If Ben Gvir Doesn’t Represent Israel, Nobody Does

Let’s cut through the smoke. We have all seen the clips; an Israeli minister abusing European civilians on camera, a minister calling for a second Nakba, a Knesset member celebrating flattened homes, a soldier posing next to rubble where children used to live, a rabbi blessing rapists, a TV host laughing at starvation, a celebrity cheering for annihilation.

And every time, every single time, the apologists scramble with the same exhausted reflex: “They don’t represent Israel.”

Stop!

If the president doesn’t represent Israel. If the prime minister doesn’t. If the entire war cabinet, on camera, with microphones, in votes and speeches and tweets, doesn’t represent Israel. Then who does?

The “few bad apples” defense has a shelf life. It expires the moment the atrocities become systematic. The moment the genocidal rhetoric comes not from a fringe lunatic but from the Knesset floor and prime minister’s cabinet. The moment polls show the overwhelming majority of Israelis backing the very policies you’re pretending are the work of outliers.

Are they really that dumb? Or do they just think we are?

Here’s the game; they want you to believe in an imaginary Israel, a ghost country assembled in Brussels conference rooms and Harvard seminars and State Department briefings. A place populated by the same dozen liberal, English-fluent, “we want peace” Israelis who get rolled out every time a European government needs to feel noble about its photo op.

I know of a European government who invite members of Likud, actual sitting officials, to a conference. They were so vulgar, so savagely extreme, so openly racist.

One of them was in a panel on Israeli-Arab normalization. An Arab official said “how to you expect us to normalize with you, when your culture minister Miri Regev calls us, Arabs, a cancer?” The Likudnik Knesset member interjected and shouted with immense satisfaction “That is a lie! Miri Regev never called Arabs a cancer, she said it about the Africans, the black people.”

The hosts of that conference panicked. Their solution? Don’t invite Likudniks again. From then on, only the usual suspects, the “peace industry” crowd. They chose charm over truth, and accents over atrocities.

That’s the Israel want you to believe in, not the one on your screen, the one in their head.

An Israeli activist recently brought soldiers home from Gaza to Europe. Real soldiers, men who admitted to what they did; taking human shields, killing civilians at random, getting explicit orders to destroy everything. The activist’s goal was simple: let them speak, and let European leaders hear, firsthand, the atrocities committed with their weapons and funding.

Many of those European leaders refused to even meet the soldiers. Because why would you meet the actual perpetrators when you can meet another lovely, gentle, perfectly coiffed Israeli who will say “peace” three times and let you keep your illusions intact?

The human capacity for self-deception is bottomless, but don’t mistake it for stupidity. It’s not. It’s rather comfort. And they will sacrifice every Palestinian corpse on the altar of their own comfort before they admit that the monster wasn’t a few bad apples. It was the whole damn tree!