NEW YORK (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman) There is no question that Ben Gvir’s actions recently were ill-advised.  He transformed a story about Israel lawfully enforcing a legal blockade into a story about an Israeli minister humiliating prisoners on camera. The harm to Israel’s standing was real, the cost to the hostage families’ diplomatic efforts was real, and the discomfort felt by Jews around the world watching the video was real.

And yet.

To stop the analysis there is to fail the moment. Because while the conduct deserves criticism, the anger behind it deserves to be understood. And too few commentators — including many within the Orthodox world — have been willing to sit with that distinction.

Who Was on Those Boats

The Global Sumud Flotilla was not, despite the framing in much of the European press, a convoy of “innocent humanitarians” caught in a misunderstanding.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned four of its organizers — Saif Abukeshek, Hisham Abu Mahfuz, Mohammed Khatib, and Jaldia Abubakra Aueda — for their roles in what Treasury called a “pro-Hamas flotilla” operating as part of Hamas’s global financial support network.

The flotilla was organized by the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad, an entity the U.S. designated and sanctioned back in January 2026, and by Samidoun, designated a terrorist front by the United States and Canada in October 2024.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did not mince words: “Treasury will continue to sever Hamas’ global financial support networks, no matter where in the world they are.” U.S. officials pointed to a letter from former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh personally endorsing PCPA’s role in organizing flotilla operations.

The UK is separately investigating flotilla figure Zaher Birawi for terrorism-related sanctions over alleged Hamas ties. Israeli authorities reported that no humanitarian aid was actually found aboard the vessels.

These are not lines from a Likud talking-point sheet. These are official designations from the Trump administration’s Treasury Department, made on the basis of intelligence assessments shared with allied governments.

What “Sumud” Actually Means

The flotilla’s name itself tells the story. “Sumud” — صمود — is Arabic for “steadfastness,” and in Palestinian political vocabulary it has long denoted not passive endurance but active refusal to accept any Jewish sovereignty in any portion of the land. Samidoun, the network behind much of the flotilla’s organizing apparatus, takes its name from the same root and openly glorifies imprisoned terrorists, including those convicted of murdering Jewish civilians, as “political prisoners.”

The people who organized this flotilla are, by their own public statements and by the verdict of the U.S. Treasury, in solidarity with the organization that on October 7th, 2023, raped women at the Nova festival, burned families alive in Kfar Aza, beheaded babies, and dragged 251 hostages into the tunnels of Gaza — some of whom are still there.

The same Hamas that, by extensive documentation from the IDF, Israeli journalists, and independent investigators including the Henry Jackson Society, used hospitals as command centers (Shifa most notoriously), fired rockets from schoolyards, stored weapons in UNRWA facilities, and embedded fighters among civilians as a matter of standing operational doctrine.

These are not contested claims from Israeli spokespeople. The Shifa tunnel complex was documented on video. The UNRWA weapons discoveries were photographed. The rocket launches from civilian areas have been geolocated by open-source investigators with no Israeli affiliation.

The Source of Ben Gvir’s Anger

Imagine, then, what it feels like to be the Israeli minister responsible for national security — a minister whose office handles the families of October 7th victims, whose office processes the trauma of hostages returning emaciated and broken, whose office sees the intelligence files on what was done to Shani Louk, to the Bibas children, to the elderly women dragged from Be’eri — and to watch Europeans sailing toward Israel’s coast in solidarity with the perpetrators.

To watch them photographed with smiles and peace signs while one’s own citizens have suffered so horrendously.

To know that the organizers have been formally designated as a Hamas support network by the United States.

To know that if these vessels had reached Gaza, the supplies — what supplies there were — would have been seized by Hamas, as nearly all aid to Gaza has been, and used to sustain the fighters still ranting and pining to rape and murder more innocents is despicable. 

The anger Ben Gvir expressed at Ashdod Port is not the anger of a fringe extremist. It is the anger felt by a very large portion of the Israeli public, including many who would never vote for him, who watched October 7th and watched the world’s response and concluded that something fundamental had broken in the Western moral compass.

When tens of thousands march in London chanting “From the river to the sea,” when Columbia students celebrate “by any means necessary,” when European foreign ministers lecture Israel about restraint while their own citizens sail in convoy with designated terror affiliates — the message received in Israel is unmistakable: our suffering does not count.

Ben Gvir gave voice, crudely and counterproductively, to that anger. He should not have. A minister of state must possess the discipline that the moment denies him. But the anger itself is righteous, even when its expression is not.

Where the Line Falls

Chazal teach in Pirkei Avos (4:1): Eizehu gibor? Ha’koveish es yitzro — Who is mighty? One who conquers his inclination. The mark of strength is not the absence of legitimate anger but the discipline to channel it. Ben Gvir failed that test. The Torah does not permit us to humiliate even a wicked person beyond what justice requires; the principle of kavod ha’briyos, the dignity of every human being created b’tzelem Elokim, does not evaporate because the human in question supports our enemies. The Rambam in Hilchos De’os (6:8) is explicit that even one’s enemy is owed basic human dignity, and the Sefer HaChinuch (Mitzvah 338) extends this even to those condemned to death.

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