How Israel's unrestrained brutality signals the beginning of its end

The following exchange, reported from an Israeli cabinet discussion on enforcing the so-called Yellow Line - a boundary inside Gaza marking areas Israel says it will control militarily - captures the mindset of those overseeing the genocide. 

Major General Tamir Yadai, deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army: "When we see an adult suspect, we shoot; a child with a donkey, we arrest."
Itamar Ben-Gvir, minister of national security: "Why not shoot a child with a donkey?"
David "Dudi" Amsalem, minister of regional cooperation: "Who should we shoot first: the child or the donkey?"

That seemingly shocking conversation, held in a cabinet room where senior officials joked about shooting Palestinian children, stripping speaker and subject alike of their humanity, is not merely a slip of the tongue.

To justify Israel's sustained violence, a racist mechanism is required to provide psychological and political legitimacy. The question itself is a representation of that racist ideology in its most brazen form - one that equates Palestinians with animals. 

Such language has been deployed since the start of Israel's war on Gaza, during which various leaders referred to Palestinians as "human animals".

It is a window into the nadir of dehumanisation: a linguistic method of legitimising institutionalised violence that does not distinguish between person and security object, because the goal is "annihilation, expulsion and settlement".

When ministers speak this way, they do not address a person with a story; they invoke a faceless image severed from story and place.

This is a process in which the person becomes a worthless object, and the power to dispossess becomes the highest moral authority. Language precedes the bullet, preparing the ground for total erasure. It is a conversation among those who only appear human.

The deputy chief of staff tries to frame such violence as bounded by "orders" and "law", but those phrases are an attempt to lend artificial order to a system whose limits have long been breached. When ministers join in, the mask is completely torn off: the violence is not a deviation but an essential means for establishing an ideological vision.

Linguistic erasure

This dialogue is not disconnected from its context. It follows the murder of tens of thousands of children in Gaza, after months in which the very concept of "child" was omitted from Israeli military and public language.

What was said in the cabinet room is a direct continuation of what is being done on the ground - and it even sounds as if it should be taken for granted.

This is what happens when language destroys people, actions eliminate lives.

Institutionalised violence in the territories has turned brutality into an accepted norm, shaping the nature of discourse, political mentality and the entire Israeli identity

This violence is the logical product of a colonial system embedded in the heart of the state apparatus and its security mechanisms. The Israeli army, perceived as a "defensive" force, is in fact the central hegemonic mechanism of the settlement project.

It is not merely a gatekeeper for civilian initiatives; it serves as the executive arm of that fundamental colonial ideology. When there are no boundaries, morality and role are erased.

The soldier and the settler reflect the same vision of preserving power, dispossession and the space of racial and military supremacy together, ultimately realising each other.

As a direct result, institutionalised violence in the territories has turned brutality into an accepted norm, shaping the nature of discourse, political mentality and the entire Israeli identity.

The politicians in the picture are not exceptions but represent a new stage in the development of the Zionist vision. Violence is no longer something to be ashamed of, but a national value - a symbol of control that continues to develop society's identity in relation to a bar of unrestrained supremacy.

Israeli society is now dependent on a delicate system of power relations - and it shifts whenever that balance is disturbed.

Signs of collapse

The so-called "enlightened" Israelis who call for changing oppressive regimes in the region and the world to liberate other peoples remain unable to free themselves from their own regime.

Their existence, as constructed, depends on the violent regime itself, not on any organic belonging to the land. It is defined by the ability to dispossess others of it.

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This is a colonial primitivism in the guise of enlightenment - a society incapable of freeing itself from oppressive power even as it carries the flag of freedom.

But history shows that when wild violence reaches its peak, it often signals the beginning of the end. Explosive, brutal and unrestrained violence is not a sign of strength but of strategic weakness.

When a regime reaches a stage where its terror is overt, blatant and without masks, it is a sign that it has exhausted itself. Violence that can no longer be covered up or justified becomes a tool for survival in the final stage of control.

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At this point, the regime loses the fabric of its softer components: it has lost politics, as well as its fragile narrative in the global discourse, and exists only as a coercive force above any human or political balance.

The project it carries becomes too heavy, on the verge of collapse.

Yet while ministers in a cabinet room joke about the "strategy" of killing a child and a donkey together in Gaza, during the harshest days of starvation, life persists in small acts of care.

In the face of erasure and annihilation, hope still sprouts from the rubble in moments such as someone sharing a tin of preserved food with stray cats.

That image of tenderness stands in stark contrast to the withered yellow autumn of the cabinet discussion, a prelude to a winter from which escape seems impossible.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.