The Handshake Over the Terrified Prisoner

A Jewish state whose minister boasts that Palestinian prisoners wet themselves from fear, while other ministers offer political respectability to the European far right, is not committing two unrelated errors. It is making one coherent choice. It treats another person’s terror as evidence of strength and support for Israel as evidence of decency. In the prison, the body must tremble; in the diplomatic salon, the hand must be shaken. The two scenes express the same conception of power.

Itamar Ben-Gvir does not describe prisoners losing control of their bodies as a disgrace of the system under his authority. He presents their fear as an achievement. Humiliation is not an accidental consequence of policy but its desired confirmation: another human body becomes the surface on which the state displays its sovereignty. Power has succeeded because someone weaker has been reduced to visible, involuntary terror.

At the same time, Israeli officials are opening formal channels with European parties previously kept at a distance because of their fascist roots, antisemitic histories or proximity to Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi milieus. Politicians from the National Rally, Vox, the Sweden Democrats and related movements may now stand beside Israeli flags, praise Jerusalem, condemn Islam and present themselves as defenders of the Jews. Israeli ministers receive them as partners and invite them to conferences ostensibly devoted to combating antisemitism.

The terrified prisoner and the diplomatic handshake belong to the same political grammar. Inside the prison, power demonstrates its ability to reduce a human being to bodily fear. Outside it, power declares that political usefulness can erase an inconvenient history and excuse a continuing politics of ethnic hierarchy. The prisoner is to be humiliated; the European nationalist is to be absolved. Both acts proclaim who now possesses the authority to terrify, forgive and define political respectability.

This is more serious than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy still recognizes the norm it violates. Here the norm itself is being replaced. Jewish memory was meant to make certain mechanisms permanently recognizable: collective suspicion, ethnic classification, the cult of force, the degradation of minorities, the conversion of fear into obedience and the designation of entire populations as threats or contaminants. Its ethical force depended on recognizing these mechanisms even when they returned under other flags and selected different victims.

That capacity is now being deliberately dismantled. The word “Nazi” increasingly ceases to name a political structure and becomes a portable label attached to Israel’s current enemy. Iran is called a Nazi regime, Hamas is inserted into the iconography of 1939, and every confrontation is presented as another version of the same absolute historical recurrence. Meanwhile, European movements preserving actual fascist and antisemitic continuities may be rehabilitated if they express sufficient admiration for Israel.

Iran is a brutal dictatorship. It represses its own population, threatens Israel and supports armed organizations throughout the region. None........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)