August 16, 2025
Abdaljawad Omar
Mural of jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti in Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, April 13, 2023. (Photo: Nidal Al-Wahidi/APA Images)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?
Mitchell
Plitnick
This desperation was on full display recently when former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has long been known to have presidential aspirations, embarrassed himself in an interview on the podcast, Pod Save America, hosted by several former officials in Barack Obama’s administration.
When asked about Gaza, the recent resolutions in the Senate calling for a suspension of arms sales to Israel, and the growing calls for recognizing Palestinian statehood, Buttigieg came back with a response so mealy-mouthed and non-committal that it unleashed a storm of criticism even from relatively moderate sectors.
“I think we need to insist that if American taxpayer funding is going to weaponry that is going to Israel, that that is not going to things that shock the conscience,” he said. “We — I think especially including voices who care about Israel, who believe in Israel’s right to exist, who have stood with Israel in response to the unbelievable cruelty and terrorism of Oct. 7 — I think there’s a reason why so many of those voices are speaking up now too,” he said. “Because this is not just something that is on its face and in itself a moral catastrophe. It is also a catastrophe for Israel for the long run.”
Palestinians appear only in vague reference. Buttigieg’s entire response centered on Israel and its supposed woes and missteps.
Buttigieg’s comments reflect an amoral person who is desperately trying to satisfy political pressures and who has no principled response to genocide. He neither supports nor opposes Israel’s actions as a matter of right and wrong; he is merely concerned with how they play politically, to voters, on one hand, and to major Democratic donors on the other.
In other words, Buttigieg responded like a typical centrist Democrat.
After a firestorm of criticism, Buttigieg tried to do damage control. While it quelled the mainstream criticism Buttigieg was most concerned with, his updated response remained unconvincing to anyone who cares not just about the genocide in Gaza but about elected officials standing for some kind of principles.
“It’s important to be clear about something this enormous and this painful. It’s just that it’s so enormous and it’s so painful that sometimes words can fail.” Buttigieg told Politico.
He said he would have voted for the joint resolutions of disapproval that Bernie Sanders recently brought in the Senate against the latest arms sales to Israel; he would recognize a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, and, most dramatically, that the U.S. should not sign another 10-year commitment of annual aid to Israel after the current one expires in 2027.
“I think as a parent, you see these awful images of starving children with their ribs showing and automatically, you imagine your own kids,” he added in an unconvincing attempt at humanizing his views.
If there is real concern there for Palestinians as people with rights and humanity that is no different from anyone else, it’s indetectable. It was a carefully calibrated statement, yet the calibration is uncertain. It’s clear that both Buttigieg and his advisers are in unfamiliar territory that they don’t know how to navigate.
Some Dems flail, while others surprise
Last week, at an event in Iowa, Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona said that his position on Israel, Palestine, and Gaza, “has always kind of been evolving with the situation.”
That’s a stunningly cowardly statement during a U.S.-backed genocide, but it was an improvement over comments he had made shortly before.
Gallego told a crowd that “The people of Gaza are in this situation because Donald Trump is President.” When audience members pointed out that the genocide was started during, and fully backed by, Joe Biden’s administration, Gallego retorted, “Whatever, hey, this is your opinion, dude.”
Gallego then said he would consider backing the “conditioning” of aid to Israel, but that this was due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that he intended to occupy all of Gaza, which Gallego called a “red line” for him.
Apparently, genocide is not a red line for Gallego. Or, even if we want to grant that the label “genocide” is debatable (although it’s not), the killing of more than 18,000 children is also not a red line for Gallego.
Now, Gallego is apparently circulating a letter in the Senate calling on President Donald Trump to investigate and take action in response to settler violence in the West Bank.
This, too, reflects a floundering Democratic Party. The settlers and their violence are the perfect targets for meaningless action. A letter like Gallego’s—even if Trump responds and does everything it asks—will have no impact on the settlers or the ongoing annexation and gradual ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, much less the genocide in Gaza.
Indeed, it doesn’t even attempt to hold Israel accountable for such crimes, targeting instead a purportedly “rogue element” of settlers on the West Bank and ignoring the support those settlers get from the Israeli military, security forces, and the government itself.
Thus, it’s the perfect vehicle for a shill like Gallego to try to satisfy the pro-Israel donors he believes he needs for his political future and to respond to the growing calls from anyone with a shred of decency for the United States to end its support for the genocide in Gaza.
Gallego isn’t alone. Even New York’s Ritchie Torres, who has never seen an Israeli policy he didn’t love, has been forced to acknowledge the suffering in Gaza. “All parties, including the U.S. and Israel, have a moral obligation to do everything in our power to ease the hardship and hunger that’s taken hold in the Gaza Strip,” Torres stated several weeks ago.
The shift was perhaps clearest in Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Klobuchar is the very model of a centrist. She is from Minnesota, a state where pro-Israel lobbying has shown some of its greatest weaknesses, including its failure to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar and its embarrassing confrontations with Betty McCollum.
But Klobuchar is nothing like McCollum, much less Omar. She is a staunchly pro-Israel figure, and was among several Democratic senators to be photographed with the wanted war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, during his recent visit to Washington.
Yet when Bernie Sanders brought his resolutions of disapproval of the latest arms sales to Israel, Klobuchar supported Bernie’s resolutions. It shocked many, including me. Klobuchar was not among those Democrats who held the popular position, in 2020, of conditioning aid to Israel on its cooperation in the sham “peace process.”
Yet while Klobuchar, and a few other surprise senators give hope in the cynical world of politics, there is a long way to go.
What is absent is a principled position. Even Sanders, who is perhaps the most principled person in the Senate on this and many issues, cannot bring himself to see that this genocide grew out of a combination of racist Israeli nationalism and decades of impunity granted to Israeli extremism by the United States.
And a principled position is what Democratic voters are looking for. A wide range of views of Israel remains among Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters, but there is much less diversity when it comes to the genocide in Gaza. The left and center of the United States electorate are clearly against this and want it to stop. Even enough of the right opposes it sufficiently for Trump to at least make a show of trying to stop it.
Opposing genocide is about as fundamental as can be on the value scale. People are seeing that supporting Israel’s genocide is, for most Democrats, a question of politics, and, at that, a question of pleasing elite political donors and lobbyists.
In other words, it’s about kowtowing to AIPAC, which has become a political albatross. It’s a political loser and an ethical black hole.
Yet, even so, Democrats like Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Gallego, and certainly absolute pawns like Torres remain reluctant to cross the line.
Pro-Israel groups on a mission to pull Democrats back
It is not only politicians who find themselves in a bind over Israel. American pro-Israeli groups, as well as some Israeli organizations, are trying to find the right balance of continuing to support Israel while also rekindling some affection for the state among liberals.
It started with a blatantly empty gesture by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) two weeks ago.
AJC sent $25,000 to the Archdiocese of New York to help repair the Holy Family Church in Gaza that was heavily damaged when it was targeted by Israel. AJC, of course, supported the blatantly absurd Israeli story that the church was hit by accident (Israel had targeted the church numerous times prior), and the political stunt had little impact.
It did, however, set the stage for the United Jewish Appeal-Federation donation of $1 million for humanitarian aid in Gaza.
The donation is going to IsraAID, an Israeli humanitarian organization. IsraAID is a genuine humanitarian group, but part of its mission has always been to use its humanitarian efforts to improve Israel’s image in the world.
Thus, when Israel offers humanitarian assistance to a disaster-struck country, IsraAID is often the means by which they can deliver it.
Of course, in Gaza, this presents difficulties on several levels. IsraAID can’t actually go into Gaza, but it turns out they have been working with Palestinian partners there.
IsraAID has been working in secret for the past year, trying to help Palestinian groups in Gaza navigate the many Israeli roadblocks—solid and bureaucratic—and helping to bring some meager amounts of aid into Gaza. Yet, while they were certainly keeping it secret to protect whomever they work with in Gaza, it is equally certain they would not have wanted the Israeli public to know what they were doing until now.
According to IsraAID, they began working in Gaza a year ago, after having worked in Israel for the first time in their own history following the October 7 attacks. To date, there has been no indication that IsraAID does anything beyond coordinating with the Israeli army and helping to get some supplies into Gaza, although their mere presence as an Israeli group raises understandable suspicions.
For the UJA, then, giving to IsraAID provides the salve for many of their own members who are not willing to oppose Israel’s genocide but are uncomfortable with the images of starving babies in Gaza. Since the group cannot actually go into Gaza, the money will go to supplies and to the Israeli organization’s overhead. It will make virtually no difference on the ground.
But the fact of the donation and the concomitant revelation that IsraAID has been working in Gaza will be very helpful for Democrats and pro-Israel groups who want to argue that the genocide is not the work of Israel as a whole but the product of a corrupt, right-wing prime minister who partnered with the most radical nationalists in his country. They will try to make this case despite Israelis themselves overwhelmingly saying they don’t care about people starving in Gaza.
This is precisely why the pressure on Democrats cannot let up, and must not be bought off with mealy-mouthed word salad and useless gestures. It must continue until Democrats, as a party, are taking a principled stand against not only Israel’s current genocide in Gaza, not only its impending genocide in the West Bank, but against a U.S. policy that has allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians of the most basic rights of life and liberty.
The current state of affairs is the result of Israeli racism, settler colonialism, apartheid, and nationalism. None of it can continue without our support. It’s time we expect our leaders to stop it.
Abdaljawad Omar
Itamar
Ben-Gvir’s staged attempt at humiliating Marwan Barghouti exposed the impotence
of the Palestinian political order — but it also laid bare the insecurities and
anxieties that fuel Israel’s need to publicly subjugate Palestinians.
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?
Democrats,
including those eyeing a 2028 presidential run, are flailing as it becomes
clear that supporting Israel is now a political loser. While politicians
navigate this new terrain, pro-Israel groups are scrambling to rebuild liberal
support.
Democrats and
their base among the institutional Jewish community have come to realize that
Israel is costing them votes, and they’re flailing desperately as they try to
respond.This desperation was on full display recently when former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has long been known to have presidential aspirations, embarrassed himself in an interview on the podcast, Pod Save America, hosted by several former officials in Barack Obama’s administration.
When asked about Gaza, the recent resolutions in the Senate calling for a suspension of arms sales to Israel, and the growing calls for recognizing Palestinian statehood, Buttigieg came back with a response so mealy-mouthed and non-committal that it unleashed a storm of criticism even from relatively moderate sectors.
“I think we need to insist that if American taxpayer funding is going to weaponry that is going to Israel, that that is not going to things that shock the conscience,” he said. “We — I think especially including voices who care about Israel, who believe in Israel’s right to exist, who have stood with Israel in response to the unbelievable cruelty and terrorism of Oct. 7 — I think there’s a reason why so many of those voices are speaking up now too,” he said. “Because this is not just something that is on its face and in itself a moral catastrophe. It is also a catastrophe for Israel for the long run.”
Palestinians appear only in vague reference. Buttigieg’s entire response centered on Israel and its supposed woes and missteps.
Buttigieg’s comments reflect an amoral person who is desperately trying to satisfy political pressures and who has no principled response to genocide. He neither supports nor opposes Israel’s actions as a matter of right and wrong; he is merely concerned with how they play politically, to voters, on one hand, and to major Democratic donors on the other.
In other words, Buttigieg responded like a typical centrist Democrat.
After a firestorm of criticism, Buttigieg tried to do damage control. While it quelled the mainstream criticism Buttigieg was most concerned with, his updated response remained unconvincing to anyone who cares not just about the genocide in Gaza but about elected officials standing for some kind of principles.
“It’s important to be clear about something this enormous and this painful. It’s just that it’s so enormous and it’s so painful that sometimes words can fail.” Buttigieg told Politico.
He said he would have voted for the joint resolutions of disapproval that Bernie Sanders recently brought in the Senate against the latest arms sales to Israel; he would recognize a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, and, most dramatically, that the U.S. should not sign another 10-year commitment of annual aid to Israel after the current one expires in 2027.
“I think as a parent, you see these awful images of starving children with their ribs showing and automatically, you imagine your own kids,” he added in an unconvincing attempt at humanizing his views.
If there is real concern there for Palestinians as people with rights and humanity that is no different from anyone else, it’s indetectable. It was a carefully calibrated statement, yet the calibration is uncertain. It’s clear that both Buttigieg and his advisers are in unfamiliar territory that they don’t know how to navigate.
Some Dems flail, while others surprise
Last week, at an event in Iowa, Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona said that his position on Israel, Palestine, and Gaza, “has always kind of been evolving with the situation.”
That’s a stunningly cowardly statement during a U.S.-backed genocide, but it was an improvement over comments he had made shortly before.
Gallego told a crowd that “The people of Gaza are in this situation because Donald Trump is President.” When audience members pointed out that the genocide was started during, and fully backed by, Joe Biden’s administration, Gallego retorted, “Whatever, hey, this is your opinion, dude.”
Gallego then said he would consider backing the “conditioning” of aid to Israel, but that this was due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that he intended to occupy all of Gaza, which Gallego called a “red line” for him.
Apparently, genocide is not a red line for Gallego. Or, even if we want to grant that the label “genocide” is debatable (although it’s not), the killing of more than 18,000 children is also not a red line for Gallego.
Now, Gallego is apparently circulating a letter in the Senate calling on President Donald Trump to investigate and take action in response to settler violence in the West Bank.
This, too, reflects a floundering Democratic Party. The settlers and their violence are the perfect targets for meaningless action. A letter like Gallego’s—even if Trump responds and does everything it asks—will have no impact on the settlers or the ongoing annexation and gradual ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, much less the genocide in Gaza.
Indeed, it doesn’t even attempt to hold Israel accountable for such crimes, targeting instead a purportedly “rogue element” of settlers on the West Bank and ignoring the support those settlers get from the Israeli military, security forces, and the government itself.
Thus, it’s the perfect vehicle for a shill like Gallego to try to satisfy the pro-Israel donors he believes he needs for his political future and to respond to the growing calls from anyone with a shred of decency for the United States to end its support for the genocide in Gaza.
Gallego isn’t alone. Even New York’s Ritchie Torres, who has never seen an Israeli policy he didn’t love, has been forced to acknowledge the suffering in Gaza. “All parties, including the U.S. and Israel, have a moral obligation to do everything in our power to ease the hardship and hunger that’s taken hold in the Gaza Strip,” Torres stated several weeks ago.
The shift was perhaps clearest in Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Klobuchar is the very model of a centrist. She is from Minnesota, a state where pro-Israel lobbying has shown some of its greatest weaknesses, including its failure to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar and its embarrassing confrontations with Betty McCollum.
But Klobuchar is nothing like McCollum, much less Omar. She is a staunchly pro-Israel figure, and was among several Democratic senators to be photographed with the wanted war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, during his recent visit to Washington.
Yet when Bernie Sanders brought his resolutions of disapproval of the latest arms sales to Israel, Klobuchar supported Bernie’s resolutions. It shocked many, including me. Klobuchar was not among those Democrats who held the popular position, in 2020, of conditioning aid to Israel on its cooperation in the sham “peace process.”
Yet while Klobuchar, and a few other surprise senators give hope in the cynical world of politics, there is a long way to go.
What is absent is a principled position. Even Sanders, who is perhaps the most principled person in the Senate on this and many issues, cannot bring himself to see that this genocide grew out of a combination of racist Israeli nationalism and decades of impunity granted to Israeli extremism by the United States.
And a principled position is what Democratic voters are looking for. A wide range of views of Israel remains among Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters, but there is much less diversity when it comes to the genocide in Gaza. The left and center of the United States electorate are clearly against this and want it to stop. Even enough of the right opposes it sufficiently for Trump to at least make a show of trying to stop it.
Opposing genocide is about as fundamental as can be on the value scale. People are seeing that supporting Israel’s genocide is, for most Democrats, a question of politics, and, at that, a question of pleasing elite political donors and lobbyists.
In other words, it’s about kowtowing to AIPAC, which has become a political albatross. It’s a political loser and an ethical black hole.
Yet, even so, Democrats like Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Gallego, and certainly absolute pawns like Torres remain reluctant to cross the line.
Pro-Israel groups on a mission to pull Democrats back
It is not only politicians who find themselves in a bind over Israel. American pro-Israeli groups, as well as some Israeli organizations, are trying to find the right balance of continuing to support Israel while also rekindling some affection for the state among liberals.
It started with a blatantly empty gesture by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) two weeks ago.
AJC sent $25,000 to the Archdiocese of New York to help repair the Holy Family Church in Gaza that was heavily damaged when it was targeted by Israel. AJC, of course, supported the blatantly absurd Israeli story that the church was hit by accident (Israel had targeted the church numerous times prior), and the political stunt had little impact.
It did, however, set the stage for the United Jewish Appeal-Federation donation of $1 million for humanitarian aid in Gaza.
The donation is going to IsraAID, an Israeli humanitarian organization. IsraAID is a genuine humanitarian group, but part of its mission has always been to use its humanitarian efforts to improve Israel’s image in the world.
Thus, when Israel offers humanitarian assistance to a disaster-struck country, IsraAID is often the means by which they can deliver it.
Of course, in Gaza, this presents difficulties on several levels. IsraAID can’t actually go into Gaza, but it turns out they have been working with Palestinian partners there.
IsraAID has been working in secret for the past year, trying to help Palestinian groups in Gaza navigate the many Israeli roadblocks—solid and bureaucratic—and helping to bring some meager amounts of aid into Gaza. Yet, while they were certainly keeping it secret to protect whomever they work with in Gaza, it is equally certain they would not have wanted the Israeli public to know what they were doing until now.
According to IsraAID, they began working in Gaza a year ago, after having worked in Israel for the first time in their own history following the October 7 attacks. To date, there has been no indication that IsraAID does anything beyond coordinating with the Israeli army and helping to get some supplies into Gaza, although their mere presence as an Israeli group raises understandable suspicions.
For the UJA, then, giving to IsraAID provides the salve for many of their own members who are not willing to oppose Israel’s genocide but are uncomfortable with the images of starving babies in Gaza. Since the group cannot actually go into Gaza, the money will go to supplies and to the Israeli organization’s overhead. It will make virtually no difference on the ground.
But the fact of the donation and the concomitant revelation that IsraAID has been working in Gaza will be very helpful for Democrats and pro-Israel groups who want to argue that the genocide is not the work of Israel as a whole but the product of a corrupt, right-wing prime minister who partnered with the most radical nationalists in his country. They will try to make this case despite Israelis themselves overwhelmingly saying they don’t care about people starving in Gaza.
This is precisely why the pressure on Democrats cannot let up, and must not be bought off with mealy-mouthed word salad and useless gestures. It must continue until Democrats, as a party, are taking a principled stand against not only Israel’s current genocide in Gaza, not only its impending genocide in the West Bank, but against a U.S. policy that has allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians of the most basic rights of life and liberty.
The current state of affairs is the result of Israeli racism, settler colonialism, apartheid, and nationalism. None of it can continue without our support. It’s time we expect our leaders to stop it.
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