SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: It wasn’t the abuse that shook them. Not the humiliation. Not the overt sadism. What truly troubled them was how it looked to the world.

https://x.com/MauricioLapchik/status/2057378141123776550

Mauricio Lapchik

Translated from Hebrew

There’s something almost inconceivable here, bordering on the absurd, in the way large swaths of Israel’s liberal camp responded to the video posted by the Kiryat Arba settler about the treatment of flotilla activists.

It wasn’t the abuse that shook them. Not the humiliation. Not the overt sadism. What truly troubled them was how it looked to the world.

I read those same familiar phrases again: “This is damage to hasbara,” “This harms Israel,” “This serves the antisemites,” and of course, the holiest of Israeli expressions: “This is a hasbara terrorist attack.”

As if the problem isn’t reality itself, but whoever documented it without filters. And in a certain sense, these responses are already more frightening than the video itself.

Because the whole world already knows, but almost no one here is still willing to look reality in the eye.

The whole world knows what prisons and torture camps look like where thousands of Palestinian prisoners are held. The whole world knows that abuse, sadism, and violence are not deviations from the system but part of it. That there are places in Israel where people enter and simply die or disappear.

But as long as it’s possible to keep pretending, many prefer to continue ignoring reality.

And I wonder: After everything Israel has wrought in the past two and a half years, what image exactly is left to save?

After more than 22,000 children killed in Gaza. After entire neighborhoods erased from the face of the earth. After hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank living under the daily terror of settlers and soldiers, under brutal occupation and a regime of Jewish supremacy.

So what exactly did Ben Gvir’s video destroy that hadn’t already been destroyed before?

But the truth is that this video was actually a rare moment of honesty, because Ben Gvir didn’t invent a thing. He simply stopped hiding reality and started taking pride in it.

Because what we saw there wasn’t an anomaly in the Israeli landscape of recent years.

On the contrary.

It was its natural product.

The most honest embodiment of a society that has grown accustomed to living among the dead and feeding on death.

Ben Gvir is simply saying out loud, with a smile, what an entire system has long been doing. And that’s why it’s still so hard to hear those who insist that “Ben Gvir doesn’t represent Israel.”

Ben Gvir is Israel of 2026.

After all, he’s a senior minister in the government. He’s not a footnote. He’s not a glitch. He sits at the heart of power, enjoys broad public support, and receives institutional backing from the state’s institutions and a wide platform in the mainstream media time and again. He controls the police, and the police serve him and his spirit.

And the truth is that those who continue even now to try to blur these horrors are no better than Ben Gvir, because there comes a moment when hiding a crime becomes complicity in it.

But all this didn’t start with Ben Gvir.

Not with Netanyahu, and not on October 7.

The great feeder of all this evil is the occupation.

Because you can’t rule over another people for decades without that rule corrupting those who wield it as well.

You can’t hold millions of people without rights, under oppression, siege, fear, and humiliation, and then expect the occupying society to be a democratic, humane, and mentally healthy one.

The occupation is a disaster for Palestinians. It is a crime against humanity. And it is also the wound within which Israel is steadily destroying itself.

As long as the occupation continues, nothing here will get better. On the contrary.

Everything will continue to deteriorate.

Until finally we can no longer recognize this place, or ourselves within it.