A few weeks ago, it was reported that the Israeli government is pushing forward a project to dig a moat nearly 170 meters long around a maximum-security section of Ketziot Prison, located in the Negev Desert in southern Israel. The idea, promoted by Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, is to fill that moat with Nile crocodiles to further endanger the lives of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held there. It is yet another cog in the dehumanizing machinery, designed to continue instilling terror as a method.

By Oda Cuentas

Describing the atrocities that the State of Israel commits every day is no longer anything out of the ordinary. Cruelty repeats its routine with almost mechanical consistency, as if the horror of its methods had become the norm. Nor are there enough words to encompass the atrocities committed by the Israeli state in the form of human rights violations: children murdered, an entire people subjected to barbarism, complaints piling up before courts and international organizations, a genocide laid bare before the eyes of the world.

Not long ago, the approval of the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners once again pushed the boundaries of what is imaginable. But even that decision seems like just another step on a staircase leading down to deeper forms of dehumanization. Israel acts as if it were always possible to sink even deeper into the abyss of barbarism it has created.

The project spearheaded by the infamous Itamar Ben-Gvir seems like something out of a nightmare: to build a moat about 170 meters long around Ketziot Prison and fill it with Nile crocodiles to “prevent Palestinian prisoners from escaping.” The initiative, which was budgeted at about 21 million shekels—approximately 7.11 million dollars—even progressed as far as the excavation of the moat.

To round out the picture, this war criminal publicly called—on the podcast titled “October 8,” with Rom Braslavski—for the murder of Palestinians every night in Gaza: “I believe targeted killings should be carried out in Gaza, eliminating between 30 and 40 people every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat; there are people there who don’t deserve to live. They shouldn’t live. They aren’t even people.”

Paradoxes

However, the project was temporarily halted following a lawsuit. A Jerusalem district court ordered that the relocation and preparation of the reptiles be suspended until the legal dispute is resolved: the government must present its arguments, and in the meantime, the crocodile pit remains at a standstill.

What is truly outrageous about this story is not just the project itself, but what managed to stop it—even if only for a while. It was not the allegations of crimes against humanity, nor the mounting evidence of torture, overcrowding, and deaths in custody. It was an animal welfare organization that brought the case before the Israeli courts to protect the crocodiles: the planned pit would be too narrow for them to grow, and the transfer could endanger their well-being. The courts intervened to remind us that, even there, reptiles have the right to decent conditions. The contrast is obscene.

The common-sense approach of protecting an animal’s life clashes brutally with the indifference toward the appalling conditions in which Palestinian prisoners survive: overcrowding, food shortages, assaults documented by human rights organizations, and the dozens of deaths recorded in Israeli prisons since October 2023. Those who emerge from these prisons rarely emerge unscathed. In most cases, they emerge scarred by trauma and by systematic physical and sexual assaults at the hands of their jailers—atrocities that are difficult even to imagine and that are part of the Netanyahu government’s campaign of extermination. This madness is capable of passing laws regulating the temperature of water in a dungeon, yet it normalizes the torture of human beings. And it is part of the logic of this genocidal state.

During the Nazi era, Hitler personally promoted laws designed to protect animals and severely punished their mistreatment. That concern coexisted with the machinery of extermination being deployed against millions of human beings. The same man who was capable of enacting laws regarding the suffering of an animal could, with cold, meticulous precision, orchestrate the suffering and death of people.

Alcatraz

It is no coincidence that Ben Gvir himself has cited the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz”— the immigration detention center built in the Florida wetlands and surrounded by alligators—as an inspiration. This is by no means an innocent reference: Alcatraz, the historic federal prison in San Francisco Bay, was for decades synonymous with extreme isolation, a regime of silence, and conditions of confinement that are now recognized as one of the harshest forms of penal punishment applied in the United States. That an official from a government internationally accused of genocide would invoke that name as a model to emulate says everything there is to know about the Ketziot project: explicit dehumanization, presented with total impunity.

Speaking of the reference to beasts, Alcatraz. In Marc Rocco’s *First Degree Murder* (1995), the story follows a prisoner who attempts to escape from the infamous prison and, after failing, ends up revealing the systematic cruelty to which he was subjected. I won’t say how it ends. But I will mention the idea that emerges at the end and seems tailor-made for these times: victory is a struggle that ends in triumph. It’s a necessity for those of us who refuse to accept barbarism as our fate. We must be capable of defeating them. There is no alternative.

Brake

This new episode is yet another escalation in a systematic policy of extermination, subjugation, and expulsion of the Palestinian people, which also threatens and attacks other peoples in the region. And in the face of those who seek to turn barbarism and powerlessness into common sense, there can be no room for resignation. We must mobilize, speak out, and organize. But it is not enough to simply resist indefinitely. The goal must be to defeat the State of Israel and its imperialist and regional allies through a socialist revolution that fundamentally transforms power relations in the Middle East and paves the way for a workers’ government and a unified, secular, democratic, non-racist, and socialist Palestine.

It is a titanic task, yes, but no historic transformation ever began as a small task. That is why it is essential to take part in strikes, demonstrations, rebellions, and international solidarity that can transcend borders. Turn scattered outrage into organized strength. Against resignation: organization. Against barbarism: revolution.