Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s firebrand national security minister, was in Washington on Monday to promote President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza — and, in particular, to try to garner support for moving Arabs out of the embattled enclave. But while Ben-Gvir has branded himself a loyal soldier for Trump’s message, the far-right politician has yet to receive an invitation to discuss the matter with anyone in the Trump administration.

“We did not meet with anybody from the Trump administration. That wasn’t the main goal,” Ben-Gvir told Jewish Insider in an interview on Monday on Capitol Hill. He spoke through his translator and advisor, Yishai Fleisher, the English-language spokesperson for the West Bank Jewish community of Hebron, where Ben-Gvir lives. 

The controversial minister feels confident that a meeting with the Trump administration will come in due time: “I’m young. I’m 49. [It was] only three years ago that I went into politics. We’ll meet with everybody along the way,” Ben-Gvir said. “I feel an embrace from the administration.” A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did he meet with his counterpart in Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was in Texas on Monday. 

The weeklong visit to the United States was Ben-Gvir’s first since becoming Israel’s national security minister in 2022, when his Jewish Power party helped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu form a governing coalition. 

Ben-Gvir has long faced criticism over his embrace of Israeli extremists, including a decades-long record of support for Meir Kahane, an Israeli ultranationalist political leader whose party, Kach, was deemed a foreign terrorist organization by the United States and banned in Israel. Ben-Gvir has been convicted in Israel of inciting racism and supporting a terror group, and he used to keep a framed photograph of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, in his home. Ben-Gvir’s attendance at a memorial event for Kahane in 2022 drew sharp condemnation from the Biden administration. 

“We’re not sure that the Biden administration would’ve given [me] a visa to come in,” said Ben-Gvir. “And I feel like the [Trump] administration is receptive.” 

While he did not succeed in reaching the White House, the minister had better luck in scoring meetings with congressional Republicans, including some in leadership positions. Ben-Gvir met Monday with Reps. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mike Lawler (R-NY), as well as Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ben-Gvir traveled to Mar-a-Lago last week to meet with House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), the third-most powerful House Republican, and Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA). 

“I am asking them to push from this side the Trump plan for Gaza. It’s moral, it’s logical, it’s the right thing to do,” said Ben-Gvir. “Our enemies in Gaza are not waiting. They did the 7th of October. And they want to strike us and kill us. The proper solution is voluntary immigration out of Gaza.” 

Ben-Gvir said he supports only “voluntary” migration from Gaza, which he has framed as a shift from his earlier support for removing all Arabs not just from Gaza, but from within Israel as well. While Ben-Gvir spent the trip saying he has softened or grown out of some of his past positions, like his support for Goldstein, he generally avoided specifying why or how he has changed his mind. 

Although Ben-Gvir casts himself as closely aligned with Trump, he has diverged from one major aspect of Trump’s approach to Gaza: Trump has said he does not want to see the rebuilding of Jewish settlements in Gaza, a policy that Ben-Gvir supports. When asked whether he agrees with this aspect of Trump’s plan, Ben-Gvir suggested the matter was not yet closed. “We’ll find an understanding. We love Trump,” he said. 

Before coming to Washington, Ben-Gvir visited Jewish communities and police departments in South Florida and New York, speaking mainly with Orthodox communities. He visited synagogues in South Florida and in the Five Towns, a heavily Jewish part of Long Island, where he spent Shabbat. 

Many of his meetings were met with protests, including during a visit to a Jewish society affiliated with Yale, where protesters hurled water bottles at him. When Ben-Gvir visited the global headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch in Brooklyn on Thursday, hundreds of protesters — those opposed to Ben-Gvir as well as Hasidic counterprotesters — gathered outside, in an incident that turned violent. A group of the pro-Israel demonstrators allegedly assaulted a woman.

Footage of the incident shows a large group of men surrounding the woman, who was escorted by a police officer, chanting “death to Arabs;” one protestor can be seen throwing an orange cone at her and another appeared to kick or shove her. 

Ben-Gvir declined to weigh in on the violence among the pro-Israel supporters. He said he was not familiar with the incident but was generally skeptical of claims of Jewish violence, noting instead that his greater concern is violence against Jews.

“The same violent folks of Yale, they have followed us throughout this tour. They tried to strike at Chabad Hasidim,” Ben-Gvir said. “They came to be violent. And I’m thankful that the Chabad community welcomed us in. There were thousands of supporters.”

It’s the “classic trope that Jews are violent, that the settlers are violent,” said Ben-Gvir.

“You saw on the 7th of October. It came from one side onto the other side,” Ben-Gvir said. “Those that murdered and did all that bad stuff, they don’t just want to murder me. And not just Israel. They were in the 9/11. They want to strike at America. They want to strike you. We cannot be naive.” 

He dismissed a question about whether it is possible for Jewish protesters to at times adopt violent tactics as well. 

“Right now it’s my children that I have to drive and defend in armored vehicles, and we’re the ones who receive the stones, and apartheid is against the Jews, and Jews cannot live in all of Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the biblical name of the West Bank. “Let’s keep it in proportion.” 

Ben-Gvir’s claim of “apartheid against Jews” has drawn fire in the past, with critics pointing out the restrictions faced by Palestinians living in the West Bank, and specifically in Hebron, where Ben-Gvir lives.

After concluding his meeting with Tenney on Monday, Ben-Gvir walked into the corridors of the Rayburn House Office Building, where he came face-to-face with activists who were on Capitol Hill for National Muslim Advocacy Day. They began shouting at him — and Ben-Gvir’s staff started filming, familiar with the kind of confrontational encounter the media-savvy minister has grown used to over the years. 

“You Zionist monster. You scum. You killed my family in Gaza for 70 years,” one man, wrapped in a keffiyeh, shouted at Ben-Gvir. He yelled back: “You’re a terrorist. You kill our children.”

More people gathered in the otherwise quiet hallway. “Free, free Palestine,” the demonstrators shouted. Ben-Gvir was ushered by his staff and his private security guards into an elevator, but he was not yet ready to end the confrontation.

“You’re jihadists,” he yelled from the doorway of the elevator, wagging his finger as the doors closed.