Israel’s real red line isn’t violence. It’s filming it

Gaza-bound flotilla activists crouch on the floor with their hands tied in zip-bands, on 20 May 2026

Jack Khoury writes in Haaretz on 24 May 2026:

The international storm provoked by videos posted by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in which he gleefully humiliates Gaza flotilla activists, resurfaced a sad truth about Israeli discourse both official and in the media: It sees no problem with the acts themselves, only with the camera that recorded them.

The prime minister, foreign minister and other politicians were quick to dissociate themselves from the documentation, not because they were shocked by the humiliation or by the message of by its proud display but rather because the videos harmed Israel’s image. Once again the argument was made about a “public relations error,” as if the problem were with the explanations rather than the reality.

After all, many in the Israeli establishment view the flotilla activists as terrorists. Thus, as far as many Israelis are concerned, treating them in a humiliating manner is not a problem. The problem is that the world got to see it. Just as in the Sde Teiman affair, with the accounts describing the egregious abuse of a Palestinian detainee, the public’s shock was not a result of moral disgust over the violation of human rights or of the law, but rather over the videos having reached foreign media outlets and the resultant reputational damage to the state.

Herein lies the great hypocrisy. Official Israel and the mainstream media have been behaving in recent years as though morality is not a value in itself but something contingent on documentation. If there is no camera there is no problem. If there is no video it is possible to deny, obfuscate or ignore.

For more than two years the Gaza Strip has been bombed, starved and destroyed under the banner of “response to the October 7 massacre.” Over 70,000 people have been killed, including tens of thousands of women and children, over 170,000 injured and 1.7 million are living in displaced persons camps. An entire territory was erased, hospitals collapsed and starvation became an overt, shameless instrument of war. All this has not provoked shock or protest in Israeli society – not because the public does not know, but because Palestinian suffering has remained mainly at a remove, obscured and invisible.

So, too, the shock at the images of settlers carrying out pogroms in the West Bank does not stem from the murderous violence but rather from the fact that they were made public. This is also true for Lebanon: A storm erupts when a statue of Jesus is destroyed or a church is damaged, because there’s a video. No one sees the dozens of Shi’ite villages that were erased.

The message conveyed by the establishment, the media and the public is not “Don’t hurt innocents or violate moral values,” but rather: “Don’t photograph.” Continue to destroy, humiliate, starve, oppress, kill and flatten, just don’t post it online. Don’t supply the world with documentation that will make it difficult to justify the acts.

This is the most disturbing aspect of the Ben-Gvir flotilla incident. If there were no documentation, if the minister had not boasted about his actions and shared the videos, would there have been any protest? Would anyone have believed the accounts of the humiliation and the violence? In the Sde Teiman affair, too, attempts were made to discredit the witness accounts, until the photos and videos began to surface.

At the end of the day, for a long time now the debate in Israel has revolved around not the limits of force and morality, but around the limits of exposure. Not over what is permissible to do but over what is permissible to see and what may or not be recorded.

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