Itamar Ben-Gvir organized his attempted humiliation of Marwan Barghouti with the precision of a political whole. Upon entering the prison flanked by cameras, the Israeli Minister of National Security confronted the leader of the Palestinian Fatah imprisoned in his cell, emitting a brutal threat that those who harm Israel are “destroyed”.
The scene was then broadcast on Ben-Gvir’s social media. Barghouti, a glove but composed, appeared both as a captive and a symbol, its simple presence transforming the corridor of the prison into a stage where national myths and antagonisms could be repeated for the public beyond the walls.
The meeting took place in a broader theater of humiliation in the past two years – stripped men and headed for arrest, hungry gasans attracted to death traps near help sites, soldiers with control points exercising the power to keep the Palestinians to wait, Lynching Pallesin settlers through the west and violent Palestinian prisoners.
Ben -Gvir’s visit was to consume the symbolic capital of the confrontation – to maintain his political character through the public ritual of his discharge. In this choreography, strength is measured not only in won victories, but in the liveliness of enemies submissive with regard to the camera.
The attempted humiliation, theatrical in his intention, was not directed against the prisoner but to the collective he represents. The act brought logic to the face of Janus of political degradation: a face fixed on the target, reducing it to an accessory in the performance of domination; The other turned to the aggressor’s own district, feeding on the emotional load of the show.
The same logic underpins the innumerable scenes of theatrical humiliation impatiently filmed by Israeli soldiers and ardently shared and enhanced on social networks by regular Israelis since October 2023.
Why, then, this perverse need – the constraint of disseminating images of humiliation and staging the force by degradation – holds such a political attraction among the Israelis?
Humiliation economy
The answer lies in the emotional economy of humiliation. It is not enough that the law is carried out – it is necessary to see, distribute and replay to reaffirm both the self -image of the Dominator and the sense of shared power of the public. The performance is inseparable from the act itself; The show transforms violence into a story and narrative into legitimacy. In turn, this can be converted into political currency.
The fragile body of a political leader, the cries of those who plead for mercy, the violation of intimate borders – all these scenes become emotional charges which nourish the sense of domination of the aggressor while ensuring the Israeli spectator that power is not only exercised but displayed, not only entirely enriched but shared.
This is how Ben-Gvir’s buffoonery should be included. Its central complaint is not that the prisons do not keep the state, but that they fail to humiliate sufficiently. For Ben-Girvir, the Israeli incarceration regime was too dignified, too retained, too insufficiently spectacular. He repeatedly condemned the penitentiary service for what he considers excessive leniency, even going so far as to reject the head of Israeli penitentiary services in December 2023 to be “too lax and not hard enough”.
He openly called for punitive measures such as the reduction of food rations of Palestinian prisoners, framing famine as a form of deterrence, and suggested in grotesque terms that it would be better to shoot prisoners in the head than to grant them more food. Rights defense groups have also documented how, under its leaders, deprivation policies – reducing access to food, water, medical care, hygiene and legal visits – have been systematically introduced, accompanied by symbolic humiliations such as forcing prisoners to repaint the prison walls or define them as trophies. He even celebrated the establishment of underground detention cells, designed to intensify isolation and psychological torment.
In the rhetoric and the practice of Ben -Gvir, the prison – unless the capacity to execute prisoners – should be a constant humiliation site, where efficiency is measured in the liveliness of degradation.
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What Ben-Gvir embodies at the level of politics reflects, in a condensed form, a broader logic of settlers: the dominant need to remember their domination. Domination, far from being a stable possession, refuses to stick; It must be repeated, displayed and renewed.
This perpetual need for affirmation betrays its fragility: the sense of the supremacy of the colonist depends on a constant return to the scenes of the subjugation, as if the power could not be verified until it is promulgated from the other. Domination becomes less a fixed state than an anxious performance, haunted forever by the possibility that, without its endless rest, it could dissolve.
It is precisely the fear of this dissolution which feeds the compulsive need to humiliate, and it is precisely the ability to humiliate that produces the feeling of ephemeral control. This double link is what gives humiliation its political strength: fragility is masked as a force, and force is renewed by fragility.
And the psychology of domination becomes a form of dependence. The colonist looks around: have you slapped one of them today? Have you got your solution? Humiliation produces an ephemeral summit and a precipitation of certainty that supremacy supremacy is intact. But like any medication, the effect wears out quickly, leaving an intensified desire behind.
Each degradation act is temporarily immobile that supremacy could escape, only to intensify dependence on its repetition. In this way, domination reveals its pathological nucleus: it cannot be maintained without the constant manufacture of abasement. He can only rest if the other is done in kneeling. The performance of the power therefore becomes less on safety than the food of a constraint – an insatiable appetite for confirmation which corrodes the claim to the permanence it seeks to maintain.
What makes this pathology so durable is not only the dependence of the colonist in humiliation, but the will of the world to provide it. The World Order provides the conditions under which this compulsion can prosper: the silence of the institutions that should censor, the diplomatic shields which divert responsibility and the endless flow of weapons and resources which guarantee that each act of degradation is significantly subscribed. International law is invoked as a principle, but is suspended in practice – indignation is carried out in words, but neutralized in acts.
This pathology is not quarantined in the colony of the colonists – it is globalized and nourished by the global tacit investment in maintaining a hierarchy where certain lives are infinitely violable. What appears to be an Israeli disorder is, in truth, a planetary arrangement, because the world allows and even rewards humiliation, as long as it serves its strategic alignments.
The Palestinian reaction
But we could still ask: what about accessories? What about Palestinians who suffer in this dynamic? The reduction of Palestinians to the performing instruments and organizations organized for evidence of degradation of the total Israel workforce exerts on them? There is something: when Ben-Gvir entered the prison cell of one of the most loved leaders in Palestine and a member of the Central Committee of Fatah, he aimed to humiliate the Palestinian political order.
Whether planned or not, the silence of Mahmoud Abbas and the passivity of the Central Committee of Fatah since the beginning of the genocide – and even as one of their most eminent leaders is paraded as an accessory in the populist theater of Ben -Gvir – only confirms the depth of impotence. Barghouti himself may not have felt the humiliation bite at that time, but the structure of humiliation did not require its subjective collapse, because it was not even targeted.
Ben -Girvir has forced to see the paradox of Palestinian leadership which continues to operate under the shadow of erasure – coordination of security, surveillance of its own people and supporting the even machinery which decreases it. Ben-Gvir didn’t need to invent the show; He simply amplified what was already there.
Many Palestinians talk about these meetings in different ways. Yes, many of us feel degraded, afraid of the distance that can go. Being arrested at a checkpoint and beating by Israeli soldiers without reason is shocking. Being sexually harassed by soldiers at checkpoints is shocking. Being degraded and treated as an animal is shocking. He creates deep trauma, especially for children who stop in Israel and violent in different ways.
But that’s not the whole story. In addition to the feeling of degradation are escape strategies and mockery gestures. Some tell themselves by laughing by soldiers at the very moment of being beaten, transforming the blows on occasions to expose the absurdity of power. Others describe how humiliation becomes routine, folded in everyday life, endured not as a collapse but as a condition to manage, sometimes even manipulated. These multiple responses reveal that the theater of humiliation does not follow the same script – it is lived and disputed by those which are interpreted as its accessories.
I remember a story, told by two friends a decade ago, which captures this dynamic with a painful clarity. They had been captured by Israeli soldiers, blindfolded and handcuffed with their hands tied behind their back, then recorded while the soldiers beat them in turn. What remained with them was not the pain, but the strange interaction it produced: when one of them shouted, the other laughs – laughing at his friend when he was suffering. The soldiers became more angry, unable to understand why their victims did not take the beats seriously. Laughter, instead of breaking the scene, intensified it, inviting more blows.
This moment reveals something deep in the psychology of humiliation and the instability of domination. Violence not only aims to hurt the body but to secure a script where the dominated confirms the power of the dominator. Laughter disturbed the script. It was not the denial of the pain, but the refusal to let the pain become the only meaning of the moment.
In this laugh – as cruel with friends – humiliation has been moved; The victim became a victim and spectator, redirecting the scene in an absurdity. There are many stories of this type, and countless others that remain unspeakable. And by their side, another question often arises when the colonists burst into increased emotion, moving into the landscape as if they were forced to reaffirm their power by violence or by speech. The question is deceptively simple, asked in Arabic: Shu Malhom? – What triggered them? And behind that, the more deep and more disturbing question persists: what’s wrong with them?
Abdaljawad Omar
Abdaljawad Omar is a Palestinian academic and theorist whose work focuses on the policy of resistance, decolonization and Palestinian struggle.
