Dangerous Liaison

BEZALEL SMOTRICH IS BANNED from entering Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Norway. The governments of the five countries issued a joint statement, on 10 June 2025, announcing sanctions against the Israeli finance minister—as well as against the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir—“for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank” through “extremist rhetoric which calls for Palestinians to be driven from their homes, encourages violence and human rights abuses and fundamentally rejects the two-state solution.” Slovenia, Spain and the Netherlands followed suit, with the Dutch government recording the ban in the Schengen Information System, obliging all 29 member states of Europe’s open-borders Schengen Area to enforce it. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, was reportedly planning to request arrest warrants against both men when he was sent on administrative leave, in May, over alleged sexual misconduct.

Smotrich is a co-founder of Regavim, an organisation that, over the past two decades, has lobbied successive Israeli governments and the courts to accelerate the construction of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to win a majority in the 2022 general election, he made coalition pacts with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. In addition to the finance ministry, Smotrich was given control over the military administration in the West Bank. Since then, several Regavim members have been placed in positions of power, many of its recommendations have become government policy, and settlements have grown at an unprecedented rate.

In March 2023, while speaking at a memorial service in Paris, Smotrich stood behind a flag of “Greater Israel” and declared, “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language.” He made a similar claim on the floor of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in July 2024. Four months later, during a meeting of his party at the Knesset, he said that he had directed the military administration “to prepare the necessary infrastructure” for the annexation of the West Bank. In December 2025, his finance ministry earmarked an unprecedented $843 million to be spent over the next five years to expand settlements, build roads, formalise land records and strengthen the military presence in the territory—which one Israeli newspaper described as a “de facto annexation.”

A second-generation settler in the West Bank, Smotrich had briefly been jailed, in 2006, for violently protesting Israel’s decision to formally withdraw from Gaza while retaining control over the territory’s borders, airspace and supplies of food and water. When militants affiliated to Hamas and other groups broke through the Israeli siege and killed nearly twelve hundred people, on 7 October 2023, he told the Israeli cabinet, “We need to deal a blow that hasn’t been seen in fifty years and take down Gaza.” The Israeli response has killed over seventy thousand Palestinians, according to the health ministry of Gaza—although the actual death toll is much higher, once the associated famine and spread of diseases, as well as those buried under the rubble, are taken into account. Smotrich has described the starvation of 2 million Palestinians as “justified and moral,” and the destruction of Gaza as the “demolition phase” before a “real-estate bonanza.” He bitterly opposed the ceasefire agreement imposed by US President Donald Trump, in October 2025, even though it heavily favours Israel, but did not follow through on his threats to bring down the Netanyahu government for accepting it. Israel has violated the terms of the ceasefire more than a thousand times in the three months since it was signed, killing hundreds of people and destroying almost three thousand buildings.