October 1995. A reporter holds a microphone toward a thin young man with a knitted skullcap and a grin he cannot suppress. In his hand he holds a chrome ornament, the kind that rides the hood of a luxury car. He has torn it from the Cadillac of the prime minister. He lifts it toward the lens the way a fisherman lifts a catch. “We got to his car,” says Itamar Ben-Gvir (b. 1976), “and we’ll get to him too.” Weeks later a law student shoots Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995) three times in the back at a peace rally and Rabin dies on the table at Ichilov Hospital. Ben-Gvir does not pull the trigger. He is nineteen and already a face the country knows, already a man who understands that a gesture, the right object held up at the right moment, can stand in for an act.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote that a man carries two terrors and spends his life answering them. The first terror is death, the plain animal fact that the body rots and the worms come. The second is worse. It is the terror of insignificance, of a life that counts for nothing, a span of years that the universe will not notice closing. In The Denial of Death Becker argues that culture exists to answer both at once. Culture hands a man a hero system, a scheme of value larger and more durable than his flesh, and tells him: earn your place here and you will not vanish. Build the cathedral, raise the sons, plant the flag on the ridge, write the book, hold the line, and some part of you outlasts the grave. The hero system is the immortality project. It lets a man feel that his days add up to something death cannot erase.
Becker’s harder claim sits underneath. The hero system needs an enemy. To feel clean a man needs someone unclean. To feel deathless he needs someone who carries death for him, a scapegoat onto whom he can load his own creatureliness and fear and then push out beyond the wall. Most of the evil men do, Becker thought, men do not from cruelty but from the hunger to feel heroic, to purchase their own significance with another man’s expulsion. The killing of the enemy buys life for the self. This is the engine Ben-Gvir rides, and he rides it in the open, on camera, with a flag in his hand.
Start with the wound, because every hero system grows from a subtraction.
The subtraction in Ben-Gvir’s world is Jewish death. Behind the settler’s pistol stands the pogrom, the cattle car, the pit at the edge of the village. A people came within a single generation of erasure and built a state on a vow, never again, and the vow is not rhetoric to the men who say it. Ben-Gvir tells the story of his own turn. He says he found God at twelve and found the cause at fourteen, radicalized, by his account, by the knife and the stone of the First Intifada. He joins the youth wing of Moledet, the party of Rehavam Ze’evi (1926-2001), whose name means homeland and whose program was the transfer of Arabs out of the land. By sixteen he has moved to the youth wing of Kach, the movement of Meir Kahane (1932-1990). “At the time,” he told Israeli television, “I was drawn to the idea that all Arabs should be expelled and that a fully Jewish state should be established here.” The subtraction comes first. The hero rises to answer it. He takes his future wife to the grave of Baruch Goldstein (1956-1994) on their first date. Goldstein walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994 and shot twenty-nine Muslims at prayer, and for years a portrait of the killer hung in Ben-Gvir’s home, until a campaign strategist told him to take it down.
Now the sacred words. A hero system runs on a handful of words it treats as holy, and the trap is to think the words mean one thing. They do not. The same word opens onto a different universe in each man’s mouth, and the meaning lives in the hero system, not the dictionary.
Take security. To a reinsurance actuary in Zurich, security means a number. He pools the world’s catastrophes, prices the tail risk, and sleeps because the spread holds. Death to him is a frequency on a table, and safety is the table balancing. To a Bedouin sheikh in the Negev, security means the feud and the tent. His clan’s known willingness to answer blood with blood keeps the raiders off, and the guest who eats his salt walks safe for three days under a law older than any state. To a Trappist monk at Vigils in the dark, security means surrender. He has handed his life to God and counts his own death a homecoming, so nothing the world does to his body can reach the part of him he has already given away. To Ben-Gvir, security wears a holster. It is the loaded pistol he wants on the hip of every settler, the armed neighborhood watch he stood up in the West Bank, the relaxed licensing that put thousands of new guns into Jewish hands after October 7. Security is the Arab prisoner held in conditions that human rights monitors call abuse and Ben-Gvir calls deterrence. Four men say security and mean four worlds. The actuary’s world has no enemy, only probability. The monk’s world has no wall, only God. Ben-Gvir’s world cannot exist without the man on the other side of the rifle, because the rifle is how his world keeps death at arm’s length.
Take honor, kavod, the word that may sit at the center of him. To a matador in Seville, honor is grace in the half second before the horn, the refusal to flinch when flinching is the body’s whole demand. To a Boston Brahmin of the old kind, honor is restraint, the understatement that needs no audience, the name you do not have to defend because you never raise your voice. To a Pashtun elder, honor is nang and badal, the shelter you owe the stranger and the debt you owe the man who wronged your house, both absolute. To Ben-Gvir, kavod is the Jew who will not kneel again. In May 2026 his men intercept a flotilla bound for Gaza and he films himself standing over activists bound and kneeling on the deck, taunting them, and posts it. The whole world reads humiliation and condemns. France bars him. Ireland bars him. Poland bars him. His own prime minister calls the conduct out of line with the nation’s values. Ben-Gvir reads the same footage as restored honor, the bound enemy proof that the Jew now stands and the other man kneels, the historical photograph reversed at last. The matador’s honor needs no victim, only the bull and his own nerve. The Brahmin’s honor dies the moment it seeks a crowd. Ben-Gvir’s kavod requires the kneeling man and the running camera, because his honor lives by the visible reversal of an old shame.
Take home. To a Maori carver, home is the marae and the ancestors carved into its posts, the dead present in the wood and the living seated among them. To a Palestinian farmer in a refugee camp, home is a rusted key and a deed to a house behind a wall he cannot cross, a rooted claim to the same soil Ben-Gvir calls his birthright. To Ben-Gvir, home is Kiryat Arba above Hebron, the settlement on the hill, the Temple Mount where he ascends as a minister of state and reads the standing prayer while police look on, where he lifts the flag and calls out that the Mount is in our hands. Two men claim one ground, and each man’s home is built on the other man’s exile. Becker would say this is no accident of the conflict. It is the form the immortality project takes when two hero systems plant their roots in a single field. The land outlasts the body. To own it is to live forever. To share it is to die.
How much of this does Ben-Gvir see?
He sees the camera. He has always seen the camera. The boy with the hood ornament knew the frame. The man who took down the Goldstein portrait on a strategist’s word knew the optics, kept the prophet Kahane and discarded the embarrassing martyr, curated the shrine. He qualified as a lawyer over the Bar’s objection and built a practice defending settlers and hardliners, and a lawyer learns to manage a record. So at the level of image the self-awareness runs high. He knows what he is selling and to whom.
At the level Becker cared about, the awareness goes dark. Ben-Gvir presents his project as plain reality, the world as it is, the Arab as threat and the gun as answer and the Mount as simple fact. He does not appear to see his hero system as a hero system, a construction that buys his significance with another people’s expulsion. He takes the construction for the ground. That is the deepest move in Becker, the refusal to know that the thing one calls reality is the thing one built to keep from knowing one will die. The man surrounded by guards lives inside the proof. A Hamas-funded cell in Hebron planned in 2025 to kill him with an explosive drone at the Cave of the Patriarchs. He moves through the world walled in security details, ringed by the death he has spent his life trying to load onto the other man and push past the fence. The terror did not leave. It moved in next door.
Three coordinates to close on.
The shape of the hero. He is the watchman at the gate who turned victim into sentry, the boy who held a torn ornament toward a camera now holding the police and the prisons of a state. He stands for the Jew who answers annihilation by becoming the one who frightens, who looks at two thousand years of his people kneeling and decides the cure is to make another man kneel and to film it. He is sincere. The terror behind him is real. The state he serves rose from a near-extinction that no honest man can wave away.
The unnamed rival. The Palestinian gets named in every speech, the enemy across the rifle, the necessary other. The rival who goes unnamed is the Jew who answers the same terror by the opposite road, the Jew of the book without the sword, the one who holds that survival lies in not becoming the thing that hunted him, that a people who came through the pit forfeit something past pricing the day they put a bound man on his knees and laugh for the lens. Kahane despised that Jew. In Beit Shemesh in 2025 anti-Zionist Haredim of Neturei Karta, Torah Jews who hold his whole project a desecration of the Name, set upon Ben-Gvir and his wife in the street. Ben-Gvir never names this rival as a rival, because to name him is to admit that the armed road was a choice among roads, and a chosen thing can be questioned, and a questioned thing loses the weight of the inevitable.
The cost the ledger cannot price. The death-penalty law passed in March 2026, hanging for Palestinians convicted of terror in the military courts, and Ben-Gvir called it a day of justice for the victims and deterrence for the enemy. The ledger he keeps records deterrence, control of the police, guns issued, prisoners held. It cannot record the thing Becker put at the bottom of the page. The immortality a man buys with another man’s death is counterfeit. The gun does not abolish the grave. The wall does not. The watchman dies too, and dies sooner for the enemies he makes, and the children on both sides of his wall inherit the terror entire, handed down with the key and the deed and the flag, undiminished, waiting for the next man who will mistake the answer to death for life.
