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alligator alcatraz
Inspired by Trump, Israel Advances Plan for Crocodile-Ringed Prison for Palestinians
Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as "specially managed wild animals," a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.
Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration's recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.
While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman's decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: "Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again."
Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.
(Photo by Itamar Ben-Gvir/Facebook)
The move by Silman—who gained international notoriety by calling for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip—came despite objections from her own ministry's legal adviser and the Nature and Parks Authority.
IPS, which sent a fact-finding mission to the Hamat Gader crocodile farm in January, argued that its employees could handle the animals, citing the agency's experience working with the attack dogs that Palestinian prisoners and human rights groups have claimed were used to maul and even sexually abuse detainees.
Silman's approval is contingent upon IPS meeting animal welfare requirements and appropriate holding conditions.
Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir has openly boasted about the dramatic deterioration in conditions endured by Palestinian prisoners since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 and Israel's retaliatory obliteration of Gaza, which United Nations and other experts describe as a genocide.
“We go into the prisons, and they wet themselves," Ben-Gvir said of Palestinian prisoners during a speech on Friday. "I'm not joking. They're afraid. Fear rules them, and that's how it should be.”
Ben-Gvir and other Israeli officials have worn noose lapel pins to celebrate a recently passed bill legalizing the execution by hanging of so-called "terrorists."
Former Palestinian detainees and Israeli personnel have described beatings, rape and sexual torture by male and female soldiers, routine amputations due to constant shackling, burnings, electrocutions, attacks by dogs, ice-water dousings, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, constant loud music, and other abuse.
The Israeli military is investigating the deaths of dozens of detainees at the Sde Teiman prison in the Negev Desert, including one who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton.
Ben-Gvir has defended Israeli reservists accused of torturing Palestinian prisoners, and called the reservists who allegedly gang-raped a man at Sde Teiman prison "heroes."
The minister is banned from entering a number of Western countries for his incitement to violence against Palestinians.
Several Israeli environmental groups issued a joint statement opposing the use of crocodiles in prisons.
"Crocodiles are sentient beings, with complex needs for space, water, temperature, and natural behavior," the groups said. "It is also highly doubtful that the crocodiles intended for this purpose have aggressive temperaments, and in any event, during the winter they slow their metabolism dramatically, become very sluggish, and stop eating.”
"Security should be achieved through real security measures, not through animals," they added. "We are considering filing a petition with the High Court of Justice over the matter.”
Last year, the Israeli military massacred 262 crocodiles that were being kept on a farm in the occupied West Bank near the illegal Israeli settler colony of Petzael, claiming the reptiles posed a risk to the public.
“They just slaughtered them," farm owner Danny Bitan told reporters at the time, describing the scene as "some kind of killing valley."
Ben-Gvir's plan comes amid ongoing slaughter in Gaza—where Israeli forces have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, over 21,500 of them children, since October 2023—and accelerating colonization and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
News of Silman's approval sparked disbelief around the world and on social media, where Reddit users called the plan "cartoonish idiocy" and "Bond villain-level lunacy."
"The fact that Israel is trying to surround a prison with [crocodiles] tells you all you need to know about these camps, which are designed to torture, rape, and murder Palestinians, often held as hostages without charges," Israeli researcher and political commentator Shaiel Ben-Ephraim said Thursday on X.
'Moral Injury': Murdered in Gaza, Disappeared in America
It's the concept that violence and injustice have more victims than the directly victimized. And can affect how we function and are able to fight back when we participate in, witness, or fail to prevent something of intolerable evil.
Part of the horror is doubting that the values ever existed. Certainly the inmates of the most incarcerated nation on Earth—the USA—might have different attitudes to the claims of minimal justice, fairness.
We are in a season of injustice and cruelty. Do fascist periods occur like seasons? Is there a periodicity?
Every day has a new horror. A video of a huge ICE raid in a strawberry field in California's Central Valley, terrorizing workers, shows "rounding up" of 100.
The quote that is attributed to Voltaire—that belief in absurdities leads to atrocities—is being acted out, stupidly.
We're now exposed—often in real time—to video of abducted mothers torn from their children, workers taken at their jobs, green card holders handcuffed when reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement appointments, in the USA—and to videos of people in Gaza shot, burned, or bombed, or herded, starving, from blasted place to blasted place by pitiless IDF operations in a not-so-hidden logic of extermination.
The displaced and bereaved in Gaza, and the disappeared in America, are not the only ones experiencing injury. We who witness and cannot stop it also lose confidence in our ability to effectively support decency and justice, or be confident that we live in a world of such things.
Unlike trauma from an accident or natural disaster, this "moral injury" is to our social sense—what we can expect from our society. Masked, heavily armed men grabbing men, women, children, brutalizing them as if they were enemies, on our streets, and knowing they are government agents, bruises our sense of moral order.
Judith Levine in The Guardian wrote:
The colossal buildup of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will create the largest domestic police force in the U.S.; its resources will be greater than those of every federal surveillance and carceral agency combined; it will employ more agents than the FBI. ICE will be bigger than the military of many countries. When it runs out of brown and Black people to deport, ICE—perhaps under another name—will be left with the authority and capability to surveil, seize, and disappear anyone the administration considers undesirable.
There is no doubt of our direction. Billions have been appropriated to build detention for ICE targets. Random exile to a torture prison in El Salvador and a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades making it clear that arbitrary abuse and inhumanity is the intention. Government terror.
Every day has a new horror. A video of a huge ICE raid in a strawberry field in California's Central Valley, terrorizing workers, shows "rounding up" of 100.
The United States government is overtly voicing white supremacy, of a "pure" historic "Homeland," more suited to 1925.
The Klu Klux Klan marches in Washington, D.C. on August 8, 1925. (Photo: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
The vice president has proposed the idea that ancestral pedigree should add a qualitative weight in American discourse. Mr Vance has complained that Uganda-born New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is "ungrateful." The president campaigned with a complaint of immigrants "poisoning the blood" of the U.S.
"Legality" and due process is gone, in a country of ICE snatch gangs grabbing anyone who speaks a "foreign" language, has some profession or marker of "alienness," terrorizing swaths of the American community, tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The following are two posts from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security:
The stupidity and vulgarity of this government department harkening to an imaginary "white" American kitch is unbearable.
(Their vacuous, absurd Hollywood America elides
- Slaughtered and dispossessed native peoples of North America;
- Africans enslaved and shipped as livestock, their destiny as sub-human chattel, stigmatized to this day;
- Spanish-speaking citizens of territory subsumed into the United States in 1848; and
- Generations of "undesirable" immigrants, each scorned as they did useful work.)
MAGA erasure of transgender people mirrors the 1933 Nazi burning of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research library nearly 100 years ago—and the Nazi purge of "Jewish degeneracy" in German scholarship is mirrored in the purge of "woke influences" in universities.
In a May 10, 1933 book burning, a member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin. (Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Am I—a secular non-Zionist Jew with roots in Brooklyn, descendant of the Jewish Great Migration 120 years ago from Eastern Europe—part of the "Homeland" they work to protect with all the powers and monopoly of violence of the federal government? I'm not without fear for my life and comforts. And nauseated that by skin color and class I am part of what they "protect."
In my Jewish immigrant culture, weaned on the stories of the Holocaust and of Eastern European persecution, we are warned to be alert for what might come to us.
In a mendacious way, this administration has taken up antisemitism as a cause, mixing Judaism with Zionism, and casting resistance to the Israeli state as terrorism. (Eurocentric Americanism is yoked to a Jewish supremacist concept of Palestine.) I may easily be not who they "protect," but who they target as a terrorism advocate.
Absurd, stupid. Not without precedent. Both Mussolini and Hitler and their appointees were comical, but it didn't matter, they managed deadly transformations of their societies for a time. That's why I wonder about periodicity—that it's a time of fascism, much as a season.
The president on July 24 issued an "executive order" declaring unhoused people a threat to public order, and saying the "vast majority" of them are drug addicts or mentally ill, and declaring public policy to "clear them" from public spaces into detention by "civil commitment."
Unquestionably, this administration is choosing the most vulnerable people—immigrants, those without housing, transgender people—to target, and has shown that it intends to deprive human rights of those it stigmatizes. We can Niemöller the trend from here.
Once we've created concentration camps like "Alligator Alcatraz" and many other unofficial miserable holding sites for people beyond the law's protection, the only question is the rate of further construction—and the funding has been voted.
Six months in, the confidence with which the Trump administration has turned the guiding philosophy of government from aspirations to equality to criminalization of non-whiteness—unleashing of police power, contempt of any sort of "queer" nonconformity, prioritization of a standard "white" model of American, and mockery of scholarship—makes me feel there is a momentum that is… tidal, and as King Canute demonstrated, impervious to commands to fall back before its fullness is reached.
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