Marwan Barghouti, Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Israeli need to humiliate
Itamar Ben-Gvir in Marwan Barghouti’s cell on 14 August 2025
Abdaljawad Omar writes in Mondoweiss on 16 August 2025:
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?