By Atilio A. Boron on August 31, 2026
Ben Gvir, foto: EFE
Few people in the world have done more to discredit the State of Israel and fan the flames of anti-Semitism than Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir. Of course, he is not alone in this endeavor. His words resonate loudly over the corpses of more than 70,000 Palestinian victims—mostly women and children—caused by the policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land theft carried out by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. In this tragic endeavor, it must be said, the genocidal regime counts on military, financial, and propaganda support from the U.S. government and those of the European Union, with a few honorable exceptions.
Without these specific crimes, broadcast urbi et orbi in real time, the words of that despicable individual would not have the impact they have achieved. These are horrendous statements made by a human scum, a bloodthirsty hyena; a psychopath consumed by hatred and sadism who, day after day, shocks global public opinion with statements that reveal rabid anti-Arab sentiment and boundless cruelty toward everything Palestinian: its people, its lands, its food, its plants—everything. A figure who embodies the racism of the Nazis who persecuted the Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s—those who took pleasure in the suffering inflicted on the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and later in the “Final Solution” carried out in the extermination camps. In a word,he shares the monstrous moral stance of the architects of the Holocaust.
Ben Gvir belongs to that infamous lineage, to that rot at the heart of civilization, and as such, his words are a spit in the face of Judaism’s great humanist tradition. It is an affront to the legacy of Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Karl Marx, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Max Horkheimer, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Isaiah Berlin, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Noam Chomsky, and, among us, León Dujovne, León Rozitchner, Marie Langer, Arnaldo Rascovsky, Gregorio Klimovsky, Rodolfo Mondolfo, Oscar Varsavsky, César Milstein, Daniel Barenboim, Beinusz Szmukler, and so many others who, in Argentina—often at the cost of imprisonment or exile—spread the emancipatory ideas of the humanist tradition trampled upon by a being as despicable as Ben Gvir.
With his hate-filled words, this vile character provides ample ammunition to anti-Semites of all stripes, for whom the Israeli minister’s words are music to their ears. And, as we noted above, to large segments of global public opinion, in whose eyes Israel’s image has been suffering a marked decline in prestige. The Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., published the results of its global survey a couple of months ago; one of the questions asked was about respondents’ opinions on Israel. Reversing the situation that had long prevailed in the past, the results indicate that across the 36 countries in the study, “an average of 67 percent of adults hold an unfavorable view of Israel, while 25 percent hold a favorable view.”
Sinister figures like Ben Gvir and Netanyahu bear the burden of the State of Israel’s growing disrepute and the spread of the virus of anti-Semitism. Let the genocide against the Palestinian people and the theft of their lands come to an end, and let the hate speech—such as that spewed by Ben Gvir through his words and by Netanyahu through his actions—also cease! And may the international community, once and for all, raise its voice and take effective measures to stop all forms of genocide: that practiced by the Israeli regime in the Middle East, and that carried out by the United States—not with bullets, but with brutal lethality—when its intensified blockade seriously endangers the lives of thousands upon thousands of Cubans.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English