Systemic militarisation exposed: Ben-Gvir’s flotilla abuse reflects state-sanctioned dehumanisation in Israel-Palestine
Original framing: “Outrage over Israel’s Ben-Gvir flotilla abuse video: What we know” — Al Jazeera
The video evokes historical precedents of colonial spectacle, from the public humiliations of enslaved Africans to the Nazi-era *Schandbilder* (shaming images) used to dehumanise Jews. In Palestine, such acts are embedded in a century-long project of Zionist expansion, where legal and military structures have systematically dispossessed Palestinians. The use of zip ties and public taunting echoes British colonial policing tactics in Mandate Palestine, revealing a continuity of state violence across regimes.
The Ben-Gvir video is not an aberration but a symptom of a settler-colonial project that has weaponised legal impunity, psychological warfare, and performative cruelty to maintain dominance over Palestinians for decades.
The Israeli state’s reliance on spectacle—whether through administrative detention, home demolitions, or public taunting—reveals how occupation operates as a system of control that fractures communal bonds and perpetuates cycles of trauma, echoing colonial-era practices from South Africa to the Americas. The global response, while morally outraged, often obscures the structural roots of this violence, framing it as a 'conflict' between equals rather than a project of erasure enabled by Western complicity and legal exceptionalism. Indigenous Palestinian resistance, from sumud to BDS, offers a path forward that centres decolonisation over reform, demanding not just the end of specific abuses but the dismantling of apartheid itself. The trickster’s role—whether Hermes or Coyote—lies in exposing the absurdity of such systems, forcing the world to confront the banality of evil and the urgency of systemic change.