On Pacification as Control and Peace as Justice

1. The Flotilla and the Price of Peace

The flotilla does not merely challenge the blockade of Gaza. It challenges the peace that is being imposed: a peace without justice, without reparations, and without recognition; a peace understood as closing the book, managing the damage, and normalizing violence.

Its significance goes beyond the aid it carries. It disrupts the attempt to reduce Gaza to a technical, humanitarian, or military problem, rather than an indictment of the international order that has allowed its destruction.

The context must not be downplayed. Gaza is neither an abstract humanitarian crisis nor just another episode of violence in the Middle East. International organizations, human rights bodies, and courts have placed what has occurred within the legal and political framework of genocide. Amnesty International stated in December 2024 that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry held that Israel had committed genocide in the Strip. The International Court of Justice has kept open the case filed by South Africa under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, with provisional measures ordered since January 2024. Israel rejects these accusations. But the debate is already part of the legal, diplomatic, and moral discourse of our time.

It is in this context that the flotilla appears. Not merely as a humanitarian operation, but as a tangible disruption of the blockade. Ships attempting to reach a place where aid is treated as a threat. Activists making themselves visible where the dominant order demands invisibility. Bodies standing in the way of a political, military, media, and diplomatic machinery that needs to administer Gaza as a zone of moral exception.

The recent scene shows this starkly: detained activists, kneeling, with their hands tied, while Itamar Ben-Gvir berates them and turns their humiliation into a public message. According to available reports, the video was published by the Israeli Minister of National Security himself following the interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla. The images drew condemnation from the European Commission, European governments, and criticism within the Israeli government itself.

The decisive factor is not merely the humiliation, but its public display. Ben-Gvir does not act like someone who fears being seen. He acts like someone who wants to project an image of authority. Violence does not appear as a clandestine excess of power, but as public pedagogy. In another context, a similar scene might have caused a scandal because it revealed what those in power wished to hide. Here, something different is happening: those in power display the degradation because they know that part of their audience will receive it as a sign of firmness.

Reducing the problem to Ben-Gvir would be insufficient. He is an extremist and grotesque minister, but he is not merely an anomaly. His obscenity reveals a broader structure. The scene works because there is a political community capable of understanding that gesture, integrating it into its affective grammar, and recognizing it as an act of sovereignty. Polls published by the Israel Democracy Institute and reported by various media outlets show, among the Israeli Jewish population, high levels of confidence in the army’s actions in Gaza, along with a marked detachment from Palestinian suffering.

This does not mean that all Israelis think the same way. There are dissidents, human rights organizations, Palestinian citizens of Israel, relatives of hostages, journalists, legal experts, and activists who oppose the war, the blockade, and the drift toward authoritarianism. This plurality exists and must be acknowledged. But it does not negate the main fact: the violence against Gaza has enjoyed a sufficiently broad social base of legitimization, indifference, or acceptance to allow it to drag on for months and for the public humiliation of activists to be presented as a political act.

2. Shared Production of Meaning and Political Closure

Here the philosophical question arises. Israel, under the current political regime, offers an extreme case of shared production of meaning under highly intense security, media, and technological conditions. The enactivist notion of participatory sense-making was developed to explain how meaning emerges in interaction: bodies that coordinate, affects that are regulated, practices that produce a shared world. The scene of the flotilla forces us to look at the political flip side of that intuition. Shared meaning does not guarantee truth, justice, or openness to the other. It can also produce closure, complicity, and indifference.

A society can reach consensus at the cost of excluding the suffering of others from the realm of the sensible. It can produce a shared reality in which the victim ceases to appear as a victim and reappears as a threat, an obstacle, a potential terrorist, a human shield, enemy propaganda, or collateral damage. It can coordinate fears, grievances, and narratives until the devastation of the other becomes a condition of its own security.

We are not faced with a lack of meaning, but with narrative saturation. Everything finds its place: security, the threat, trauma, defense, the enemy, the right to exist, external anti-Semitism, internal treason, military necessity. The symbolic machinery functions because it integrates every objection as a confirmation of itself. Denouncing the massacre is presented as a service to the enemy. Humanitarian aid becomes a provocation. The witness is treated as hostile. The word “genocide” is expelled from the realm of the sayable.

The flotilla introduces a fissure. Not because it is pure, nor because it can single-handedly resolve the history of Palestine, but because it restores a minimal exteriority: ships, proper names, foreign bodies, cameras, testimonies. Its message is elementary: Gaza exists. It cannot be reduced to a theater of operations, a diplomatic dossier, or an internal security problem. It is the place where the scope of the word “humanity” is decided.

That is why the response is so harsh. It is not merely about preventing aid from entering. It is about punishing the very appearance of aid. Bringing aid to Gaza means affirming that there are human beings there in need of protection, care, and recognition. That affirmation shatters the logic of the siege. If the inhabitants of Gaza appear as concrete people—hungry, wounded, and stripped of their possessions—the security narrative loses its stability. That is why the witness must be degraded. That is why the activist must be shown on his knees. The image says: no one enters this narrative without first being subjugated.

The age of social media intensifies this logic. Violence no longer needs to remain hidden. It can circulate as content. It can be posted, shared, celebrated, denounced, or reappropriated. It does not merely document an abuse; it mobilizes audiences. It elicits support, anger, pride, shame, outrage, or mockery. Ben-Gvir’s video does not aim to convince an impartial conscience. It seeks to synchronize affections within a political community that needs to confirm that control, strength, and sovereignty still exist.

Surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence belong to the same regime, though they do not alone explain the violence. Contemporary warfare combines classification, identification, profiling, the circulation of affect, and the production of enemies. The other appears less and less as a face and more and more as a pattern, a threat, data, a target, or a trophy. Dehumanization does not begin solely with the insult. It begins with the organization of the world in such a way that certain lives can no longer speak to us. The face becomes a category. The victim becomes a variable. Hunger becomes a logistical problem. Death becomes a statistic.

From this vantage point, one can better understand the political limit of a certain celebration of shared meaning. If the participatory production of meaning is conceived without a theory of exteriority, it may end up valuing the emergence of common worlds without asking about their victims. But not every common world is just. Not every coordination is ethical. Not every participation produces recognition. There is also participation in denial, in obedience, in indifference, and in cruelty. There are also communities united around a lie.

The flotilla forces us to distinguish between peace and pacification. Peace demands justice, recognition, and reparation. Pacification demands silence, administration, and closure. Peace opens the possibility of a shared future. Pacification stabilizes the victory of some over the political and material disappearance of others.

The peace offered to the world in the name of Israel’s security seems to demand that Gaza be accepted as the price: hunger; the destruction of hospitals, schools, homes, archives, and families; the dead; the survivors turned into surplus; the international community condemning excesses while tolerating the structure that produces them.

Ben-Gvir exposes the obscenity of that pacification. Not because he is an absolute exception, but because he strips away all pretense. Where diplomacy speaks of balance, he reveals domination. Where governments speak of security, he displays humiliation. Where official language maintains a hygienic distance from violence, he turns it into a spectacle. His vulgarity has diagnostic value: it reveals what the presentable grammar of pacification needs to conceal.

But the image also eludes him. That is the risk of any staging of power. What seeks to produce obedience may produce testimony. What aims to display sovereignty reveals moral degradation. What wants to show strength shows fear: fear of aid, of the witness, of judgment, of a peace built on destruction being called by its name.

3. Aid as an Accusation

The flotilla does not threaten true peace. It threatens the tranquility of those who have learned to live with the destruction of Gaza as long as they are not forced to look at it. It makes the foreign ministries uncomfortable—those that condemn the excesses but preserve the structure. It makes the platforms uncomfortable—those that turn humiliation into content. It makes a philosophy uncomfortable that celebrates the emergence of meaning without asking who has been left out of the world that meaning produces.

That is why it matters. It reminds us that there is no peace when the stability of some requires the political, material, and symbolic disappearance of others. It shows that shared meaning can become a machine of closure. It forces us to consider that a society highly attuned to itself may be, precisely for that reason, incapable of peace.

The flotilla carries aid. But it also carries an accusation: against Israel, against the world that negotiates with destruction, against the diplomacies that confuse balance with justice, against the platforms that distribute humiliation, and against every theory that forgets to ask about the victims of the world it describes.