The Handshake Over the Terrified Prisoner
The Handshake Over the Terrified Prisoner
A Jewish state whose minister boasts that Palestinian prisoners wet themselves from fear, while other ministers offer political respectability to the European far right, is not committing two unrelated errors. It is making one coherent choice. It treats another person’s terror as evidence of strength and support for Israel as evidence of decency. In the prison, the body must tremble; in the diplomatic salon, the hand must be shaken. The two scenes express the same conception of power.
Itamar Ben-Gvir does not describe prisoners losing control of their bodies as a disgrace of the system under his authority. He presents their fear as an achievement. Humiliation is not an accidental consequence of policy but its desired confirmation: another human body becomes the surface on which the state displays its sovereignty. Power has succeeded because someone weaker has been reduced to visible, involuntary terror.
At the same time, Israeli officials are opening formal channels with European parties previously kept at a distance because of their fascist roots, antisemitic histories or proximity to Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi milieus. Politicians from the National Rally, Vox, the Sweden Democrats and related movements may now stand beside Israeli flags, praise Jerusalem, condemn Islam and present themselves as defenders of the Jews. Israeli ministers receive them as partners and invite them to conferences ostensibly devoted to combating antisemitism.
The terrified prisoner and the diplomatic handshake belong to the same political grammar. Inside the prison, power demonstrates its ability to reduce a human being to bodily fear. Outside it, power declares that political usefulness can erase an inconvenient history and excuse a continuing politics of ethnic hierarchy. The prisoner is to be humiliated; the European nationalist is to be absolved. Both acts proclaim who now possesses the authority to terrify, forgive and define political respectability.
This is more serious than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy still recognizes the norm it violates. Here the norm itself is being replaced. Jewish memory was meant to make certain mechanisms permanently recognizable: collective suspicion, ethnic classification, the cult of force, the degradation of minorities, the conversion of fear into obedience and the designation of entire populations as threats or contaminants. Its ethical force depended on recognizing these mechanisms even when they returned under other flags and selected different victims.
That capacity is now being deliberately dismantled. The word “Nazi” increasingly ceases to name a political structure and becomes a portable label attached to Israel’s current enemy. Iran is called a Nazi regime, Hamas is inserted into the iconography of 1939, and every confrontation is presented as another version of the same absolute historical recurrence. Meanwhile, European movements preserving actual fascist and antisemitic continuities may be rehabilitated if they express sufficient admiration for Israel.
Iran is a brutal dictatorship. It represses its own population, threatens Israel and supports armed organizations throughout the region. None of this requires transforming Hitler into an all-purpose adjective. The compulsive invocation of Nazism does not sharpen perception; it destroys distinctions until evil comes to mean nothing more than hostility toward Israel.
Once that substitution has been completed, European nationalists no longer need to confront the political culture of their own movements. They need only praise Israel, condemn Islamism, endorse Israeli military power and describe Jerusalem as the forward fortress of Western civilization. The Israeli handshake becomes a certificate of purification, while support for Israel begins to function as retrospective absolution.
This is not an accidental diplomatic flirtation but a transaction. At an Israeli government conference against antisemitism, European far-right politicians were welcomed while major Jewish figures and organizations withdrew in protest. The responsible minister did not apologize to the Jews who regarded these invitations as a betrayal. He apologized to the far-right guests for the criticism directed against them and thanked them as friends and allies.
That scene contained the entire policy. Representatives of movements rooted in traditions of antisemitism were received in Jerusalem as allies against antisemitism, while Jews objecting to their rehabilitation left the room. This was not an unfortunate contradiction or a failure of public relations. It was the message.
The European far right receives what it urgently needs: recognition by the Jewish state. Its leaders can return home and claim that accusations of antisemitism, fascist continuity or ethnic nationalism are obsolete slanders. How could their politics remain dangerous when Israeli ministers shake their hands? How could they be contaminated by their histories when Jerusalem recognizes them as defenders of the Jews and of Western civilization?
Israel receives something equally useful. It gains allies prepared to defend almost any Israeli action, attack Muslim minorities, denounce liberal institutions and interpret opposition to Israeli power as part of a civilizational war. These movements do not admire Israel despite its movement toward ethnic nationalism, permanent emergency and contempt for judicial restraint. Increasingly, they admire Israel because of it.
Each side certifies the other. The European far right tells Israel that its radicalization is courage. Israel tells the European far right that its radicalization is friendship with the Jews. The handshake completes the exchange.
That is why the prisoner who loses control of his body from fear cannot be treated as an isolated prison scandal. He is the internal truth of the external alliance. Israel increasingly offers the radical right a living demonstration of the state it desires: ethnically defined, organized around permanent danger, impatient with courts, suspicious of minorities and proud of its capacity to make unwanted people afraid.
The humiliation of the prisoner is therefore not a deviation from this political friendship. It is its obscene emblem. A minister who boasts of another person’s terror is announcing a definition of sovereignty in which power becomes real when another body trembles, order is restored when the vulnerable lose control of themselves, and the state proves its strength through humiliation.
This should terrify Jews before it fascinates anyone else. Instead, it is presented as evidence that Jewish weakness has ended. The political imagination is instructed to understand history as a reversal of positions: Jews once faced prisons, guards, weapons and humiliation; today a Jewish state possesses prisons, guards, weapons and terrified prisoners. The conclusion is no longer that humiliation must never again become an instrument of politics. It is that Jews must never again occupy the humiliated position.
“Never again” is reduced to “never again to us.”
Yet a deeper humiliation is concealed within this spectacle of strength. The politician proud of the terrified prisoner is not merely degrading someone weaker. He is accepting the persecutor’s definition of power as authoritative. Historical advancement is measured by the ability to occupy the position from which another person can be made to tremble. The mechanism is not rejected; only the distribution of roles is changed.
This is mimetic self-humiliation. It is not liberation from the persecutor’s world, but an admission that no higher conception of strength has been found. A political order built beneath the memory of persecution does not abolish the persecutor’s position. It struggles to secure a place beside it and to prove that it too can operate its gestures, instruments and pleasures.
The raised arm and the extended hand belong to this same political theatre. When a straight-arm gesture performed during an event connected with Donald Trump’s inauguration was immediately recognized and celebrated by neo-Nazi and radical-right circles, Benjamin Netanyahu defended its performer as a great friend of Israel. Friendship with Israel was treated as sufficient evidence of innocence, as though political meaning could be erased by demonstrating usefulness to the Jewish state.
Political gestures do not mean only what their author later claims to have intended. They also mean through the traditions that recognize them, the audiences that celebrate them and the alliances they make visible. When a gesture historically associated with domination is welcomed by movements preserving its political longing, there is no innocent ambiguity left to protect. The raised arm announces hierarchy; the extended hand seals mutual recognition. One says that we know who should be afraid, while the other confirms that we recognize one another as legitimate.
Israel should not be flattered by such recognition. It should be horrified.
We have no right to place words into the mouths of Jews who were led to their deaths. They were not a single political subject, and their murder did not leave one instruction for those who followed. We nevertheless know what their deaths did not authorize. They did not authorize the imitation of the persecutor’s position, the inheritance of his gestures, the pleasure of domination or the conviction that another human being’s terror proves one’s own greatness. Their deaths were not a licence to move to the safer side of the same machinery.
The deepest profanation of memory does not occur when the Holocaust is forgotten. It occurs when the Holocaust remains permanently present as justification for the determination never again to become the victim, even at the price of learning to resemble the perpetrator.
This is not the banal claim that Israel is repeating Nazi Germany. History does not repeat itself with such theatrical obedience. The claim is more exacting: humiliation, ethnic selection, collective suspicion and the enjoyment of unrestrained domination do not change their nature because the identity of the person operating them has changed.
Nor is anyone being judged for the crimes of parents or grandparents. Guilt is not hereditary, but political traditions are not chromosomes. They survive through parties, institutions, language, symbols, exclusions, attacks on minorities and conscious acts of rehabilitation. A movement does not become democratic because its leaders have learned to smile beside an Israeli flag. It becomes democratic only by abandoning the political machinery of ethnic hierarchy.
Friendship with Israel is not such an abandonment. Increasingly, it is being accepted as its substitute.
Israel should therefore stop asking whether European and American radicals say pleasant things about Jews. It should ask what they say about citizenship, Muslims, migrants, courts, political violence, historical responsibility and the limits of national sovereignty. It should ask whether they reject antisemitism because they reject the machinery of ethnic hatred, or whether they merely wish to redirect that machinery toward another population.
The Israeli government does not want these questions. It wants gratitude. It has discovered political forces that admire Israel precisely when democratic institutions and Jewish organizations recoil from its transformation. In exchange, Israel offers them something no public-relations campaign could purchase: a Jewish seal of respectability.
This mutual recognition should frighten Israeli society more than the ritual discovery of another Hitler abroad. A state that identifies Nazis among all its enemies but refuses to recognize authoritarian and fascist mechanisms among those requesting its blessing has not learned too much from history. It has learned to instrumentalize history so completely that memory now protects the forces it was meant to expose.
A prisoner loses control of his body from fear, and an Israeli minister takes pride in it. Across Europe and America, movements carrying authoritarian, fascist and antisemitic inheritances extend their hands toward Jerusalem. Israeli officials accept those hands and call the gesture a common struggle against hatred. The cameras record, an arm rises, the hands meet, and the terrified human being disappears beneath them.
Israel calls this a victory over antisemitism. It is not a victory. It is the moment when Jewish memory is used to absolve the political forces it was meant to make recognizable, while Jewish strength is measured by the ability to occupy a place beside the persecutor.
That is not triumph over historical humiliation. It is mimetic self-humiliation elevated into state policy.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
