I take my title from that of a brilliant monograph (The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism, 2005), by the renowned French journalist and intellectual, Jean Daniel, who was the editor of the weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur from 1964 until his death in 2020. In that moving lament for his people, Daniel diagnoses the morbid psychological and intellectual self-subjugation of the Jewish people to an ethos of victimhood, separatism, and moral and racial supremacy—rooted, as I will argue, in the primitive Old Testament ancestral mythos of the ancient Hebrews — and within whose walls they continue to be shackled to the atavistic notion of the Chosen People, an obsession with Holocaust remembrance, and a reflexive apologia for the modern state of Israel that has anaesthetized them to the sufferings of the Palestinians. As Omar Bartov (Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University) has observed more recently, every threat, however minor, to Israel’s original determination to cleanse the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants in Greater Israel or its imperial ambitions in the region has been described by its government (and the U.S. Israel Lobby) as “existential”, and the prelude to another Holocaust — the apotropaic specter of which has been used to justify its military’s brutal retaliations, and rendered its population morally insensible to the miseries it has inflicted upon its Palestinian Arab subjects.
In what follows, I cannot hope to improve upon the reflections of Daniel, Bartov, Norman Finklestein, and the many other authorities on the conflict on whom I have gratefully depended, beyond dilating upon them from my own, reductively personal perspective, and my own lifelong study of ancient religious ideas. My method may strike readers as backwards: that is, to begin with present events, before seeking what can only be a tentative and provisional aetiology in the more recent and ancient past.
Part One. A “Lunatic State”: The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza
How is it that the victims of a genocidal holocaust could become the perpetrators of one, in spite of the still searing memory of the atrocities they had suffered just eight decades ago? The lust for revenge is, to be sure, one of the most primitive and intractable of human passions. In the literature of antiquity, it is recognized (often in the form of the vendettas and blood feuds that poisoned successive generations of ancestral enemies) as the principal obstacle to the establishment of a civilization based on the rule of law.
The historical transition from personal, familial, or tribal vengeance to a regime of impartial and universal justice is one of the oldest themes in the Western literary canon. Homer’s Iliad ends with Achilles’ transcending his vengeful rage against Hector for killing his friend Patroclus, when he finally agrees to return Hector’s mangled corpse to his grieving father, Troy’s defeated King Priam. Aeschylus’ great trilogy, the Oresteia, concludes when the Erinyes (the avenging Furies) are superseded by and transformed into the Eumenides, the goddesses of mercy. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the tragedy is partially sublimated by the reconciliation that takes place between Hamlet and Laertes before they both succumb to their mutually inflicted wounds. And of course, what is the Christian scriptural soteriology but a providential narrative of the great movement of history from an epoch under a law of retributive justice (the lex talionis) to a new age of mercy and love–from, in Augustine’s famous formulation, an aera sub lege to the new aera sub gratia?
The Old Israel’s ethic was epitomized by the primitive scriptural formula of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. The modern state of Israel, in its revenge for the Hamas killing spree of October 7, has gone transcendently beyond any semblance of reciprocity, and in exchange for eyes and teeth has maimed or taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians.
The atrocities committed against Palestinian civilians in Gaza for the past fifteen months (and most recently in southern Lebanon) are almost impossible to credit or comprehend, notwithstanding that they have been verified by every impartial observer on the ground: the U.N. peace keepers and humanitarian relief workers; every major international human rights organization, including Israel’s own B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the parties to the Geneva Conventions; the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the few independent journalists who haven’t yet been killed or expelled from the field by the IDF; the volunteer physicians and medics still operating in the few hospitals that Israeli bombs have spared (or rather missed); the IDF soldiers themselves who have, with sadistic glee, filmed and uploaded their videos to social media of bombs exploding and incinerating Palestinian villages, their ransacking of Palestinian homes, and torturing of prisoners; statements of Israeli journalists and Jewish academics, not to mention the unapologetic declarations of intention by the Israeli government itself. All have attested to what have been called “war crimes”, “crimes against humanity”, “ethnic cleansing”, and (in the case of the International Court of Justice) a “plausible genocide”.
By the end of the first year of the IDF’s campaign of extermination (under the casus belli of eliminating Hamas, which everyone knows is a pretext), at least fifty thousand Palestinian civilians (the majority of whom are women and children, and thus non-combatants by definition) had been massacred, hundreds of thousands evicted from their homes, and who knows how many more hundreds of thousands irremediably injured or buried under the rubble. (In a recent article in The Lancet, the death toll so far has been estimated at 186,000; which is not to mention the U.N.’s estimate of 1.9 million Palestinians who have been displaced and are now—what shall we call them?—refugees twice over, since most of the population of Gaza has consisted of refugees or descendants of refugees who were first expelled, beginning in 1947, from the new Jewish homeland as it was originally delineated by the U.N. partition.)
Israel’s outrageously disproportionate response has, inevitably, turned Hamas into a hydra’s head, and seeded their recruitment of otherwise moderate Palestinian Arabs. The reflexive Israeli self-exculpation of “human shields” is belied by the overwhelming multiple of Palestinian civilians to Hamas militants killed, not to mention the deliberate devastation of non-military targets. As proof that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”, its spokesmen have pointed with great pride to the “surgical precision” of their targeted assassinations (legally dubious under international law) and their booby-trapped pager operation against Hezbollah; except that the pagers exploded inside houses, mosques, and shopping centers, blinding, mutilating, and killing scores of innocent bystanders.
By the one-year mark, the IDF had dropped 85 million tons of bombs on Gaza (by comparison to the 2.8 million tons dropped by the Allies during the entirety of World War II.) The only plausible raison d’être for the use of 2,000-pound bombs (supplied by the U.S. government, whose foreign policy has been bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby since the 1960s) is to indiscriminately reduce civilian Palestinian infrastructure and large population centers to dust. As Norman Finklestein (the Jewish-American historian, and son of Holocaust survivors, who has chronicled the conflict in Gaza since its occupation in 1967) has wryly observed, Israel has always preferred innocuous “high-tech massacres” to hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, videotaped scenes have been posted of IDF command centers in which generals, far out of harm’s reach and with expressions of smug self-satisfaction on their faces, push the buttons and watch, on huge wall monitors, the explosions that pulverize entire Palestinian villages, resembling nothing so much as teenagers playing computer games.
Of course, the dropping of 2,000-pound bombs on Palestinian population centers once again puts the lie to Israel’s claim that it is acting “morally” to limit civilian casualties, and confirms what has long been obvious: that the casus belli has nothing to do with Hamas and everything to do with the longstanding project of the state to eradicate the indigenous population of Palestine in pursuit of a Greater Israel “from the river to the sea” (the Palestinian rallying-cry that is ironically more apposite to the original Zionist enterprise than to jihadist fantasies) comprised of an ethnically pure Jewish population—a strategic objective that has been reiterated again and again since the very nascency of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century. (In pursuit of this objective, as Finklestein has reported, the IDF has engaged in periodic operations in Gaza since the early 2000s of what it has described openly, using a typically de-humanizing euphemism, as “mowing the lawn”.)
In widely documented cases, IDF soldiers have entered Palestinian homes with no plausible suspicion of finding Hamas militants hiding there and murdered or kidnapped entire families. There are currently at least 10,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails under barbaric conditions, few if any having been charged and none given due process. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has reported widespread use of torture. At one notorious prison, Sde Teiman, a leaked video shows rows of Palestinian prisoners lying naked and blindfolded on a concrete floor, one of whom is being gang-raped with a metal rod by Israeli guards, an attack so brutal that the victim was left unable to walk.
When ten soldiers were eventually arrested for the rape on July 29, 2024, the response of both government officials and the Israeli people was all too reminiscent of similar junctures in human history, when nationalist frenzies periodically erupt from beneath the thin veneer of civilization. During the military trial, extremist mobs, including government ministers, stormed the courthouse chanting “Disgrace!” and demanding the release of the perpetrators as “heroes” of the state. On X, instead of condemning the torture, Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called for “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video and to “exhaust the full severity of the law against them”. On the day of the soldiers’ arrest, Security Minister Ben-Gvir told Israeli media that it was “shameful” for Israel to arrest “our best heroes”. On the same day, Smotrich broadcast a video message, saying that “IDF soldiers deserve respect” and must not be treated as “criminals”. When asked by an Arab MP in the Knesset whether it was legitimate “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum, Hanoch Mildwidsky of Netanyahu’s Likud Party replied, “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!” The de-humanizing of the indigenous Palestinian population of Greater Israel has long been used to morally detoxify such sadistic cruelty, and when members of the Israeli government and people refer to Arabs, as they have done so often, as “sub-human”, “barbarians”, or “animals”, they do so without the slightest awareness of the obvious analogy to the Jews’ own historical degradations.
In any case, according to UNWRA and B’Tselem, the rapes and torture recorded at Sde Teiman are routine at Israeli detention centers. As a B’Tselem spokesman epitomized what innumerable prisoners had related in interviews after their release without charge:
We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in 16 different locations across Israel. It was depressing. As we gathered the testimonies, we realized that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.
For reasons such as this, and with the memories etched on his own moral conscience of what his parents had related to him of their experiences in Nazi concentration camps, Finklestein has reluctantly concluded that Israel has become a “lunatic state”.
The illegal blockade imposed on Gaza since its military occupation by Israel during the 1967 war has intensified to the point that the eminent Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has called Gaza “the largest open-air prison in the world”. (Fellow academic and historian, Avi Shlaim, Human Rights Watch, the renowned American authority on foreign affairs, John Mearsheimer, and members of the Israeli government itself have repeatedly used the same formulation.)
Under the blockade, Gazan imports and exports are entirely subject to Israeli whim. The Netanyahu government has restricted the flow of humanitarian food aid to rations deliberately calculated to barely exceed a starvation diet, with the intended result that tens of thousands of Gazans are suffering from malnourishment and the diseases attendant upon it. The illegal blockade has also prevented fuel from entering, so that, in their forced march to the “safe zones” in the south, Gazans have had to abandon their vehicles, nor have they been able to operate the generators needed to keep their hospitals running, among the consequences of which have been the needless deaths of infants in incubators and patients undergoing surgery. Israel has also prevented basic medicines from entering Gaza, so that many of those maimed in the carnage have had to be operated on without anaesthetics, and scores have died of infection who could have been saved by conventional antibiotics.
In contravention of the Geneva Conventions and the U.N.’s periodic decrees on the rules of combat since the end of World War II, IDF bombs and missiles have completely destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Gaza: the electrical grid, the internet, and, above all, its water purification plants and sewage treatment facilities, making the search for non-polluted drinking water a daily ordeal for the inhabitants. There is, besides, credible eye-witness evidence (see below) that the IDF has gone to the lengths of chemically poisoning Palestinian wells. As Ilan Pappé has documented, this is merely a repetition of a tactic used in 1948 by the Haganah to ethnically cleanse the indigenous Arabs from within the original borders of the nascent state.
In its inhuman cruelty, however, this pales by comparison to the deliberate destruction of elementary schools, daycare centers, universities, mosques, Islamic cultural centers, and hospitals, almost all of which have by now been obliterated by largely U.S.- and British-supplied fighter jets, bombs, missiles, tanks, armored bulldozers, and heavy artillery.
I have recounted Finklestein’s observation that the IDF eschews the dangers of hand-to-hand combat, but that has not prevented their snipers from targeting children in playgrounds, journalists (hundreds of whom have been murdered), the UNIFIL compound in southern Lebanon, Palestinians evicted from their homes while on the designated routes to the supposed “safe zones”—described by one observer as “shooting fish in a barrel”–, and volunteer doctors and medics on their way to and indeed inside Gaza’s surviving make-shift trauma centers.
As reported in LifeSiteNews, two volunteer American surgeons have observed the mass starvation and execution of children, the murder of healthcare workers and journalists, and the deliberate poisoning of the water supply: in short the “intentional destruction…of an entire society” by IDF troops. Rejecting Israel’s claims to be targeting Hamas as a fiction, Dr. Mark Perlmutter (president of the World Surgical Foundation, and a past president of the United States section of the International College of Surgeons) has concluded: “The major target [of the Israeli army] is the elimination of the Palestinian population”, in what he describes bluntly as ”an organized genocide”.
In an interview with CBS News on July 21, 2024, Perlmuttter lamented that
In 40 mission trips over 30 years – Ground Zero, earthquakes – all of that combined does not equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.
I have seen more incinerated children than I have ever seen in my life, combined. More shredded children in just the first week. Missing body parts, crushed by buildings or bomb explosions.
In a contemporaneous article published in Politico, Perlmutter and his fellow American volunteer trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa recount the horror of trying to save the lives of a constant influx of pre-teens who had been shot by snipers in the head or chest: “They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die.”
But it was the IDF’s systematic attacks on and calculated intimidation of healthcare workers (doctors, nurses, medical students, and hospital administrators) that Perlmutter and Sidhwa found more barbaric than anything they had witnessed in their combined 57 years of volunteering in war and disaster zones around the world. Perlmutter relates one instance in which an IDF soldier burst into a hospital and ordered a Gazan surgical nurse at gunpoint to stop operating on a patient. When he refused, he was shot in the leg, whereupon medics improvised by filling the void with surgical cement, before the IDF intruders kidnapped him to an Israeli detention center, where he languished, strapped to a table and handcuffed, subsisting on a daily juice box, and left without medical attention for 45 days.
As Perlmutter relates, “During that time, he told us, he was beaten so badly that his right eye was destroyed. As malnutrition set in, he developed osteomyelitis – infection of the bone itself – in his broken femur.” Eventually, he was dumped naked on the side of the road, and crawled two miles before a passerby found him and brought him to the European Hospital.
Many there suffered a similar fate. The Hospital’s director fled to Egypt “after his home was destroyed and his family threatened”, while most of the remaining staff were kidnapped and tortured.
The cloak of silence in which such Israeli atrocities have been enshrouded by the governments and mainstream press in the United States and Western Europe (by contrast to the condemnations ventilated by the other 95 percent of the nations of the world) has been as pusillanimous as predictable. To state the obvious, were the U.S. government to inform its population of Israel’s war crimes it would be inculpating itself in the genocide in which it has been directly complicit through the billions of dollars in aid, the lethal munitions, and the on-the-ground weapons guidance it has provided the IDF, without which its carpet bombing of Gaza, as in every other of Israel’s wars, would have been transcendently beyond the capacity of the Israeli military to carry out. (Without American air power, the IDF would be reduced to the impotence of the Palestine resistors lobbing rocks over the security fence.)
In terms of its Middle East foreign policy, successive administrations have been ventriloquized by Zionist propagandists and reduced to (using Max Blumenthal’s descriptors) the vassals and stooges of a tiny nation an ocean and continent beyond America’s immediate sphere of influence and inimical to its own security interests. Both political parties, in fact, have been equally subservient to the omnipotent Israel Lobby, on whose munificent donations they depend. As John Mearsheimer has put it, in their foreign policy, Israel and the United States are “joined at the hip”, and in granting Israel unconditional approval for its military adventures throughout the region, the difference between the Democrats and Republicans has amounted to, in Mearsheimer’s words, the difference between “tweedle dee and tweedle dum”.
To illustrate the degree to which U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been dictated by Israel for at least the past 30 years, Jeffrey Sachs, in an interview with Tucker Carlson in December of 2024, revealed that General Wesley Clark related to him that he (Clark) had been told by the Pentagon shortly after 9/11 that the U.S. would wage seven wars in five years on Israel’s behalf. Clark’s reference was to a strategic paper entitled “Clean Break” prepared by the neo-con hawk Richard Perle and enthusiastically agreed to by Netanyahu in 1996.
The “clean break”, as Netanyahu reiterated in a speech shortly after 9/11, was to be with the outmoded geopolitical strategy of fighting terrorism — henceforth to be replaced by the wholistic strategy of overthrowing the regimes that sponsored it. Of the list of the seven “terrorist regimes” to be toppled by the U.S. (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan), all, not by coincidence, had been hostile to Netanyahu’s longstanding project of an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and exhortative of the legal recognition of a sovereign state for the Palestinians.
Doing Israel’s bidding, the U.S. has since then brought down the governments of six of the seven on Netanyahu’s “Clean Break” hit list. Whether toppled by military invasion or CIA-sponsored “popular uprisings”, most of these campaigns for regime change were initiated under palpably fictitious pretexts (Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”; Assad’s “chemical attacks” on his own people), and resulted in political chaos, murderous ethnic and sectarian-religious violence, and the revival of hitherto dormant or contained Islamist militants (such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS), in what had been relatively stable and harmonious pluralist states.
With Assad now finally ousted from Syria—the Obama administration’s coup having failed in 2011 — the Lobby’s propaganda machine has been relentlessly focused on diabolizing Israel’s last standing target. Nor has Sachs any doubt that Israel is doing its best to persuade the Zionists and neo-con hawks with whom Trump has incomprehensibly surrounded himself, to manipulate him into a war with Iran which, should they succeed, will have lit the fuse that ignites a regional conflagration that, as Sachs has warned, might well eventuate in a global inferno.