Itamar Ben-Gvir staged his attempted humiliation of Marwan Barghouti with the precision of a political set-piece. Entering the prison flanked by cameras, the Israeli National Security Minister confronted the imprisoned Palestinian Fatah leader in his cell, issuing a blunt threat that those who harm Israel will be “wiped out.”
The scene was later broadcast on Ben-Gvir’s social media. Barghouti, gaunt yet composed, appeared as both a captive and a symbol, his mere presence transforming the prison corridor into a stage where national myths and antagonisms could be rehearsed for the audience beyond the walls.
The encounter unfolded within a wider theater of humiliation over the past two years–men stripped and marched toward arrest, starving Gazans lured into death traps near aid sites, soldiers at checkpoints exercising the power to keep Palestinians waiting, settlers lynching Palestinians across the West Bank, and Palestinian prisoners beaten and raped.
Ben-Gvir’s visit was about consuming the symbolic capital of confrontation–sustaining his political persona through the public ritual of debasement. In this choreography, strength is measured not simply in victories won, but in the vividness of enemies subdued before the camera’s gaze.
The attempt at humiliation, theatrical in its intent, wasn’t directed at the prisoner but at the collective he represents. The act bore the Janus-faced logic of political degradation: one face fixed on the target, reducing him to a prop in the performance of domination; the other turned toward the perpetrator’s own constituency, feeding off the emotional charge of the spectacle.
The same logic underlies the countless scenes of theatrical humiliation eagerly filmed by Israeli soldiers and ardently shared and reshared across social media by regular Israelis since October 2023.
Why, then, does this perverse need–the compulsion to disseminate images of humiliation and to stage strength through degradation–hold such political appeal among Israelis?
The economy of humiliation
The answer lies in the affective economy of humiliation. It is not enough for the act to be carried out–it must be seen, circulated, and replayed to reaffirm both the dominator’s self-image and the audience’s sense of shared power. The performance is inseparable from the deed itself; the spectacle transforms violence into narrative, and narrative into legitimacy. In turn, that can be converted into political currency.
The frail body of a political leader, the cries of those pleading for mercy, the violation of intimate boundaries–all of these scenes become affective charges that nourish the perpetrator’s sense of dominance while assuring the Israeli spectator that power is not only exercised but displayed, not only enacted but shared.
This is how Ben-Gvir’s antics should be understood. His central complaint is not that prisons fail to secure the state, but that they fail to humiliate enough. For Ben-Gvir, Israel’s regime of incarceration was too dignified, too restrained, too insufficiently spectacular. He has repeatedly condemned the prison service for what he considers excessive leniency, even going so far as to dismiss the Israeli Prison Service chief in December 2023 on the grounds of being “too lax and not harsh enough.”
He has openly called for punitive measures such as reducing food rations for Palestinian prisoners, framing starvation as a form of deterrence, and has suggested in grotesque terms that it would be better to shoot prisoners in the head than to grant them more food. Rights groups have further documented how, under his leadership, policies of deprivation–cutting access to food, water, medical care, hygiene, and legal visits–were systematically introduced, accompanied by symbolic humiliations like forcing detainees to repaint prison walls or parading them as trophies. He has even celebrated the establishment of subterranean detention cells, designed to intensify isolation and psychological torment.
In Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric and practice, the prison–short of the ability to execute prisoners–ought to be a site of constant humiliation, where effectiveness is measured in the vividness of degradation.
What Ben-Gvir embodies at the level of policy reflects, in condensed form, a wider settler logic: the dominant need to remind themselves of their dominance. Domination, far from being a stable possession, refuses to stick; it must be rehearsed, displayed, and renewed.
This perpetual need for affirmation betrays its fragility: the settler’s sense of supremacy depends on a constant return to scenes of subjugation, as though power could only be verified in the moment it is enacted upon the other. Domination becomes less a fixed state than an anxious performance, forever haunted by the possibility that, without its endless restaging, it might dissolve.
It is precisely the fear of this dissolution that fuels the compulsive need to humiliate, and it is precisely the capacity to humiliate that produces the fleeting sense of mastery. This double-bind is what gives humiliation its political force: fragility masks itself as strength, and strength renews itself through fragility.
And the psychology of domination becomes a form of addiction. The settler looks around: Did you slap one of them today? Did you get your fix? Humiliation produces a fleeting high and a rush of certainty that one’s supremacy is intact. But like any drug, the effect quickly wears off, leaving behind an intensified craving.
Each act of degradation temporarily stills the anxiety that supremacy might slip away, only to intensify the dependence on its repetition. In this way, domination reveals its pathological core: it cannot sustain itself without the constant manufacturing of abasement. It cannot rest unless the other is made to kneel. The performance of power thus becomes less about security than about feeding a compulsion–an insatiable appetite for confirmation that corrodes the very claim to permanence it seeks to uphold.
What renders this pathology so enduring is not only the settler’s addiction to humiliation but the world’s willingness to supply it. The global order furnishes the conditions in which this compulsion can thrive: the silence of institutions that should censure, the diplomatic shields that deflect accountability, and the endless stream of arms and resources that ensure each act of degradation is materially underwritten. International law is invoked as a principle, yet is suspended in practice–outrage is performed in words, yet neutralized in deeds.
This pathology is not quarantined within the settler colony–it is globalized and nourished by the world’s tacit investment in maintaining a hierarchy where some lives are endlessly violable. What appears as an Israeli disorder is, in truth, a planetary arrangement, because the world permits and even rewards the addiction to humiliation, so long as it serves its strategic alignments.
The Palestinian reaction
But one might still ask: what about the props? What about the Palestinians who suffer within this dynamic? Is the reduction of Palestinians to instruments of spectacle and to bodies staged for degradation evidence of the total hold Israel exerts over them? There is something to it: when Ben-Gvir strode into the prison cell of one of Palestine’s most beloved leaders and a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, he aimed to humiliate the Palestinian political order.
Whether intended or not, the silence of Mahmoud Abbas and the passivity of Fatah’s Central Committee since the genocide began–and even as one of their most prominent leaders is paraded as a prop in Ben-Gvir’s populist theater–only confirms the depth of the impotence. Barghouti himself may not have felt the sting of humiliation in that moment, but the structure of humiliation did not require his subjective collapse, because it wasn’t even aimed at him.
Ben-Gvir forced into view the paradox of a Palestinian leadership that continues to operate under the shadow of erasure–coordinating security, policing its own people, and sustaining the very machinery that diminishes it. Ben-Gvir did not need to invent the spectacle; he merely amplified what was already there.
Many Palestinians speak of these encounters in different ways. Yes, many of us feel degraded, afraid of how far human sadism can go. Being stopped at a checkpoint and beaten by Israeli soldiers for no reason is shocking. Being sexually harassed by soldiers at checkpoints is shocking. Being degraded and treated like an animal is shocking. It creates deep traumas, especially for the children Israel arrests and violates in different ways.
But that is not the whole story. Alongside the sense of degradation are strategies of evasion and gestures of mockery. Some recount laughing at soldiers in the very moment of being beaten, turning the blows into occasions to expose the absurdity of power. Others describe how humiliation becomes routinized, folded into the everyday, endured not as collapse but as a condition to be managed, sometimes even manipulated. These multiple responses reveal that the theater of humiliation does not follow the same script–it is lived and contested by those who are cast as its props.
I remember one story, told by two friends about a decade ago, that captures this dynamic with painful clarity. They had been captured by Israeli soldiers, blindfolded and handcuffed with their hands tied behind their backs, then recorded as soldiers took turns beating them. What stayed with them was not the pain, but the strange interaction it produced: when one of them screamed, the other laughed–mocking his friend even as he suffered. The soldiers grew angrier, unable to comprehend why their victims were not taking the beating seriously. The laughter, instead of breaking the scene, intensified it, inviting more blows.
This moment discloses something profound about the psychology of humiliation and the instability of domination. Violence aims not only to wound the body but to secure a script where the dominated confirms the power of the dominator. The laughter unsettled the script. It was not the denial of pain, but the refusal to let pain become the only meaning of the moment.
In that laughter–however cruel between friends–humiliation was displaced; the victim became both sufferer and spectator, redirecting the scene into one of absurdity. There are many such stories, and countless more that remain untold. And alongside them, another question often arises when settlers erupt in heightened emotion, moving through the landscape as if compelled to reaffirm their power through violence or through discourse. The question is deceptively simple, asked in Arabic: shu malhom?–What triggered them? And behind it lingers the deeper, more unsettling question: what is wrong with them?
Abdaljawad Omar is a Palestinian scholar and theorist whose work focuses on the politics of resistance, decolonization, and the Palestinian struggle.