There is a specific kind of sentence that shows up right before mass killing, and it almost never changes. ‘They’re not even people.’ ‘They’re not worthy of life.’
Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, spoke a few of those sentences over the weekend.
Speaking on a new podcast hosted by Rom Braslavski, a former hostage held in Gaza for more than two years, Ben Gvir said he disagreed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to scale back strikes on the enclave.
His alternative, as reported by The Times of Israel, was a nightly quota: assassinations "taking down 30 to 40 every night."
Then he clarified who he meant. Not only people posing an immediate threat. There are people in Gaza, he told Braslavski, who are "not worthy of life.”
“They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people."
The Clarification
A call to kill combatants who pose an immediate threat is an argument about war. It can be wrong, disproportionate, illegal — but it's an argument inside the framework of legal warfare.
Ben-Gvir deliberately stepped outside that framework and said it out loud. He wasn't describing a target.
He was describing a category of human being that, in his view, has no business existing. A quota of 30 to 40 a night doesn't require intelligence, evidence, or imminence. It requires bodies.
Note also how The Times of Israel softened his words in its own summary — "apparently referring to Hamas operatives."
He said the opposite. He said not just those who pose a threat.
When a cabinet minister makes a genocidal statement about an entire population, a news outlet that inserts a more civilized summary of what he “must have meant” is not neutrality.
It's editing.
Where That Phrase Comes From
“That’s something a Nazi would say.” It turns out my immediate response to Ben-Gvir’s statement was not hyperbole.
The “Nazi” comparison isn’t just a loose association, either. “Life unworthy of life" — lebensunwertes Leben — is a phrase with a documented origin.
It entered German public life in a 1920 book by a jurist and a psychiatrist arguing that certain people could be killed for the good of everyone else.
That argument became the organizing concept of the Nazi T4 program, which murdered disabled children and adults in six killing centers.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum documents how that same designation later followed the SS east, into the shootings of institutionalized patients in Poland and the Soviet Union.
That is the phrase's lineage. Ben-Gvir didn’t stumble into a coincidence. He is a lifelong student of an ideology built on exactly this premise — that some populations aren’t worthy of life.
Who’s Saying it
Ben-Gvir is not a backbencher venting. He is a follower of Kahanism, the movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was banned in Israel and designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
He has been convicted eight times, including for incitement to racism and for supporting a terrorist organization.
He also runs things. As national security minister, he controls Israel's national police and its prison system, where thousands of Palestinians are held and where he has boasted of cutting food rations.
In May, Netanyahu publicly rebuked him after video circulated of his treatment of detained flotilla activists.
An Israeli human rights organization exposed Ben-Gvir’s policy of torture in the Israeli prison system he runs.
Palestinian prisoners, the majority held without charges, suffer violent sexual assault and torture. Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, documented testimony from prisoners who described their time in Israeli prisons as “living in hell.”
Nine governments have already decided Ben-Gvir is a problem. In June 2025, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom jointly sanctioned him with asset freezes and travel bans for inciting violence against Palestinians.
Slovenia, the Netherlands and Spain followed. This year, Ireland and France barred him outright.
The United States, meanwhile, called the sanctions unhelpful and asked allies to reverse them.
Incitement is Not a Figure of Speech
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, direct and public incitement to commit genocide is its own crime — separate from the killing, punishable whether or not anyone acts on it.
The reason is Nuremberg, and later Rwanda: prosecutors learned that the speech comes first, and that it is the thing that makes ordinary people willing. (Keep that in mind as members of the Trump administration continue to dehumanize immigrants in the U.S.)
In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and found that Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had incited it.
(Nir Hirshman (ניר הירשמן) CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Commission also said that it had not finished assessing statements by other Israeli political and military leaders, and that those statements should be examined too.
Ben-Gvir has not been formally assessed by the body. He just handed it a recording of his genocidal statements.
‘They’re Not Even People’ is Genocide
None of this is theoretical for the people it describes. More than 1,250 Palestinians have been killed since the October truce took effect, according to health officials in the territory — a truce that has functioned, for families there, as a slower rate of death rather than an end to it.
Netanyahu rejected a U.S.-backed peace plan last week. In the same interview, Ben-Gvir described wanting Israeli settlements across all of Gaza and mass Palestinian departure, a proposal international lawyers have repeatedly said could amount to ethnic cleansing.
Israel now controls almost 70% of the Gaza Strip. The goal is 100%. The Palestinians who survived the genocide are being forced into an area surrounded by IDF soldiers. No one is allowed to leave.
Israeli government officials have the nerve to call it a “humanitarian camp.”
And in perhaps the most revealing exchange, Braslavski asked to personally execute the man who held him. Ben-Gvir answered that he would turn the world upside down to make it happen.
Al Jazeera reported that Ben-Gvir called executing Palestinian prisoners one of his greatest dreams — from the man who runs the prisons.
Here is the lesson: Genocide doesn’t begin with a decision, it begins with a definition.
Someone in power draws a line around a group of people and announces, ‘They’re not even people.’ After that, killing is no longer killing, it's maintenance. 30 to 40 a night. A number, not a name.
FREE PALESTINE. 🇵🇸
