The Master Is Here. He Must Be Punished.

On Wednesday morning, Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video on his social media account. In it he walks among dozens of activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla — humanitarian aid workers who had attempted to deliver food and medicine to Gaza — kneeling on the ground at Ashdod Port, blindfolded, hands bound behind their backs. Israel's national anthem plays over a loudspeaker. Ben-Gvir waves a large Israeli flag above them and shouts in Hebrew: 'Welcome to Israel. We are the masters here.' He then approaches a bound woman who attempts to speak and shouts 'Am Yisrael Chai' directly at her face.

He filmed it himself. He posted it himself. He waited for the responses.

They came.

Germany's ambassador called it wholly unacceptable and incompatible with the basic values of our countries. Britain's Foreign Minister said she was truly appalled. France, Italy, the Netherlands and Canada summoned Israeli ambassadors. The UN Human Rights Council convened an emergency session. Netanyahu criticised the optics. Israel's own foreign minister called it out.

Then Washington spoke.

The White House and State Department issued no immediate statement. The response, when it came, was left to Mike Huckabee — the US Ambassador to Israel — who posted on social media that Ben-Gvir had 'betrayed the dignity of his nation.' That condemnation arrived one day after the United States Department of the Treasury had sanctioned the flotilla organisers themselves — the people Ben-Gvir was filmed taunting while they knelt blindfolded on the ground. Washington sanctioned the victims. Then it condemned the man who filmed himself humiliating them. This is not contradiction. This is policy.

The world that expressed outrage on Wednesday already knew what Ben-Gvir had been doing for three and a half years. The documentation exists in primary reports from institutions whose credibility is beyond question.

B'Tselem's January 2026 report, Living Hell, documents a prison system under Ben-Gvir's direct oversight in which approximately 9,200 Palestinians are held — including 350 children — in conditions the organisation describes as torture camps. Based on 21 testimonies from Palestinians released under the October 2025 prisoner exchange, the report describes not individual failures but institutional policy, designed from above and implemented systematically.

The UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese submitted her report — Torture and Genocide — to the Human Rights Council in March 2026, drawing on more than 300 testimonies. She found that Israel's detention system has 'degenerated into a laboratory of calculated cruelty.' She named Ben-Gvir specifically as having advanced a deliberate 'prison revolution' designed to institutionalise degradation. 'What once operated in the shadows,' she wrote, 'is now practised openly — a regime of organised humiliation, pain and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels.'

What that regime involves, documented in her report and corroborated by multiple independent human rights organisations, includes the following. Starvation — the deliberate reduction of food and water as policy. Denial of medical treatment, leading to the deaths of nearly 100 detainees in custody. Removal of access to lawyers and the Red Cross. Beatings, breaking of bones and teeth, burning. Sexual violence — rape with bottles, metal rods and knives. Detainees being spat upon, urinated upon and attacked by trained dogs. Detainees photographed and filmed naked in humiliating positions. More than 18,500 Palestinians detained since October 2023, including at least 1,500 children. Thousands without charge or trial. Many forcibly disappeared.

Ben-Gvir's response to this documentation has been consistent. He brags about it. He invites Israeli media into the facilities for what his office calls 'rare glimpses' — television pieces that put the abuse on display with the minister's full participation. He posts videos. He films himself stomping on prisoners during raids. The documentation of his conduct exists not because journalists uncovered it but because he produced and distributed it himself, for a domestic audience meant to feel pride rather than shame.

This is the correct moment to place Ben-Gvir's conduct within the history it belongs to.

Two men from the Nazi regime are relevant here. They were convicted for different categories of crime. Ben-Gvir commits both.

Julius Streicher was not a general. He did not command troops, design concentration camps or order deportations. He was a politician and publisher of Der Stürmer — a newspaper built on the deliberate public degradation of Jews for mass nationalist consumption. For twenty-five years, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of antisemitism and incited the German people to active persecution, as the Nuremberg tribunal stated in its judgment. The International Military Tribunal convicted him not of ordering deaths but of crimes against humanity — specifically for making the humiliation of a people into spectacle, for producing the degraded image of the other that nationalist pride required, for building the psychological infrastructure that made persecution feel righteous to those who watched. He was hanged for the newspaper. For the spectacle of dehumanisation produced and distributed for a domestic audience that was meant to feel power rather than shame.

Streicher was convicted for what he did to Jews. The state built in the name of those Jews now employs a minister doing the same thing to Palestinians.

Oswald Pohl was the head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office — the organisation responsible for the administration of the Nazi concentration camp system. He was not convicted for ordering individual killings. He was convicted for designing and running the administrative machinery of deliberate starvation, medical neglect, forced labour and systematic abuse that produced mass death as a consequence of institutional policy rather than explicit order. The Nuremberg tribunal found that the natural death rate in camps under his administration averaged nearly 10 per cent per month in the latter half of 1942 — deaths produced not by gas chambers alone but by the deliberate withholding of adequate food, medical care and humane conditions as a matter of administrative design. He was hanged in 1951 for what his office administered.

Ben-Gvir is the National Security Minister of Israel. He oversees the Israel Prison Service. Under his administration, nearly 100 Palestinian detainees have died in custody. The UN Special Rapporteur has documented starvation, denial of medical treatment, sexual violence and deaths as the product of deliberate institutional policy — not individual failure. A February 2024 report from Physicians for Human Rights concluded that the various prohibited measures utilised across the entire prison system indicate that the prisons are not acting independently but rather in accordance with directives from above.

Streicher was hanged for the spectacle. Pohl was hanged for the administration.

Ben-Gvir is both.

He films the spectacle himself and posts it for nationalist consumption. He administers the system that produces starvation, sexual violence and deaths in custody as institutional policy. He is not a bystander to these crimes. He is their architect and their publicist simultaneously.

The UN Special Rapporteur has called on the ICC Prosecutor to investigate and pursue arrest warrants for Ben-Gvir specifically. The court has the documentation. It has the testimonies. It has the reports. It has the videos Ben-Gvir made and posted himself.

What it does not have is the political support of the powers whose approval it requires to function. The United States has spent three years vetoing every UN resolution that would have created accountability for the conduct documented above. Washington funds the government that employs Ben-Gvir. Washington arms the military that detains the children. Washington sanctions the people trying to deliver food to those children. Washington then posts on social media that Ben-Gvir has betrayed the dignity of his nation.

The Nuremberg promise was never meant to be universal. It was announced by four victorious powers who were simultaneously conducting colonial violence across Asia, Africa and the Middle East that would never face a tribunal. The court was built to prosecute the defeated. It was never designed to reach the allied. It has not changed.

Ben-Gvir is not a surprise. He is a destination. The destination of a system that promised universal justice and delivered selective justice, that built a court to prosecute the spectacle of dehumanisation and funds the government of the man producing it, that hanged Streicher for the newspaper and Pohl for the administration and writes cheques to the state of the man who is both.

Itamar Ben-Gvir should be in a dock at The Hague. The documentation exists. The testimonies exist. The legal precedent exists — Nuremberg established it specifically for this category of conduct. The videos exist — he made them himself.

What does not exist is the political will of the states powerful enough to put him there.

The master is in his cabinet. The court is in The Hague. The United States is writing the cheques. The distance between those three facts is the measure of everything the Nuremberg promise was always worth.

The Nuremberg Files is DiploPolis's ongoing investigation into the promise of universal accountability — what it meant, what it became and what its failure costs the world.

Previous in the series: The Nuremberg Paradox — The court that cannot collect. The promise that was never universal. The architecture of selective justice.