The word “subhumans” must appear as a question, not as an affirmation. It names the operation that makes political cruelty possible: reducing the other to an inferior form of existence. In Milei’s Argentina, that operation can be recognized in a public language saturated with insults: “kukas,” “leftist pieces of shit,” “orcs,” “mandrills,” parasites of the state, enemies of freedom. This is not merely rhetorical vulgarity. It is a pedagogy of dehumanization. A society that becomes accustomed to naming its adversaries in this way also becomes accustomed to seeing them suffer without scandal. This is why the mirror of Gaza is so unbearable. There, the language of dehumanization has accompanied extreme material destruction: Palestinians turned into an undifferentiated threat, civilians reduced to suspects, an entire population treated as an obstacle. The comparison does not erase the differences between Argentina and Palestine; it presupposes them. But it allows us to perceive a moral continuity: when political language abandons the idea of common humanity, violence ceases to appear as a crime and begins to present itself as cleansing, defense, adjustment, or liberation.
The position of Javier Milei’s government toward the State of Israel should not be read as just another eccentricity of its foreign policy, nor as a simple declaration of ideological affinity with Benjamin Netanyahu. It is something more serious. What is condensed in it is a profound transformation of the Argentine political imagination: the abandonment of that grammar of human rights which, with all its limitations, organized much of democratic legitimacy after 1983.
Argentina was not only a country that recovered democracy after a dictatorship. It was also a country that attempted to turn the memory of state terror into a political criterion. “Never Again” did not only mean the retrospective condemnation of the crimes of the dictatorship. It meant, at least in its highest aspiration, the affirmation that no state could sovereignly dispose of the bodies, lives, memories, and suffering of those who had been declared enemies, subversives, disposable, or nonexistent.
For that reason, Milei’s unconditional support for Netanyahu’s coalition government is not a matter external to Argentine politics. It is a direct affront to that tradition. Not only because the Argentine government aligns itself with a state policy denounced by international bodies, jurists, United Nations rapporteurs, and human rights organizations as part of a machinery of destruction directed against the Palestinian people. But also because that alignment reveals, by contrast, the normative core of the project that Milei is unfolding within Argentina itself.
The same gaze that accepts the devastation of Gaza as collateral damage in a supposed civilizational war is the one that, domestically, conceives of pensioners, public-sector workers, teachers, students, people with disabilities, the sick, the poor, and entire communities as accounting obstacles. This is not a matter of mechanically comparing different situations. It is a matter of identifying a structural affinity: wherever life becomes an impediment to accumulation, to territorial appropriation, to resource extraction, or to the fantasy of an unlimited corporate sovereignty, that life begins to be treated as surplus.
Francesca Albanese has shown that violence against Palestine cannot be understood only as military violence. It is also an economy, a network of complicities, a device of legitimation and silencing. Her analysis allows us to see that genocide is sustained not only by the weapons that kill, but also by the discourses that justify, the corporations that benefit, the states that protect, the media that displace attention, and the institutions that persecute those who name the crime [*].
From this perspective, Israel functions as a mirror of the West. But in the Argentine case, that mirror returns an especially painful image. What appears there is the inversion of the democratic legacy of human rights. Milei does not merely abandon Argentina’s diplomatic prudence. He reconfigures Argentina’s place in the world as an ideological appendage of the United States and Israel, and in doing so turns foreign policy into a pedagogy of cruelty: it teaches which lives deserve mourning, which lives may be sacrificed, and which peoples may be dispossessed without official language losing its moralizing tone.
The decisive question, then, is not only why Milei supports Netanyahu. The question is why much of the Argentine press still does not dare to read that support as an interpretive key to the Milei project as a whole. Because doing so would require recognizing that the destruction of the public sector, the privatization of common goods, the surrender of strategic resources, the repression of social protest, and the disciplining of vulnerable bodies are not accidents of a harsh economic policy. They are the domestic reverse of one and the same doctrine: the doctrine according to which the world belongs to those who can appropriate it, and those who obstruct that appropriation must be neutralized, expelled, or abandoned.
The Argentina that made human rights into a public language cannot remain indifferent before this inversion. If “Never Again” still has any meaning, it must also mean this: never again accepting that a state declare an entire population a threat; never again allowing security to be invoked in order to justify destruction; never again turning victims into administrative problems; never again separating the memory of state terror from present forms of abandonment, dispossession, and violence.
[*] This reflection takes as its background Francesca Albanese’s article “Anatomía de una difamación,” published in Le Monde diplomatique en español. Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, responds in that text to the international campaign of discredit directed against her mandate. She situates the destruction of Gaza within a broader framework: not only as military violence, but as the result of a political economy of occupation, a network of state, corporate, media, and institutional complicities, and a profound crisis of international law. Her formulation of Israel as a “mirror of the West” helps us understand why Gaza does not only call Israel into question, but also the Western governments that sustain, justify, or silence that violence. In the Argentine case, this reading allows us to interpret Javier Milei’s government’s support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as the symptom of a broader mutation: the abandonment of the democratic grammar of human rights and the acceptance of a politics that distinguishes between protected lives, sacrificable lives, and surplus lives.
Albanese, F. (2026, March). Anatomía de una difamación: Francesca Albanese responde a sus detractores [Anatomy of a defamation: Francesca Albanese responds to her detractors]. Le Monde diplomatique en español, 365, 16–17. https://mondiplo.com/anatomia-de-una-difamacion