Well, here we are again, staring into the abyss and finding that the abyss has installed state-of-the-art surveillance and a robust system of administrative detention. The latest 'revelation' to shock the collective conscience of people who haven't been paying attention for forty years is that Israel is running what is affectionately being termed its own Guantanamo. Reports of systematic torture, 98 deaths in custody, and facilities like Sde Teiman have surfaced, and the world is performing its usual choreographed dance of 'deep concern.' It’s enough to make one nostalgic for a time when state-sponsored cruelty at least had the decency to be secretive.

Let’s talk about the 'only democracy in the Middle East' trope, shall we? It is the favorite security blanket of the Western neoliberal, a phrase whispered to soothe the soul while watching grainy footage of human beings being treated like discarded livestock. The reports from former prisoners and human rights organizations detail a catalog of horrors that would make a medieval inquisitor blush, yet the internal Israeli debate isn’t about whether torture is a fundamental stain on the national soul. No, that would require a soul. Instead, the debate is a bureaucratic squabble over who has the jurisdiction to be the monster. When the military police actually tried to detain soldiers suspected of 'severe' abuse, the Right-wing circus arrived in full face paint, storming the gates not to demand justice, but to defend the divine right to be a thug. It was a beautiful moment of clarity: the mask didn't just slip; it was incinerated.

On one side, you have the Israeli Right, a collection of messianic morons and opportunistic grifters who view international law as a polite suggestion written by people who don’t have enough sand in their shoes. They don’t even bother with the veneer of civilization anymore. To them, the 98 dead are just a rounding error in a holy war that they are winning only in their own fever dreams. Then you have the Israeli Left, or what’s left of it—a shrinking group of academics and lawyers who write scathing op-eds in Haaretz that are read by exactly twelve people in North London and nobody with a badge. They perform their outrage with the practiced weariness of a parent watching a toddler set the curtains on fire for the fifth time today. Their 'measured' dissent is the lubricant that allows the machine to keep grinding; it provides the illusion of a functioning domestic critique while the cages stay full.

And what of the prisoners? To the state, they are not humans, but variables in a security equation that always equals zero. The reports of systematic abuse are not 'accidents' or the work of 'a few bad apples'—the favorite euphemism of the intellectually bankrupt. Torture is a policy. It is an industry. When you keep thousands of people in a legal vacuum, the vacuum eventually sucks out the humanity of both the prisoner and the guard. But don’t worry, the international community is on the case. By 'on the case,' I mean the United States is currently checking its pockets to see if it has any more billion-dollar checks to sign while issuing press releases that sound like they were written by an AI programmed specifically to say nothing in five hundred words.

History is a recursive loop of humans finding new ways to put other humans in boxes and then arguing about the dimensions of the boxes. We saw it in the high-altitude hubris of the American century with Guantanamo, and now we see the localized, high-intensity version in the Levant. The 98 dead Palestinians didn't die because of a lack of oversight; they died because the system functioned exactly as intended. A prison without oversight is not a failure of democracy; it is the ultimate expression of state power, stripped of its PR department.

Is there a moral to this story? Only if you believe in fairy tales. The reality is that we live in a world where 'human rights' are a commodity traded like pork bellies, used by the West to beat their enemies over the head and tucked away in a drawer when their friends start reaching for the jumper cables. The debate in Israel isn’t about the morality of the cage; it’s about the optics of the cage. And as long as the world is willing to look the other way, the cage will only get bigger. I’d say we should be ashamed, but shame requires a baseline of expectation that humanity hasn't met since the Bronze Age. Sit back, watch the news, and wait for the next report to come out in six months. It’ll be the same as this one, just with a higher body count and a more creative set of excuses. It’s all so terribly predictable.