At an intimate dinner in 2023, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman received a special gift from the Israeli government.

Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu had traveled all the way to Cedarhurst, New York, to present the Long Island Republican with an enlarged replica of an ancient coin. “I graciously accept this on behalf of all the people of Nassau County and the people of the United States of America who love Israel,” he said to Eliyahu, in a video of the event that has since been deleted from YouTube.

Blakeman, who is now running for governor of New York, is a staunch supporter of the Israeli government. At a time when Americans across the political spectrum are becoming increasingly critical of Israel, Blakeman’s record stands out. He has a long history of embracing far-right figures associated with the Israeli settler movement, which, since 1967, has been encroaching on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. Last year, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that “Israel must immediately cease all new settlement activity” and return all West Bank land and property.

But since then, violent settler attacks on Palestinians and settlement construction backed by the Israeli government have continued.

Yossi Dagan, an influential Israeli official who has lobbied US lawmakers in support of settler interests, told the Hebrew-language news outlet in 2021 that Blakeman is a “strategic asset” not only for his New York constituents, but also for “the State of Israel and Samaria.” (Judea and Samaria is the Israeli name for the occupied West Bank.) Blakeman’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or a detailed email outlining this story.

On the campaign trail, Blakeman has touted himself as the candidate who can bring safety and security to New York’s Jewish community. He has said that if elected, he could “stop” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom Blakeman has frequently—and baselessly—called an antisemite. Blakeman has seized on Mamdani’s alliance with the incumbent governor he’s hoping to defeat: Democrat Kathy Hochul. Mamdani has drawn the ire of right-wing Israel supporters for his consistent public remarks accusing Israel of genocide and his release of a video calling for the arrest and trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mamdani’s rhetoric is far from extreme. Many leading experts say Israel’s attacks on Gaza amount to genocide, and the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest on war crimes charges.

Beyond his criticism of Mamdani, Blakeman has been a vocal antagonist of the pro-Palestine protest movement across New York, even visiting Columbia University in 2024 amidst a burgeoning student protest encampment. “These people that are protesting are professional protesters, they are anti-American,” Blakeman said at Columbia.

Months later, he signed into law a mask-ban prohibiting the use of facial coverings to conceal one’s identity in public in Nassau County. According to the , the measure was introduced by another Republican, who “argued for the law’s necessity in the wake of pro-Palestine protests across the country.”Protesters have often covered their faces to protect themselves from pro-Israel groups that publicly identify activists. If elected governor, Blakeman has said he would push for a mask-ban statewide.

Blakeman’s association with the Israeli far-right is nothing new. As a congressional candidate in 2014, he traveled to Israel and met with Dagan and numerous other government officials, according to . On that trip, Blakeman visited East Jerusalem on a tour hosted by Ateret Cohanim, a group that has worked to methodically take over real estate in the area and evict Palestinian residents.

As a Hempstead town councilman and later as Nassau County executive, Blakeman has worked explicitly to link Long Island’s municipal governments with the Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied territories. He signed partnership agreements, in 2016 and 2022, with Dagan’s Shomron Regional Council and the Binyamin Regional Council—Israeli governmental entities that oversee settler communities in the West Bank.

In November 2025, Blakeman signed a cooperative agreement with the Har Hevron Regional Council, which recently hosted a conference featuring US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. “I love Judea and Samaria,” Blakeman said at theg of the agreement. “I love the spirit of the people there.”The Har Hevron council administers Israeli settlements around Hebron, where Israel’s ultra-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir lives in an enclave called Kiryat Arba.

Even within pro-Israel politics, Ben-Gvir is deeply controversial. The has reported that “Ben-Gvir hung a portrait of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein on the wall of his living room for years.”In 1994, Goldstein, an American settler living in Kiryat Arba, entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque and killed 29 Palestinians in a mass shooting. The killing led Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to designate the Kach party—to which Goldstein belonged—as a terrorist organization.

In 1995, as a 19-year old, Ben-Gvir appeared on television brandishing a Cadillac emblem he said was stolen from Rabin’s car, while stating: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too.”Weeks later, Rabin was shot dead by Jewish extremist Yigal Amir.

In 2019, even AIPAC denounced Ben-Gvir’s Oztma Yehudit—or Jewish Power—party as “racist and reprehensible,” and in recent years, 10 countries have banned him from entering their territory. But since 2023, Ben-Gvir has served in Netanyahu’s cabinet, a perch from which he’s called for the “voluntary emigration” of nearly 2 million Palestinians from Gaza and a campaign of targeted assassinations there killing 30 to 40 people “every night.”

Eliyahu—the Israeli official who gave Blakeman the replica coin—is also a member of Ben-Gvir’s party. Months after meeting with Blakeman in 2023, Eliyahu expressed openness to using a nuclear bomb in Gaza. He later claimed the comment had been “metaphorical,” but Netanyahu suspended him from the Israeli cabinet.

Blakeman met directly with Ben-Gvir in April 2025, welcoming him to Nassau County with a police honor guard. Blakeman also sat for a meeting with Ben-Gvir and NYPD commander Richie Taylor at the private home of a nursing home magnate. (The day before, Ben-Gvir had given a speech at the Chabad Lubavich headquarters in Brooklyn. Outside, a mob of pro-Israel men attacked two women and chanted “death to Arabs.”)

In a private meeting with Hasidic leaders in Brooklyn this month, according to the , Blakeman posed a question: “If there is rioting here, if they’re burning down the yeshivas and your shuls, and burning down your house and raping your women, you think Zohran Mamdani is going to stop them?”The meeting was organized by a close confidant of Blakeman, David Katz, who serves as the executive director of the nonprofit Israel Heritage Foundation, which provides a forum for Israeli ministers to interface with influential Americans.

At an IHF event in 2024, then-Religious Zionists of America chair Martin Oliner said that “maybe it’s up to us to actually kill civilians” in Gaza. Those comments later received a disavowal from the IHF.

At another 2024 IHF event, Blakeman suggested his remarks from a recorded video should be deleted if the IHF wanted to retain its 501(c)(3) status with the IRS. That video remained online for months until the IHF deleted its entire YouTube channel after I reported for on the group’s ties to the Trump campaign and top Israeli officials in 2024. Dagan’s office, Katz, and Oliner did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this year, Blakeman crossed paths with Dagan and Katz again at the New York premiere of a play called , produced by a settler theater company. At the play, Blakeman took a smiling photo with Ross Glick, the former executive director of Betar US, which only days before had signed a settlement agreement with the New York Attorney General’s office in response to the AG’s allegations that Betar had engaged in “violence and harassment…motivated by the anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim sentiment expressed by its leadership and members.”

Betar’s legal counsel, Jeffrey Schwartz, told me that “there was never any judicial review, findings, or admission of wrongdoing of any kind” as part of the settlement agreement. Glick acknowledged that the AG’s investigation “reportedly included incidents from the period when I was working with Betar.”But, he added, “I did not become aware of that investigation until well after I stepped aside.”Glick strongly disputed the attorney general’s public characterization of the settlement agreement, saying it was “grossly misleading and self-serving.”

Glick said that he grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors and that he is supporting Blakeman for governor and has also supported Dagan. “I am an advocate for bipartisan support for the ‘Friends of Judea Samaria’ congressional caucus,” he said. “I’m also looking at property in Judea for myself.”The same day as the premiere, Blakeman met privately with Dagan, and the pair issued a joint video. “We will always stand with you, Yossi,” Blakeman said.

“Bruce is a real supporter and real partner of all the people of Israel,” Dagan said, “and especially to the brave people who build Judea and Samaria.”