Ben-Gvir

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister and head of the extremist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, traveled up and down Israel distributing assault rifles (including MZ-4s) to Jewish-Israeli citizens in the weeks following Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7. It was a significant escalation in Ben-Gvir’s ongoing efforts to arm Jewish Israelis and, using these events as photo ops, the far-right lawmaker was greeted with great fanfare by the recipients — new civilian guards, intended to become ​“rapid response” groups. These civilian-arming events irked the U.S. government— which has been providing additional arms to the Israeli military since the outbreak of the war — and led to a threat from the Biden administration that the United States would stop sending guns.