The minister proposed the idea during a security cabinet meeting on Tuesday, where officials supported expanding the assault in Lebanon.
“Let’s start thinking outside the box about Hezbollah,” Ben Gvir said.
“Conquering territory and killing many terrorists, but also detaining their women and youth and taking them to terrorist prisons,” he added.
“That’s what hurts them the most.”
I’m not an expert, so take all this with a grain of salt.
The problem with Israel and the region in general is that the normal-ish people are drowned out by the radicalised folks pointing to people like Ben Gvir on the other side and saying “if we try to normalise with them, this will happen. Do you want to negotiate with these monsters?” And repeat ad nauseum.
Ben Gvir himself is a Mizrahim (the Jews from the Middle Eastern diaspora instead of European), and while I can’t say about his family specifically, IIRC many Mizrahim tend to be more right-wing than the average populace because they’re the ones with more direct conflict and memory of being kicked out of their homes by Middle Eastern countries after the formation of Israel. To some, Israel was the only place they could go after they were kicked out because of being Jews. (You could argue that Israel’s actions led to the people being kicked out and the rise in antisemitism, but they could then argue the Holocaust was clear justification, or that it proved that Jews needed a state, or whatever. I’m not trying to state definitively who’s at fault or who’s in the right here.) It’s basically a siege mentality applied to an entire country after nearly a century of war for existence and due to a shared cultural memory of the Holocaust and other persecution that has convinced many of them that the only way to get “what they deserve” (whatever that may entail) is through beating their neighbours into submission — an attitude which has been part of Israeli politics since before Israel existed as a modern state with the Iron Wall essay by Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
And obviously the same applies on the other side, which is why we have groups like Hamas, which grew from dissent over Arafat and the PLO’s more peaceful approach towards finding a resolution to the region during the First Intifada and Oslo. Meanwhile, on the Israeli side, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin got shot by the Israeli far-right for trying to make a peace happen. So neither side can really work towards peace because the ones who try are shut down by volume and by force.
The same thing kinda happened in Hong Kong, where I’m actually from. From the government’s perspective, the protests and demands for democracy never ended, so they decided the only way to crush them was by force, hence the crackdown in 2020 and onwards. From the pro-democratic folks’ perspective, the government never gave anything even when the more pacifist, negotiable side tried, so out came the localists (who saw Hong Kong more as a distinct and even independent unit from China and wanted to make it so, as opposed to the previous democratic activists who, in my opinion rightly, believed that democracy in Hong Kong could not happen without simultaneously obtaining democracy in China for our brethren), and the radicals (who wanted to tear and burn things down so that the government was forced to listen for economic and PR reasons), and the moderate voices were quieted. Both sides saw the other as unnegotiable (Israel sometimes throws around the phrase “no partner for peace”), so they decided the only solution was to force the matter, which then spirals until… well, whichever has more force wins.