Ben Gvir meets 4 GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, making inroads in US politics
Legislators, including chair of key House panel, meet far-right minister whom Biden considered sanctioning; ‘I think they really liked what they heard,’ Ben Gvir says after meeting
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told The Times of Israel that he met on Monday with four Republican US lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including one who heads the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The meetings indicated that the far-right Israeli lawmaker, whom former US president Joe Biden’s administration considered sanctioning last year, is making inroads in American politics — at least on the Republican side of the aisle.
Rep. Brian Mast was the most senior lawmaker to meet with Ben Gvir. Mast is a major backer of Israel’s settlement movement who directs staff on the Foreign Affairs Committee to refer to the West Bank only by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria. Ben Gvir is a resident of the Kiryat Arba settlement outside of Hebron.
The minister held meetings with two of the more conservative members of the Republican caucus in Reps. Jim Jordan and Claudia Tenney, but he also sat down with the more moderate Rep. Mike Lawler.
Mast, Lawler, Jordan and Tenney were among the first US lawmakers to ever meet with Ben Gvir, joining House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who sat with the national security minister at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last week.
Ben Gvir said he didn’t come to the Hill with a particular agenda, other than to give those who agreed an opportunity to get to know him.
He said the US lawmakers he met expressed their full-throated support for Israel and its war against Hamas. They didn’t try and urge him to change Israeli policy either.
Some of the Republican lawmakers also updated him on their efforts to crack down on the finances of pro-Palestinian groups in the US, he said.
“I didn’t ask them afterward whether they’ll vote for Ben Gvir, but they wanted to get to know me and I think they really liked what they heard,” he noted.
Ben Gvir did not hold any meetings with members of US President Donald Trump’s administration during his weeklong trip, though he insists that was never part of the plan. There had been reports of a potential meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, but that sit-down never materialized.
Like at other points throughout his trip to the US, Ben Gvir faced a handful of far-left protesters who heckled him in the halls of the Congressional office building. The national security minister was filmed shouting back at one of the activists, saying: “You kill babies.”
Also on Monday, Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Jewish Democrat introduced legislation — pegged to coincide with Ben Gvir’s visit — that seeks to codify Biden’s sanctions regime against violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
The sanctions were reversed by Trump on his first day in office, and the legislation is almost certain to fail, given the Republican majority in Congress.
WATCH: Along with other protesters, Medea confronted Israeli war criminal Itamar Ben-Gvir today at the U.S. Capitol and he completely lost it.
Ben-Gvir, Israel’s so-called “Minister of National Security,” has openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and directs the bombing… pic.twitter.com/7oqXpp3ICr
— CODEPINK (@codepink) April 28, 2025
“Violence in the West Bank has reached a fever pitch, and Itamar Ben-Gvir serves as inciter-in-chief of some of the deadliest settler violence,” said Nadler in a statement.
“We must be crystal clear about who Itamar Ben-Gvir is: he is a racist, terrorist, Jewish supremacist. This legislation sends a message: Ben-Gvir’s incitement is not welcome in our communities and in the United States,” he added.
Monday was Ben Gvir’s only day in DC and the last day of his trip to the US, which saw stops in Florida, New Haven and New York.
He met with largely Orthodox Jewish community leaders, college students, Israeli businessmen and local law enforcement officials.
Ben Gvir used the trip to express his support for Trump’s plan to take over Gaza and move interested Palestinians elsewhere, maintaining that it is consistent with his long-held call for Israel to encourage Palestinians to leave the Strip. Critics have characterized the initiative as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, particularly when the mass population transfer is pushed in the middle of a war.
The national security minister also highlighted in meetings his efforts to worsen the conditions of Palestinian security prisoners and allow Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in defiance of an unwritten status quo that governs the flashpoint Jerusalem holy site.
The Times of Israel Community.