1. He’s a follower of the notorious Rabbi Meir Kahane, a violent Jewish supremacist whose militant Jewish Defense League, Kach political party, and offshoots were classified terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
- Ben-Gvir is an acolyte of Meir Kahane, an American-born extremist rabbi who preached violence and called for the enslavement or expulsion of all Palestinians from Palestine/Israel, introducing legislation to that effect as a member of Israel’s Knesset (parliament) in the 1980s.
- Members of Kahane’s Jewish Defense League (JDL) and Kach political party carried out scores of terrorist attacks starting in the 1970s, killing dozens of Palestinians and Americans and injuring many others. The U.S. State Department labelled Kach and other Kahanist groups terrorist organizations after one of his followers massacred 29 Palestinians as they prayed in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994.
- Ben-Gvir has carried on Kahane’s extremist legacy, frequently praising him over the years, inciting racism and violence against Palestinians as leader of the Kahanist Jewish Power party, while rising to one of the most powerful positions in Israel’s government as minister of national security.
2. As national security minister, he’s in charge of Israel’s police and prison system, which rights groups have condemned as a network of “torture camps” for Palestinians.
- Human rights groups, UN experts, and journalists have documented the widespread, systematic torture of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, most of whom have not been charged or convicted of anything, including doctors and other civilians. This torture includes beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and denial of medical care, causing numerous deaths and amputations.
- Ben-Gvir has boasted of the harsh conditions he’s inflicted on Palestinians and others imprisoned by Israel, posting videos on social media showing him threatening and abusing Palestinians and foreign human rights activists.
- At least 98 Palestinians are known to have died in Israeli custody since October 2023 under Ben-Gvir’s watch.
3. He spearheaded Israel’s racist new death penalty law that only applies to Palestinians.
- Ben-Gvir was the driving force behind the draconian death penalty law passed by the Knesset in March 2026, which has been condemned by the UN and rights groups as racist and one of the “most extreme” death penalty laws in the world.
4. He wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians out of all of historic Palestine.
- For years, Ben-Gvir has been calling for Palestinians to be expelled from Israel, the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and wants to establish a “migration ministry” to deal with indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel he deems “disloyal.”
- Since October 2023, he has repeatedly called for Israel to “encourage” the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians out of Gaza, which Israel has been systematically destroying as part of its ongoing genocide, to render it unlivable so Palestinians have no choice but to leave or die.
5. The UK, Canada, Norway, Australia and New Zealand imposed sanctions and barred him from entering their countries for inciting violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians.
- In June 2025, the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Australia and New Zealand imposed a travel ban and economic sanctions on Ben-Gvir and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities” in the West Bank, adding: “Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights.”
6. He’s pushing to impose full Israeli control over the venerated Noble Sanctuary Mosque complex in East Jerusalem, threatening to ignite a major religious conflagration.
- Ben-Gvir wants Israel to take complete control of the Noble Sanctuary Mosque complex, known as the Temple Mount to Jews, in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem, making frequent provocative visits to assert domination over the third holiest site in Islam and one of the most sensitive holy sites in the world.
- For decades, messianic Jewish extremists have been working to take over the 1,300-year-old Noble Sanctuary, destroy the iconic Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock shrine it contains, and replace them with a Jewish temple on the spot two ancient Jewish temples are believed to have stood.
- As national security minister, Ben-Gvir has changed the decades-long “Status Quo” in which only Muslims were allowed to pray inside the Noble Sanctuary, while below the Noble Sanctuary only Jews are allowed to pray at the adjoining Wailing Wall. Cloaking his agenda in terms of religious freedom, Ben-Gvir’s police now allow Jews to pray openly in the Noble Sanctuary as a step towards making it an exclusively Jewish site.
7. He’s a settler living illegally on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank.
- Ben-Gvir lives in Kiryat Arba, one of the most extreme Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which was built on occupied Palestinian land outside the city of Hebron in violation of international law and official U.S. policy going back decades.
8. He was convicted multiple times of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism against Palestinians.
- A notorious far-right activist in Israel going back decades, Ben-Gvir was criminally charged 46 times, and convicted eight times, including for rioting, supporting a terrorist organization, and incitement to racism for promoting Kahane’s ideology.
9. Before entering politics he worked as a lawyer representing Israelis accused and convicted of acts of violence against Palestinians and left-wing Israelis.
- For years Ben-Gvir worked as a lawyer with a far-right group called Honenu, defending Jewish extremists who were accused or convicted of violent attacks, including murder, against Palestinians and liberal Israelis.
- His clients included an Israeli settler who was convicted of murdering three members of the Dawabsheh family, including a mother, father, and their 18- month-old son, in an arson attack on their home in the West Bank in 2015.
10. He had a framed photo of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein hanging in a place of honor in his office.
- For decades, Ben-Gvir had a framed photo of fellow Kahane disciple Baruch Goldstein, the U.S.-born settler who gunned down 29 Palestinians as they prayed in Hebron in 1994, hanging in a place of honor in his office. In 2020, under pressure, he took the photo down as part of an effort to appear more moderate and form an alliance with other right-wing parties while running for the Knesset.
Go deeper
- Fact Sheet: Meir Kahane & The Extremist Kahanist Movement
- Explainer: The Temple Mount Movement
- 5 Questions for an Expert: Israel’s New Death Penalty Law