Colonialism is dehumanising. It is something akin to a spectacle that several world leaders and ministers have partially woken up to that fact, after a video showing Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir humiliating the kidnapped Global Sumud Flotilla activists generated much negative attention on social media. Israeli ambassadors were summoned, while the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said that Ben Gvir “betrayed the dignity of his nation.
Ben Gvir did not betray dignity. He exposed Israel’s disregard of dignity. In colonialism, dignity does not exist. The outrage was merely controlled diplomatic theatrics, as dehumanisation spilled over to non-Palestinians.
When images of Palestinians, detained, bound, and held in pits first emerged on social media during the genocide, Israel’s security narrative held sway over colonial dehumanisation. Mainstream media went out of its way to assure its viewers that Israel stated it was acting in accordance with international law.
Now that the flotilla activists faced similar treatment, temporarily, world leaders are shocked. Why weren’t world leaders shocked earlier? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to Ben Gvir’s disgusting behaviour gives a partial insight into diplomacy’s warped reasoning. “Israel has every right to prevent provocative flotillas of Hamas terrorist supporters from entering out waters and reaching Gaza,” Netanyahu stated. “However, the way that Minister Ben Gvir dealt with the flotilla activists is not in line with Israel’s values and norms.”
Rights, terrorist supporters, values and norms. Netanyahu parroted all the terminology that world leaders utilise in their measured condemnations of Israel.
There is always an active space for dehumanisation in colonialism, and world leaders reflect that back to Israel. The bottom line, in this case, is not that Israel cannot dehumanise Palestinians and their supporters. It’s that Israel should not have done so in such an overt way that world leaders had to make statements for their citizens who do not matter to their governments other than being passport holders and therefore can claim their rights.
World leaders are not against colonial dehumanisation. If they were, the 1947 Partition Plan would not have passed. Guatemala’s UN Representative Jorge Garcia Granados, who later served as the country’s first ambassador to Israel, lobbied for partition by dehumanising Palestinians. His rhetoric found a solid audience among UN member states, further reflecting the colonial influence at the UN which still lingers today.
What we see today is a legacy built on earlier decades.
Instead of holding Zionist paramilitaries accountable for their crimes against humanity, world leaders recognised the state of Israel. Not as a colonial enterprise founded upon the 1948 Nakba, but a state without any murderous precedents leading to its inception.
Throughout the decades up to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, world leaders participated in the dehumanisation of Palestinians. Voting for partition was dehumanising, in the same way that normalising all of Israel’s violations and war crimes is dehumanising. Justifying genocide on the false pretext of security concerns is dehumanising. Speaking, albeit hypocritically, on behalf of non-Palestinians while passively viewing Palestinians being burnt to death, blasted into the air by bombs, decapitated into strewn body parts, is dehumanising.
Ben Gvir not only exposed Israel’s politics of dehumanisation. It also exposed the selective morality of Israel’s accomplices. The international community accepts dehumanisation. At this rate, maybe a clause might be written into international law.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
