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........