GAZA, (PIC)
The scenes broadcast by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of the activists of the “Freedom Flotilla” were not just individual behavior from a far-right minister, but turned within hours into a major international issue that reopened a long file of accusations related to the mentality of abuse and humiliation within the Israeli system, whether against Palestinians or even against foreign solidarity activists.
The video snippet, which showed activists handcuffed, their heads to the ground, amid screaming, insults, and a political show by Ben-Gvir, did not only create a wide diplomatic crisis with several Western countries, but also revealed the scale of the contradiction between the image Israel tries to market of itself, and the actions of arrogance, genocide, and systematic humiliation.
Widespread anger
What is remarkable about the international reactions is that they were not limited to traditional diplomatic statements, but reached the point of summoning Israel’s ambassadors in a number of Western capitals, including France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada, in a step that reflects the scale of embarrassment the video caused to Western governments before their public opinion.
European officials described the scenes as “shocking”, “humiliating”, and “violating human dignity”, while Madrid demanded the imposition of urgent European sanctions on Ben-Gvir, in an ongoing and consecutive development that reflects a shift in European political language toward the Israeli government.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez went further than mere condemnation, when he announced that his country would raise the file within the European Union institutions, in an indication that the issue has transcended its humanitarian dimension to turn into a political and moral test for Europe’s relationship with Israel.
What actually shocked the West?
The paradox is that what the activists of the “Freedom Flotilla” were subjected to is nothing new for Palestinians or human rights organizations, but it seemed shocking when it occurred before public cameras, and with this superiority, arrogance, provocation, and human insults, and against activists many of whom hold Western nationalities.
The official West, which for long years ignored the testimonies of Palestinian prisoners about the torture they are subjected to in Israeli occupation prisons, systematic humiliation, and even rape, found itself this time before direct images that are difficult to justify or ignore, especially since those who appeared in the video are not fighters, but civilian solidarity activists who came to break the blockade on Gaza.
This is precisely why the issue gained its gravity, because it conveyed a miniature scene of Israel’s mentality and what it practices against Palestinians and prisoners.
From the Freedom Flotilla to Israeli prisons
This attack also brought back light to what has been happening inside Israeli prisons for years, and especially since the Zionist war of genocide on Gaza after October 2023.
According to statements by the spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, it was verified that Israel killed around 90 Palestinian detainees inside Israeli prisons as a result of torture, maltreatment, negligence, and inhumane violations.
UN and human rights reports spoke about Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons being subjected to multiple patterns of violations, which included severe physical torture, starvation, deliberate medical negligence, in addition to sexual violence and humiliating assaults, as well as prolonged shackling, sleep deprivation, beating, dragging, and psychological humiliation, in practices that human rights bodies said reflect a systematic pattern of inhumane treatment inside Israeli detention centers.
The most important thing in the ongoing shift is that accusations related to torture, humiliation, and violations inside Israeli prisons are no longer limited to the Palestinian narrative or the reports of human rights organizations, which Israel has always faced with skepticism and denial, but have increasingly begun to find their way into the Western media itself, with all the deep political connotations that carries. When influential Western newspapers and media institutions, some of which were historically known for their proximity to the Israeli narrative or their extreme caution in approaching this file, begin to publish testimonies and reports talking about torture, sexual violence, starvation, and humiliation inside detention centers, this reflects a gradual shift in the nature of the ongoing debate within the West about Israel, and portends the erosion of part of the immunity it enjoyed for decades.
Continuous shocks inside Western media
Influential journalistic institutions are approaching, in an unprecedented way, files that Israel succeeded for decades in keeping within the margin of the Palestinian narrative or human rights reports that are questioned politically and managerially. The debate about violations inside Israeli detention centers is no longer confined to statements by humanitarian organizations or testimonies of Palestinian prisoners, but is gradually finding its place in the widely influential Western press, with all the connotations that carries that transcend the human rights dimension to the level of a shift in the political and moral mood within the West itself.
In this context, reports and investigations published by prominent Western and Israeli newspapers sparked a wide debate about the nature of what is happening inside Israeli prisons, and the scale of violence practiced against Palestinian detainees since the war on Gaza. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz spoke in an unusual tone about the transformation of a number of Palestinian prisoners into “skeletons”, and linked this sharp deterioration in their conditions to the policies led by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir inside prisons, including starvation, abuse, and systematic tightening of detention conditions.
In the United States, American writer and journalist Nicholas Kristof stirred a storm of controversy after publishing testimonies of former Palestinian detainees who spoke about violations described as horrific, including torture, sexual violence, and systematic humiliation. The importance of these testimonies lay not only in their content, but in the fact that they came out through Western media platforms with a wide influence on public opinion and decision-makers.
The danger of these shifts lies in that they point to a decline in the ability of the traditional Israeli narrative to contain criticism or isolate it within the narrow human rights framework, as accusations related to torture, insult, and collective punishment are gradually creeping into the heart of the general Western debate, after long years of political and media protection that Israel enjoyed. This is what makes the scenes of abuse of the “Freedom Flotilla” activists more than just a passing incident, but part of a broader picture that has begun to take shape globally about the nature of the system that manages the war, prisons, and the blockade at the same time.
Ben-Gvir: An exception or a system?
Some Israeli and Western circles try to present Ben-Gvir and others as an exception and an extreme case separate from the “Israeli state”, but recent international reactions pose a different question: Is the problem in the person of the minister, or in the political environment that brought him to the heart of power?
He does not work outside the government, but occupies one of the most sensitive ministries, and enjoys the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his policies inside prisons, checkpoints, and Jerusalem have been repeated for years without real accountability.
For this reason, observers believe that what appeared in the “Freedom Flotilla” video is not an individual deviation, but an intensive expression of a political and security culture based on deterrence through humiliation, and on showing strength before Palestinians and those in solidarity with them.
In a remarkable intervention on his page on the X platform, the specialist in Israeli affairs, Ihab Jabarin, presents a critical reading of this idea. Jabarin says, “If Ben-Gvir does not represent Israel… according to Saar, and Smotrich does not represent it according to Lapid, and Netanyahu does not represent it according to the opposition because he is “hijacking the state”, and the settlers and hilltop youth do not represent Israel, according to Netanyahu, and the Haredim do not represent the “Israeli” because they do not enlist, and the army soldiers do not represent “Israel’s values” whenever a new scandal appears in a church in southern Lebanon, and the opposition does not represent it according to the government, and the judiciary does not represent it according to the right, and the protesters in Tel Aviv do not represent Israel according to the coalition, and the international community deals with “the actions of the government of Israel” as if they are something separate from Israel itself and do not represent it… fine, who the hell represents this wilderness?!”
This reveals that the crisis is no longer confined to the variance between political currents, but has turned into an open internal conflict over defining the identity of the entity itself. Between Ben-Gvir and Smotrich on one side, and Netanyahu on the other, and between the military establishment, the police, the judicial system, and the currents of settlers and the religious right, a difference in vision does not appear as much as a dispute over who owns the right to define “Israel” and who actually represents it.
What attracts attention in this fragmentation is that it does not produce a natural pluralism as much as it reveals a state of continuous exchange of accusation of stripping “representative legitimacy”, where each party accuses the other that it does not embody the image of the state and does not reflect its essence, while everyone practices, to close degrees, the same logic of arrogance of power and its tools, including structural violence, institutional hegemony, and reproducing the discourse of superiority and control. Thus, the dispute does not seem like mere contradictions within a political system, but a reflection of a single structure whose centers multiply but intersect in their behavior, where roles overlap between the political, security, and religious in producing a single approach based on organized arrogance and managing the conflict as a permanent condition for existence.
In this context, the question is no longer only who represents “Israel”, but whether this entity still retains the possibility of a coherent definition of itself, or whether it has become closer to a system contested by power centers from within, while uniting in actual practice around a single pattern of hegemony, reproducing itself no matter how faces and discourses change.
An image crisis or a legitimacy crisis?
The current crisis does not only relate to Israel’s media image, but touches the legitimacy of its entity before the world. The Western debate about Israel is no longer revolving around the media image or political reputation management only, but is heading gradually toward redefining its position within the Western moral and political system itself.
The continuous accumulation of images of the war of genocide on Gaza, with its accompanying continuous mass killing of civilians, and wide targeting of children in the sight of the world, and violations inside prisons, and scenes of public humiliation, along with the arrogance of settlers in the West Bank and their attacks on Palestinians and Christian sanctities in Jerusalem, contributed to moving Israel from the position of “the ally whose criticism is managed with caution” to “a file that imposes an escalating moral pressure within the Western structure”, putting Western governments before an increasing contradiction between the discourse of human rights and the practice of political alliance.
This shift was not an emergency moment, but revived a collective memory weighed down by shocking images that preceded the war of genocide, but returned to gain a stronger presence in public awareness, such as the attack on the coffin of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh at her funeral, the burning of the Dawabsheh family, the storming of the Ibrahimi Mosque, and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, in addition to documented scenes of Israeli soldiers and settlers dealing with killing and insult as an ordinary practice or even a subject for boasting. With the accumulation of these facts, current events no longer seem separate, but an extension of an extended structure of behavior that reproduces itself in different forms over time.
This shift did not come only from within official institutions or traditional media, but deepened due to a wide and unprecedented Western popular movement, which went out to streets, universities, and alternative media platforms, and put the Palestinian cause back into the heart of the public debate, outside the monopoly of the traditional official narrative. This movement is no longer marginal, but has become a pressuring factor on political and media elites, pushing them gradually to reconsider the limits of unconditional support for Israel, especially with the widening gap between what is visually displayed of field practices and the traditional Western political discourse.
In this context, bolder media voices in criticizing Israel emerged within the United States, among them the American media personality Tucker Carlson, who described it as “the most violent country in the world”, and accused it of fueling chaos in the Middle East, along with his criticism of the continuation of unconditional US support for it. These shifts, in the media as in the street, reflect a gradual transition from the stage of “critical reservation” to the stage of “public accountability”, deepening pressures on Western governments that find themselves before a public opinion that no longer accepts the contradiction between declared values and actual policies.
Thus, Israel is no longer just a political file in Western foreign policy, but has begun to turn in some contexts into a moral burden that confuses the internal balance of the Western discourse itself, and reveals the limits of the ability of political and media systems to manage an escalating contradiction between strategic commitments on one hand, and increasing demands for justice and human rights on the other.
A revealing moment
The importance of the “Freedom Flotilla” incident lies in that it did not add a new fact as much as it re-conveyed an old image to the level of direct vision, so the suffering of Palestinians moved from the circle of human rights reports and documented testimonies to the public international scene that does not need vehicles of explanation or interpretation. The image that sparked the wave of anger in Europe is nothing but a concentrated and limited reflection of what Palestinians describe as an extended reality repeated daily inside prisons, checkpoints, and under blockade, since long decades of asymmetrical conflict.
In this context, the current crisis does not seem like a separate event or a passing diplomatic dispute, but a new episode in a visual and moral accumulation that has begun to link separate incidents within one broader narrative. Each incident of this type is no longer read by itself, but as part of a repeated pattern that reproduces images of humiliation and excessive force, consolidating in the international awareness a sense that what is happening is not situational exceptions, but a structure of behavior repeated in different forms over time.
Therefore, this moment seems like a par excellence revealing moment, not because it reveals something new, but because it removes layers of justification and interpretation that were separating discourse from reality. With the wide circulation of images and scenes, and the accumulation of international reactions, the mentality of force and subjugation has become more exposed before world public opinion, so that it is no longer possible to confine it within the discourse of “democracy” and “security”, after the scenes of humiliation themselves became a fixed part of the narrative that pursues Israel in the international space.
