By Daniel Frost
When Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir released footage of himself strolling through Damon security prison to confront female Palestinian prisoners, the easy instinct was to write it off as another publicity stunt. It wasn’t. Watch the clip closely and you’re looking at something far more disturbing: a political system that has normalized cruelty carried out in the state’s name. One of the detained women stood before him and explained that the prisoners had gone three days without water for bathing, basic medical care, or clean clothes. Ben Gvir didn’t deny a word of it. He owned it openly, almost proudly, telling the women the era of humane treatment was over under his watch and boasting about reducing their living conditions to the bare minimum.
This staged display of degradation should force Israel’s friends abroad to sit with an uncomfortable truth. Ben Gvir is not some fringe figure who wandered in from the margins of Israeli politics. He sits at the center of an ultranationalist coalition that controls the country’s key security institutions. For years, Western leaders told themselves a comforting story: that the far right figures in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet were temporary aberrations, glitches in an otherwise democratic system. That story no longer holds. Ben Gvir’s words and actions reflect where the political mainstream actually stands, in a majoritarian consensus that treats basic Palestinian rights as an inconvenient luxury to be discarded whenever it suits the government.
Systemic degradation of prisoners reflects a broader institutional majoritarian consensus rather than a temporary political anomaly.
This mindset is not confined to one minister’s office; it is built into the architecture of the state itself. Take the death penalty bill that recently cleared the Knesset. Under its terms, military courts are required to impose execution as the default sentence for anyone convicted of terror offenses committed with the intent of denying the State of Israel’s existence. That phrasing was chosen deliberately. It shields Jewish extremists who commit identical acts of terrorism against Palestinians, sparing them the gallows, and locks a permanent two tier judicial system into law, with verdicts decided by national identity. Meanwhile, Ben Gvir celebrated a new execution complex complete with viewing booths for victims’ families, and once marked his own birthday with a noose decorated cake. Execution policy, in other words, has been folded into state propaganda.
The cruelty inside the prisons is matched by public incitement on the airwaves. In a recent broadcast, Ben Gvir openly called for thirty to forty targeted assassinations every night in Gaza, insisting the targets need not pose any immediate threat and justifying the killings by declaring that these people are not human and do not deserve to live. Under any standard legal framework, a government minister calling for the systematic killing of non combatants is incitement to war crimes, plain and simple. Inside the Israeli cabinet, however, such statements barely register; they are treated as routine tools for political mobilization ahead of parliamentary elections.
Legislative measures and public incitement embed two tier judicial standards and state sanctioned impunity into governance.
All of which throws the international response into painfully sharp relief. For decades, the West’s main diplomatic instrument has been the ritual statement of condemnation. Every time an Israeli official says something appalling or oversees systemic abuse, the foreign ministries in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris dutifully issue notes expressing deep concern. European officials call the minister’s words unacceptable and inhumane. UN leadership labels them dangerous and outrageous.
Yet not one of those statements has ever saved a single Palestinian life. None of them brought water back to the women in Damon prison, or halted the demolition of homes across the West Bank, or stopped the settlement outposts from spreading, or shielded civilians in Gaza from the daily bombing. Condemnations without enforcement behind them are not merely useless; they are actively harmful, because they let Western governments perform outrage for domestic audiences while continuing to provide the economic, military, and diplomatic cover that keeps the whole system running.
The hypocrisy becomes hard to miss once you set it against global precedent. When comparable violations happen in a state outside the Western orbit, the response is swift: comprehensive trade embargoes, universal jurisdiction warrants, financial blockades, full international isolation. When it comes to Israel, the same governments settle for selective sanctions against minor settlement figures or individual ministers, a bit of cosmetic dressing that masks structural inaction. A travel ban on Ben Gvir from a handful of European countries does nothing to disturb the flow of military aid, intelligence sharing, or preferential trade agreements that keep the apparatus he commands running.
Performative diplomatic condemnations without binding material enforcement reinforce structural impunity for state level violations.
Palestinians have lived with this reality for decades: empty diplomatic posturing while their land is carved up, their freedom of movement strangled, their sons and daughters held in military detention with no end in sight. More than three thousand Palestinians currently sit in prison without charge or trial, tried by military tribunals operating under rules written by the very state prosecuting them. Every time a foreign government limits itself to a press release, it signals to Israeli leaders that violating international law costs nothing. Israeli ministers understand this perfectly. To them, a diplomatic scolding is a minor public relations inconvenience, one that carries no structural consequences.
The torture, the starvation, the deliberate neglect documented across Israeli detention facilities are the direct products of this impunity. When Ben Gvir stands before a camera and mocks female prisoners who cannot get clean water or sanitary supplies, he is not merely talking to his own voters back home. He is taunting the international legal order itself, proving in front of the lens that conventions, treaties, and Geneva declarations have no force inside his prisons.
The political order that governs Israel has stopped pretending to uphold equal rights or human dignity before the law. The far right ideology Ben Gvir champions is not a sideshow; it is state policy. By declining to impose binding arms embargoes, suspend trade agreements, or pursue accountability through international courts, Western powers have turned themselves into passive guarantors of the whole arrangement. And until international diplomacy swaps performative statements for real material consequences, the institutionalized cruelty captured in Ben Gvir’s prison videos will keep on being the daily reality for millions of Palestinians under occupation.
About the Author
Daniel Frost is a Foreign affairs columnist specializing in global geopolitics, European security, and strategic policy.