30 to 40 targeted assassinations [in Gaza] per night,” Ben-Gvir recently said on a podcast. “Not just those who pose an immediate threat. There are people there who don’t deserve to live … They are not even people.”
Isn’t that what Hitler said???
I could go on and on: Ben-Gvir is a busy man. He recently filmed himself entering prison cells containing Palestinian women and taunting them. On the same podcast where he urged nightly killings in Gaza, he went on to say that he thought Israel should occupy the entirety of Gaza. And, on Monday, he stormed the al-Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem, accompanied by extremist settlers and with the protection of the Israeli military.
He’s just itching to instigate riots.
Evil twins
The critical point I’m coming to is that we have two governments running major wars in the Middle East right now that are steeped in Hitlerian hatred. One of them is run by Trump, who has more than once publicly praised Hitler as a “great leader,” and many of his followers are Neo-Nazis that he courted in order to gain power. A love for Nazi tactics is evidenced by Trump’s unnecessarily violent, almost Gestapo-like immigration department, which separates children from their pumpkin-picking mothers in order to pile the mothers up in a prison surrounded by the nation’s largest alligator-and-snake-filled mote.
I’m not trying to get sentimental here about Palestinians who have perpetrated innumerable horrors of their of own by bombing cafes and buses full of civilians. I just want to point out that Israel and America have transitioned to extremist and dishonorable governments. Netanyahu even matches up well to Trump in the scale of scandals (if not also Trump’s extreme number of scandals) over which he has been tied up in legal actions. Many even believe Netanyahu was behind Epstein, whom they claim was used to compromise American businessmen and politicians for control and used to spy and with whom Trump seems wickedly connected, given how hard he is using his office to cover for all of that. (I don’t know if those theories are true or not, but they are popular beliefs that might be true.)
As both nations—Israel and America—have elected leaders who have shifted government toward those nation’s furthest-right fringes, the zealots who have been brought into their circle of power to run the government no longer represent true Jewish values or deeper American or Christian values. Both the Jewish religion and the Christian religion teach kindness and hospitality and JUSTICE specifically toward aliens … from the same books of the Bible.
That doesn’t mean you have to let as many aliens into your country as want to pour in, any more than hospitality requires you to let everyone into your house. It certainly doesn’t mean you need to let into your country anyone you have solid reason to believe wants to harm you, anymore than hospitality and kindness requires you to let burglars into your home.
However, it does mean you don’t treat every alien whose time it is to leave as if they are de facto terrorists and rapists. Most are just moms or dads cleaning hotel rooms for the governing elite who own the hotels and resorts and who knew they were hiring illegal aliens to save themselves money. Those migrant workers, as I’ve written before, have become the modern-day peasant class that the wealthy class in both nations long chose to turn a blind eye to because big hotels and restaurants (and farms) wanted cheap labor. Their governments were complicit in allowing the breaking of their own laws, which seemed to exist only to force the peasants to keep their heads down and not complain about conditions.
In Israel, the situation is far more complicated than just cheap labor, but some of the leaders carrying out policy in Gaza and the West Bank are as awful as the people they hate and as bad as the current leaders in America.
Both Netanyahu and Trump now share the risk of having their power stripped away from them in the next election because their extremism is turning the middle away from them, and they are both losing some of their extremists, as well. (Trump’s betrayal of some of the major objectives promised to his own supporters has lost him influential support.)
The prime minister has released several video and social media messages in recent weeks, publicly pleading with Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Winter to unite as one bloc instead of running as smaller parties. But so far, the right-wing parties are focusing on their own campaigns and leaning into a message that is becoming more extreme.
Such is the state of affairs going into fall elections for both nations. Iran is counting on watching them both flounder around in their own divided extremism to see their governing power fall apart. It’s treading water with mines and torpedos to buy time until the governments of those nations start to crumble because, if Republicans lose as largely as polls (often wrong) are indicating, Trump likely spend the rest of his presidency tied up in trials and unable to get anything passed through congress. Yet, who knows how wild that will make him—like a caged animal.
The center fringe
The cockroaches under self-serving commanders-in-chief like TheRump and NetanYAHOO have been given a voice and have been stirred up by these two men, who will gather forces from wherever they can find force by tapping into the rising magma of rage. So fringes, which were once largely ignored and a lot quieter, have crawled out from under the woodwork onto the center stage and have been empowered by the leaders whom they empowered with their votes. Together, they have forged a coalition—a support base that has been made into the core of government in order to form a government. In both nations.
Ben-Gvir is so shameless that there is no way to spin his conduct. He has been condemned and sanctioned by politicians and governments around the world. Nevertheless, Israel’s apologists have tried to cast him as a fringe figure.
But that is just it, both governments have made the fringe the new center. Ben-Gvir is an example of that.
“Ben-Gvir’s statements do not reflect the policy of the State of Israel and should be condemned by all who care about Israel’s future,” the American Jewish Committee stated in August, after the politician’s comments about settlement in Gaza.
But they DO reflect the official policy of Israel because the official government of Israel chose him to administer that policy, knowing full well what he is like and where he campaigned to run with those programs! The government can try to distance itself like that, but the fact is the coalitions in Israel and the US were built by intent in order to bring those same governments into existence.
Trump, for example, has tapped into years of rage that has built up from the insane triumphs of liberalism over conservatism in America that have delivered gay marriages, trans-genderism, men in women’s bathrooms at the same time the women are in them, children born whose parents and teachers pretend they are without gender like “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” mass immigration (which rich conservatives also wanted). A lot of nutty, once ultra-fringe, ultra-cringe ideas that liberals made central in American politics have made the Americans who once were at the center feel increasingly marginalized. So, the pendulum is swinging now to the opposite extreme.
Just look at the oddballs Biden put in office and how poorly they tended to the normal business of their departments because they were too busy using their departments to find ways to normalize and centralize their own fringe groups … like this ludicrously ugly male pair of wives:
That’s the New Democrat normal. Oh, but don’t speak the obvious and odious truth about their pretend gender transitions, blatantly and ridiculously failed as they are.
My point is not to argue those issues, but just to say, as society moved so extremely to the Left, anger burned on the Right until those who felt marginalized found a person through whom they could gain power to restore the balance, which is what Ben-Gvir probably sees himself as doing.
My secondary point would be that someone like Trump doesn’t even care about many of those issues, such as sexual deviancy (being a deviant by his own boasting about how he grabs women) or abortions. He’s just tapping into the anger to use it for his own empowerment because anger is powerful, even if disorganized and chaotic; but Trump loves chaotic, just like his father, the devil. And so the two nations are both cracking and crumbling from years of social wars between Left and Right that have pushed people toward extremes, and thinned out the middle that once could get along.
This is, in other words, the outcome of longtime culture wars that constantly divided nations, which are now being reaped by power-hungry, maniacal leaders who are exploiting the anger to empower themselves. Trump’s evil genius is seeing how he can exploit anger for his own uses. Netanyahu, not much different. We now live in nations where humankind is falling apart at the seams with wedges being driven everywhere by intentionally divisive leaders.
Make no mistake: Ben-Gvir may be an embarrassment, but he is no anomaly. He is very much the face of modern Israel and his vision for the country accurately reflects the reality on the ground.
Same can be said of Trump, elected twice. The second time America knew what it was electing (or had no excuse not to), so he is what the majority of voters chose.
Marching toward Armageddon
I’ve said this before, but people like Ben-Gvir in Israel’s government will make Biblical prophecies like this one for Israel come true, and it won’t take much more time (particularly verse 14):
12 “This is what the Lord says:
“‘Your wound is incurable,
your injury beyond healing.
13 There is no one to plead your cause,
no remedy for your sore,
no healing for you.
14 All your allies have forgotten you;
they care nothing for you.
I have struck you as an enemy would
and punished you as would the cruel,
because your guilt is so great
and your sins so many.
15 Why do you cry out over your wound,
your pain that has no cure?
Because of your great guilt and many sins
I have done these things to you. (Jeremiah 30:12-15)
Back in 2024, I wrote about that prophecy and another prophecy that says,
25 Therefore the LORD’s anger burns against his people; his hand is raised and he strikes them down. The mountains shake, and the dead bodies are like refuse in the streets. Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away, his hand is still upraised.
26 He lifts up a banner for the distant nations, he whistles for those at the ends of the earth. Here they come, swiftly and speedily!
I.e., he calls in the nations against Israel to make war on it.
27 Not one of them grows tired or stumbles, not one slumbers or sleeps; not a belt is loosened at the waist, not a sandal strap is broken.
They arrive around Israel ready to make war!
28 Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung; their horses’ hooves seem like flint, their chariot wheels like a whirlwind.
29 Their roar is like that of the lion, they roar like young lions; they growl as they seize their prey and carry it off with no one to rescue.
30 In that day they will roar over it like the roaring of the sea. And if one looks at the land, there is only darkness and distress; even the sun will be darkened by clouds. (Isaiah 5:25-30)
That is saying the nations will overwhelm Israel because so many have been made angry with it, creating a time of darkness and distress in Israel—ha’aretz, the land.
I noted back in that article,
It’s not hard to see the many nations of the world that are Muslim would turn in unison against Israel if the sites Muslims consider sacred on the Temple Mount were threatened [which Ben-Gvir has done], but those nations may also include Russia as an ally of Iran and other nations that turn against Israel—Islamic Turkey seeming more on sides with Russia now than with the US or Israel (“Thundering Toward Armageddon”)
We now see that exact formation shaping up, as I suggested, as we read in the news that Russia is now supplying Iran with the cruise missiles it needs, which Iran is using to attack its enemies in the Middle East, which means Russian missiles may soon be directed at Israel if it steps back directly into the Iran war, though for now Israel seems to be sidelined from making direct attacks on Iran. Israel’s relationship with Turkey has also become much more strained since I wrote that comment. So, it is all quickly moving in that direction.
Electioneering
Ben Gvir is perhaps the best known of Israel’s far-right politicians, a provocateur with his hands on the country’s levers of power. As the minister of National Security, he is in charge of the police and the prisons as his politics have become a defining feature of Israel’s image abroad.
With two months until the elections, Israel’s far-right field is becoming increasingly crowded, packed with small parties vying for a finite pool of votes. To stand out, politicians are unabashed in their messaging and their vision for the country.
It’s a race to the extremities almost perfectly timed to match up with US elections. In both countries right now, the extreme right is driving the nation.
The far-right is a dominant feature in Israeli politics – and a key component of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.
It is obviously the dominant feature in US politics, too, although many of Trump’s own supporters are not happy with the Israeli war path Trump has run down, nor with his deployment of everything he can find to obscure the Epstain scandal to save his cronies and likely himself. MAGA has splintered badly over these issues.
In Israel, the situation is a little different. The old splinter groups are competing to be more extreme than each other, and new splinter groups are forming. There is no cohesion in the madness in either Israel or America. Anger doesn’t know cohesion.
In Israel, we read,
That electoral arithmetic is intensifying competition for right-wing voters and pushing politicians to adopt even harder-line positions….
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich repeatedly celebrates the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, openly boasting of destroying the possibility of a Palestinian state. A cornerstone of his election campaign is called “Yes. Let’s Judaize!” – a plan which aims to change the demographic reality in the Negev and Galilee, areas of Israel with substantial Arab populations, by applying settlement strategies from the West Bank: bringing a million additional Jewish residents and establishing about 40 new communities alongside dozens of individual farms.
Meanwhile, Ofer Winter recently launched his new “Your People Israel” party. The retired brigadier general is popular among Israel’s right-wing and religious Zionist movement. At the party’s launch event in late-August, he said, “There will never be a Palestinian state here. The solution in Gaza is simple – emigration.”
It may be that no solutions worked out by humankind for the violence that Palestinians have also rained down on Jews in Israel will ever work, but neither will this one as the extremists separate Israel from the rest of the world, until they leave Israel without any allies because they have made it into its worst version of itself. That’s when Israel will be pressed toward a nuclear solution that will only bring global catastrophe.
America is also becoming its worst version of itself in the eyes of all the world over which Trump has rampaged, seriously threatening to grab the land of long-time allies, bulldozing through their economies with tariffs, flip-flopping all over the place so they don’t even know where the solid ground on treaties is, deriding their leaders constantly, driving wedges between America and its old allies from World War II days. Trump, too, said this week he has been seriously considering a mini-nuclear solution, which could open Pandora’s Box, but has decided not to go that route … for now.
False religion
All of these guys are guided by bastardized religion. Gvir believes he is guided by biblical prophets and prophetic rabbis and that God will empower him for helping to bring the Jewish messiah to rule Israel. Such brazen beliefs embolden him to take actions others despise because he believes God will make him triumphant if he is so bold.
Trump is surrounded by his own nest of prophets, led by prophetess Paula White Cain and joined by Lance Wallnau, who all tell him that God will empower him if he defends Israel.
Pete Hagsbreath is filled with violence and machismo guided by Christian Nationalism (and his own ego), which is built on a twisted view of biblical prophecy that says, just like Wallnau, that it is the manifest destiny of Christians to rule the earth now. That is a doctrine of the “Church triumphant” that once empowered Catholic pogroms against Jews and crusades against Muslims and inquisitions against Protestants. It is a misconstrued prophetic belief, but a long popular one, with a history of epic destruction. The belief has long been used to co-opt religion to gain political power.
Christian nationalists believe under that “prophetic mandate” they are to seize power by military effort and violence, the exact opposite of everything Jesus lived and taught. Trump believes he is to do it for his own empowerment, and that’s all he needs for motivation. If God helps him, great; but he’d do it anyway. Zealot Ben-Gvir and many Zionists of a white and blue stripe (rather than red, white and blue stripes) are enlivened by similar beliefs that they are working out their Jewish destiny. All of these people working out their own versions of destiny, but none are waiting for God to deliver. They believe arrogantly they know the plan and the path, and it is their calling to make it happen. There is no humility in them whatsoever.
As a result, human evil is manifesting again in global imperial wars, and the world marches restlessly toward Armageddon as these people create massive hot wars that are now burning up the whole Middle East. The flaw is not in the ancient religions, which also contain harsh warnings against people who want to make the end come quickly in order to see it happen and specifically against taking the timing of prophecy into their own hands.
The actual religious writings are also filled with virtues that must govern all human action, which naturally curb the extremes. It is the human lust for power that drives narcissists and despots and maniacs to use those religions to empower themselves and to justify themselves while ignoring the imposed and inconvenient virtues. The words of the prophets draw out human nature as leaders lust for the powers talked about in those prophecies while ignoring all the impositions and warnings they don’t like. The prophets, thus, lure human nature to expose itself and bring on humanity’s own judgement because it is human nature to believe the parts that serve us and ignore what we don’t like.
Leaders like Trump and Netanyahu, and their underlords like Hegseth and Ben-Gvir, ignore the tempering parts of those belief systems that are inconvenient truths to their lust for power. Their own self-righteousness leads them to storm ahead of the texts they claim to believe in; or, in Trump’s case, his endless quest for self-aggrandizement with no interest in righteousness or virtue of any kind, causes him to cut his own trail.
Perhaps instead of thinking from the standpoint of whether God is on their side, they should have started by asking if they are on God’s side.
This weekend, I’ll dive into how badly the main war in the Middle East is going for these warriors. It does not appear God is on their side, given that they are so much more powerful than their enemy, yet their enemy appears to be winning its objectives, which will eventually heat Netanyahu and Trump up to even more aggressive attacks OR cause Trump to back out defeated with some lame claim of victory, leaving Netanyahu to complete the war on his own. Trump certainly wants out, but will he be able to find enough of a claim for victory to protect his ego from the enormous loss? He might not find that path, and Iran is trying to make certain he cannot. Netanyahu, on the other hand, clearly will not back down now that he’s gone this far in his lifelong quest to rid the world of his Iranian enemy. (Become a paying subscriber, and you won’t miss any of it.)
(Articles for the quotes above appear in boldface among the headlines below. You can also read about the latest oil surge taking diesel to a five-year high and why analysts are saying it is no temporary blip, the soaring 10YR yield, the Netherland’s big rush to move gold out of the US, and the rising likelihood of a major global dollar sell-off and how that would work.)
