This is the face of Israel

This week, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, posted a video on social media of himself taunting flotilla activists held by Israeli forces.

In one clip, a handcuffed activist shouts “Free Palestine” as Ben-Gvir strolls past. She is immediately seized by the hair and shoved to the ground by security personnel. Ben-Gvir looks on, gleeful. In another, dozens of detainees are shown bound and kneeling with their foreheads to the floor, forced into stress positions as the Israeli regime’s national anthem blares from a loudspeaker. Ben-Gvir waves a large Israeli flag and bellows at them: “Welcome to Israel – we are in charge here.”

Ben-Gvir knows he can do this and face no serious consequences. Why would he think otherwise? His country has just got away with a genocide livestreamed to a global audience.

There have been condemnations, though, notably, from governments whose citizens happen to be among the detained. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, called the footage “unacceptable” and a violation of human dignity. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, declared that he would not tolerate the mistreatment of his country’s citizens and announced that he would push at the European Union level for sanctions against Ben-Gvir specifically, having already banned him from entering Spain. Even the United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said Ben-Gvir had “betrayed the dignity of his nation”.

But, however genuine the outrage, sanctioning Ben-Gvir targets just one cog in a far larger genocidal machine. It is the same tactic European states have deployed when confronted with illegal settlement-building in the occupied West Bank: Sanctioning a handful of violent settlers while leaving untouched the state structure that plans, funds and protects the settlement enterprise. The gesture creates the appearance of consequences without threatening the system that produces them.

This is not accountability. It is the international community drawing a line just far enough from its own complicity to feel clean. Ben-Gvir did not build the prisons, order the systematic torture within them, or impose the blockade that the flotilla was trying to break. He is one minister in a government that has carried out a genocide with the material and diplomatic support of many of the very Western states now lining up to denounce him. Removing him from the equation changes nothing. The prisons remain. The blockade remains. And the genocide continues.

The video has also struck a nerve inside Israel. Netanyahu publicly rebuked Ben-Gvir, saying his conduct was “not in line with Israel’s values and norms”. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar addressed him directly on X: “You knowingly caused harm to our state in this disgraceful display – and not for the first time.” Saar added that Ben-Gvir had “undone tremendous, professional, and successful efforts made by so many people”. For Saar and Netanyahu, the problem is not what Ben-Gvir is doing; it is that he is showing it so brazenly. The concern is optics – that a video made visible, to a European audience and with European citizens in it, what has long been standard practice towards Palestinians.