When we hear of so many incidents in which Israeli soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank detain Palestinians and gratuitously ransack their homes (if not completely destroy their homes), one tries to understand what role humiliation plays in the way in which the soldiers orient themselves to their victims.

As a recent film for Al Jazeera’s English channel demonstrates, Israeli soldiers have a peculiar penchant for documenting their wanton violence and uploading their films onto social media platforms. Richard Sanders, the director of the documentary, has remarked in interviews that such films number in the thousands.

One video circulated on social media last January/February is of soldiers occupying a Palestinian home in the refugee camp of Jenin, in the West Bank. The soldiers are in good form, relaxing on the sofa while smoking an argileh (water pipe) and munching on chips. On the floor of the other side of the room sit the Palestinian inhabitants of the house—bound, gagged and blindfolded. Menacing and stirring up their captives, the soldiers laugh and tell jokes. The soldier behind the camera asks another: “What do you wish for”? The other answers: “Relaxing on the beach in Gaza”. And to another: “And what do you wish for”? The soldier makes a thrusting motion with his groin, and says: “Make love on the beach” (according to the inserted English subtitles; another version I have seen reads differently: “fuck the Arabs in Gaza”).

Other videos document soldiers in Gazan homes ransacking personal belongings and dressing up in women’s lingerie, or forcing hapless Palestinian detainees to hold and wave Israeli flags. There are also video’s of soldiers and Israeli citizens mocking Palestinians by dressing up as prisoners, with hands bound and eyes blindfolded. Some of these are performed by Israeli children, egged on by their parents. And then there are other short films of Israeli soldiers cheering while in the background they wantonly detonate and destroy Palestinian buildings.

As Amnesty International has documented, very often these are civil properties—universities, municipal houses—that the Israeli soldiers themselves have been occupying. Of late, media reports note the celebratory demeanor of Israelis concerning images of a huddled mass of Palestinians being forcibly removed from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. These reports note a certain satisfaction with the humiliation and destitution of Palestinians.

The mainstream media and its audience in Israel echo this modality of humiliation. Take for example Yaki Adarr: “We’re not leaving Gaza. You will continue to starve, you will continue to die, your homes will continue to burn, your children will continue to live in the mud, in the nylon”. By “nylon”, he means tents. Or another popular media personality, Itamar Fleischmann: “I don’t have mercy on these Gazans. I don’t think that there is anyone in the state of Israel, in greater Israel, that should have mercy on these Gazans, not on the elderly, not on the young, and not on the children. The Gazans, as far as I am concerned, can starve to death. I don’t care about them. Why should we care about the Gazans?” (Both on YouTube).

While we can develop varying markers by which to categorize such videos, I want to suggest that they can be generically labeled as “compulsive humiliation drives”. As such, they resonate with a deep-seated racism directed toward what in the process transpires as the abject Other—Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Currently, as the genocide in Gaza extends into its second year, this mode of racial humiliation gains sustenance from an apparent "right to unaccountability" Israel enjoys.

It is as though Israeli soldiers can feel good about themselves once they humiliate Palestinians, and once they share such acts of humiliation with their society and the world at large.

Their sense of pride, purpose, and self-respect is somehow dependent on their capacities to maintain a modality of humiliation. They have a pathological need to enter into and fulfil a dynamic of humiliation. Arguably, racism is so entrenched in the psyche of the soldiers that they have to violently humiliate and reduce their captives to some sort of sub-humanity in order to feel their own humanity.

One former Israeli soldier turned activist, interviewed by Owen Jones (December 15, 2023), says that what was difficult for him when serving in Gaza in 2014 was to come across family photographs in the homes they ransacked. In his eyes, the photographs humanized the Palestinians, told stories about them, depicted children and adults, showed them celebrating a wedding or a birth.

It is of course a question of power, of subjugation, demonstrating capacities to dominate the abject Other, expel this polluting other from their midsts. While Palestinians within Israel proper are tolerated as a minority, in the Occupied Territories they are rendered intolerable, subject to a pernicious apartheid regime of governance.

This is evident when we look toward the extreme, or the extremities of political culture in Israel, an extremity that arguably has always been interwoven with the mainstream.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a prime example, such as his employment of the term “disgust” when responding to the ICC’s application for arrest warrants for him and his defense minister. What profoundly bothered him, disgusted him, was being put on a par with Hamas, whose officials were also indicted by the ICC.

“Disgust” evokes revulsion, resonating with a racial aversion Netanyahu embodies towards Palestinians, who are often referred to as “scum” by Israeli politicians. Take the Minister of National Security, Ben-Gvir, on Nov 24, 2023: “My instructions are clear: there are to be no expressions of joy. Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism, victory celebrations give backing to those human scum, for those Nazis”. He is referring to Palestinian celebrations upon the prison release of their relatives, in a deal to release Israeli captives. But what is rather uncanny is his absolute disgust with the abject Other he deems “scum".

The compulsive need to humiliate the Other through wanton, gratuitous violence is almost always anchored in modalities of racism, in the very fibres of a social temperament (what Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century called assabiyya) emerging from settler colonial societies. It is currently encouraged by Western governments’ tacit endowment for Israel’s so-called right to unaccountability.

Norman Saadi Nikro has Australian and Lebanese backgrounds. He is a former Australian Volunteer Abroad, serving in the West Bank of Palestine in 1998-99. His books include The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style,and Civil War in Lebanon (2012); Milieus of ReMemory: Relationalities of Violence, Trauma, andVoice (2019); and Nafssiya: Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism (2024). Since July 2024 he resides in Sydney as an independent scholar and writer.

The article is a republication from PEARLS & IRRITATIONSIRRITATIONS website at:

https://johnmenadue.com/humiliation-and-gratuitous-violence-the-racial-logic-of-israels-right-to-unaccountability/

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