Israel Is the Prison

Dania Rajendra and Dan Berger

October 21, 2025

doi.org/10.63478/44O19Z11

Between October 1 and 3, as many Jews around the world sought forgiveness for the year’s transgressions as part of the Yom Kippur holiday, Israel illegally arrested 462 people in international waters. The world’s only Jewish state intercepted the forty-two-boat Global Sumud Flotilla off the coast of Gaza in order to maintain its seventeen-year blockade of Gaza that has, after two years of genocide, become a campaign of forced starvation.¹ More than 400 people from nearly sixty countries participated in the flotilla and were sent to Israeli detention centers, where Israel’s far-right national security minister called them “terrorists.” Upon their release, flotilla members spoke of being beaten, tormented, fed vermin-infested food, and denied medical treatment.² But, as climate activist Greta Thunberg said upon her deportation from Israel, the “mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment…is not the story.”³ Rather, the story is the ongoing and worsening genocide. “We cannot take our eyes away from Gaza, from all the places of the world that are suffering, living on the forefronts of this business-as-usual systems,” Thunberg said in a press conference from Athens.

Global Sumud Flotilla sailing from Barcelona on August 31, 2025. Photo Credit: Aniol via Wikimedia Commons. — Global Sumud Flotilla sailing from Barcelona on August 31, 2025.
Photo Credit: Aniol via Wikimedia Commons.

The flotilla is the latest act of courageous solidarity aiming to end the genocide and the delirium of business as usual amid its devastation. The unconscionable violence Israel commits in Gaza is, as many have observed, the first livestreamed genocide. To go about daily life amid such cruelty is already a bewildering act of cognitive dissonance. Yet most mainstream American institutions, including many Jewish ones, are dedicated to denying that reality. They demand, sometimes politely and sometimes with force, that we join them inside the dome of The Truman Show.

In the movie, Truman (played by Jim Carrey) has lived his whole life unaware that he is trapped inside of a reality show. Once he learns the truth, he tunnels out of the dome, escaping the regime of surveillance. Here he encounters a group of fans campaigning to “Free Truman.” Unlike Truman, however, the residents of the Jewish dome—a small and shrinking percentage of American Jews—choose to dig in, rather than tunnel out. They perform repentance while affirming their commitment to Zionism and to Israel. Outside the dome, increasingly large majorities of Americans—including Jewish Americans—tell every pollster who asks how much they oppose Israel and support Gaza.⁴

The cloistered world of Jewish American institutions is one version of the dome of business-as-usual. There’s also the Democratic Party dome, the mainstream media dome, and undoubtedly others. Inside the artificial conditions of the business-as-usual dome, social change is accomplished quietly and behind the scenes. This theory suggests that dedicated, principled individuals who serve as trusted advisors to powerful leaders strategically hold their tongue on that one, big issue until it’s their time to shine, and their eloquence or personal relationship then moves the powerful person to see the light and make big change.

This idea of change has always been a lie—and it’s obviously not working now. So why won’t our Trumans tunnel free? Certainly, self interest; as Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But it’s not only that. It is also a deep and persistent belief in a sort of compound interest theory of social change: individual actions, more or less uncoordinated, shift hearts and minds, and then change happens. For example, when Dania led a coalition effort against Amazon, sometimes people would announce that they “never” bought anything from Amazon, assert that they knew others doing the same, and insist it would “add up” and influence top corporate leadership to make changes.⁵ But that is not even a boycott, which is organized. Thousands of tiny individual choices made on their own, without an organization, may get a late-night show back on the air but cannot fix the economic, social, and political problems from which cancellations, much less fascism, arise.⁶

Outside the dome, we’re all watching Israel eviscerate Gaza with horror, cheering on the flotilla, and watching Hannah Einbinder, Javier Bardem, and Morgan Spector give interviews with entertainment television about how this genocide is made possible by the United States, and how we should stop it and free Palestine.⁷ Not “feed the hungry” or “end the famine,” but free Palestine.

Outside of the dome, there are the only two factors changing minds, and they are both extremely visible: first, the ongoing, undeniable, live-streamed horrors perpetrated by Israel; and second, the Palestinians working to free themselves, alongside those who have been working in solidarity with them—part, of course, of freeing ourselves. Not unrelated: recently, one of these activists in solidarity won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, the most Jewish city on Earth. Zohran Mamdani won because the electorate transformed itself to elect him. It was an enormous organizing effort, led by working-class Muslim organizations, the NYC chapters of Democratic Socialists of America and Jewish Voice for Peace, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, members of which knew or knew of Mamdani from shared Palestine solidarity and other justice work. His campaign—the canvass, the platform, the energy—is also the biggest antifascist movement in New York, and it sits alongside the mass mobilizations in DC, Los Angeles, and Chicago (as well as less urban places like Bozeman, Montana) opposing the escalation of American fascism–including enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza.⁸

Every institution is a terrain of contest, and to contest we need organizations. Einbinder and Bardem are acting in concert, as part of a group—Film Workers for Palestine—and they are advancing a strategy, in public and in private.⁹ They aren’t “raising awareness”; rather, they’re organizing. Einbinder’s call to “Free Palestine” builds public pressure to get the people in charge of the world’s armies to stop Israel—or at least stop arming Israel—and to be unsatisfied with those steps, because the goal is named clearly: Free Palestine.

Naming Israel a carceral state makes plain, as Khalidi writes, that “the same principles of control, confine, and dominate” that Israel uses against Palestinians in the West Bank, in Israeli prisons, and the pre-1967 borders of Israel are all inseparable from the violence Palestinians in Gaza experience.

Why are self-professed liberals like Ezra Klein so opposed to adjusting their conception of how change happens? The idea that inside-the-dome maneuvering creates change is not the only error that needs correcting. There’s also the notion that “exposing wrongdoing” is sufficient for change. However, without a strong left (or left-led coalition) to electrify an electorate and then stay engaged to force through well thought-out policy changes such a notion is impotent. The genocidal wrongdoings of Israel are exposed, as they have been daily for more than two years–livestreamed for all to see, boasted about on the floor of the United Nations . While the newly inked ceasefire is a welcome pause to the active slaughter, as Mouin Rabbani notes, “it is hardly a peace agreement nor one that lays the basis for attaining Palestinian rights.”¹⁰

Even mass-mobilizing is not proving to be an effective policy-change mechanism. It has many other utilities, but the idea that we will have a dramatic Selma-style demonstration and then our imaginary LBJ will move the Civil Rights Act also misses some key materialist analysis. Not least of these contextual factors was the leverage the Cold War and thriving anticolonial movements provided the Black Freedom movement—until, of course, they didn’t. Having appeased its international critics as much as it was willing to, the United States responded to an era of political-economic crisis with widespread repression that culminated in mass incarceration. Many in the Black Freedom movement clocked these changes in the political economy and adjusted their strategies in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Most of their white Jewish allies–already riding the postwar highway out to the suburbs and better positioned by racial capitalism to benefit from the neoliberal turn–did not. (The same was true of their non-Jewish white allies.) One generation removed from the antisemitic purge of the left under McCarthyism, many Jewish organizations doubled down on a carceral liberalism that blames Black people for the consequences of the structural changes to the economy and cements a commitment to tiny, technocratic adjustments rather than bottom-up, holistic visions of social change.¹¹ To cement their interests to capital’s, Jewish institutional leaders created the false safety of the dome. But as Truman learned when he started to question life inside the dome, its illusory calm could quickly turn predatory to those who sought a life beyond its confines—and depending on the exploitation of those who never invited in at all.

Trying to make sense of these dynamics in 1970, New York Black Panther Zayd Shakur declared, “America is the prison.”¹² Shakur sought to connect the oppression Black Americans faced in all of society with their hyperconcentration in, and active resistance to, carceral facilities. “Prisons are an extension of the repression” faced by oppressed people in all of society, Shakur said. “All of America is a prison where the people are being held captive by the real arch criminals.” In calling America a prison, Shakur rejected the false promises of US nationalism. Buoyed by the mass movements of his era, he understood that the United States had never made good on its promises—whether its founding principles of “liberty and justice for all” or its more recent principles enshrined in a series of civil rights legislation. He called not for inclusion in the American Dream, but for the forging of a new society, where land and property “would belong to the people.” Shakur would not live to see that new society; he was killed by a State Trooper on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. His comrade and travel companion, Assata Shakur, came closer. Shot and arrested on the turnpike, she served six years in prison before escaping. She died on September 25, 2025, in Cuba, where she lived freely for decades despite a $2 million bounty on her head.

"Revolution in our Lifetime" Art Credit: Emory Douglas via Rawpixel — “Revolution in our lifetime” Emory Douglas.
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Original public domain image from Library of Congress

Assata Shakur and Hillary Rodham Clinton were born the same year. Their different trajectories represent many, many things about world developments since 1947. One of these is the choice each made about how to relate to the prison industrial complex as it took shape during their adult lives. The Truman Show dome, from the Jewish institutional dome to the Democratic Party and beyond, is built of affluence and ideology—to simultaneously excuse and expand the carceral reality that everyone else inhabits. Liberals retreated into a garrisoned dome, while Assata and Zayd Shakur both understood the prison to be the more operative analytic and, in doing so, opposed it. We are fighting against that prison still, both in the United States and in Israel.

Inside the territory it controls, Israel organizes abandonment, and thus governs through, and as, a prison.¹³ As scholar Rashid Khalidi wrote in 2014, “Israel has taken the traditional approaches of isolation, containment, and control to new heights.”¹⁴

Naming Israel a carceral state makes plain, as Khalidi writes, that “the same principles of control, confine, and dominate” that Israel uses against Palestinians in the West Bank, in Israeli prisons, and the pre-1967 borders of Israel are all inseparable from the violence Palestinians in Gaza experience. Just three days into the 1967 war, Israel resurrected the British military court system in the newly occupied Palestinian territories. The carceral practices of its colonial predecessor have expanded in increasingly high-tech fashion over the decades.¹⁵ But the prison’s core purpose, incapacitation and displacement, remains unchanged.

While Israel has sealed off Gaza, thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and inside Israel have experienced “administrative detention,” where they have been locked up without charge—sometimes for years at a time. This regime of administrative detention, a central factor motivating the October 7 attack—whose key planner spent more than twenty-three years in prison—has only grown alongside the genocide.¹⁶ At least 73 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prisons as a result of torture and medical neglect since October 7.¹⁷ More than 11,000 Palestinians are in Israeli prisons, including 3,544 under administrative detention. The Palestine prisoner support organization Addameer called Israel’s prisons “the frontline of genocide.”¹⁸ As part of the ceasefire agreement, Israel agreed to release 250 Palestinian prisoners serving lengthy or life sentences, along with 1,700 Palestinians arrested in Gaza since October 7. As part of its routine practice, Israel raided the homes of their families of those to be released, threatening them not to celebrate their freedom.¹⁹

That Palestinians from the West Bank face military courts rather than the civilian legal system demonstrates the war-like nature of prisons in the colonial context. The United States and Israel easily find common cause in their use of mechanisms of war to enforce social control. US companies supply much of the bombs and weaponry used in Israel, paid for with US funds, while Israel has developed ongoing training relationships with municipal police departments nationwide. This “Deadly Exchange,” as critics call these police training exercises, is hardly the origin of police violence in the United States; US police have a long history of racist brutality that predates the founding of Israel, much less the contracts between the two entities.²⁰ Rather, the contracts between the Israeli military and American police speak to the shared repression binding the “special relationship” between the two countries.

People forced to live in prison can make a life there, but never a home. Gaza is the ancestral land for millions of Palestinians, as well as the site where many people made refugees during the Nakba found residence…Gaza was never a prison—Israel is.

This bond exceeds shared police training tactics. As Israel has remade itself into one of the world’s leading tech capitals, it has exported what Rawan Abdelbaki and Rana Sukarieh call “technologies of surveillance and apartheid.”²¹ Israel’s surveillance economy, built with its own national companies as well as in partnership with US-based companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Palantir, has enabled decades of expanded settlement. Human rights lawyer and UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese has recently called it the shift “from economy of occupation to economy of genocide.”²²

For years, we on the left have described Gaza as “an open-air prison.” Borrowing from Palestinian descriptions of life under siege, it was a way to describe the land, air, and sea blockade of Gaza that Israel imposed in 2007. People were trapped there by the IDF and Israeli control, but Gaza is—or was, and will again be—a place. Part of the storied coast of historic Palestine, approximately 80 percent of Gazans are Nakba refugees and their descendants—Palestinians who fled or were expelled following the establishment of Israel in 1948.²³ They and their children and their children’s children continued to make homes under occupation—passing down keys to their original houses in what is now Israel. Their attachment to the land invites us to see Gaza as not only a prison. A prison is not a home, no matter how long someone is forced to live in it.

The people of Gaza made lives on their land as best they could, under conditions not of their choosing. People forced to live in prison can make a life there, but never a home. Gaza is the ancestral land for millions of Palestinians, as well as the site where many people made refugees during the Nakba found residence. Gaza is land barricaded by a colonial force. A place that could be sovereign, but instead faces a colonial army backed by the world’s biggest colonizing army, laying siege to it for months on end with a combination of artillery and deprivation. Imperial rulers are not in the habit of destroying their prisons. Gaza was never a prison—Israel is.

For Jews raised inside the Jewish institutional dome, including Jewish Israelis under the Iron Dome, their idea of their own Jewishness is so tied to their perceived ability to expel (or jail, or control) others that to relinquish their Zionism would leave many “liberal Zionists” almost no Jewishness at all.²⁴ In contrast, leftist, mostly anti-Zionist Jews safeguarded our commitment to the ethical precepts that once undergirded all of Judaism, such as all humans are made in the image of divine (whatever divine that means to you), that to kill is to dishonor both humanity and the divine, and that it is our shared, sacred obligation to repair this broken world—or, as the poet Grace Paley once credited her mother with saying, “everyone just wants to live like a person.”²⁵ As Benjamin Balthasar details in his book Citizens of the Whole World, Jewish leftists did this in partnership with non-Jewish leftists—these are the Jews (white and otherwise) who did not abandon the Black Freedom struggle—and in defiance of the changes to the United States and the world that Shakur noted as early as 1970.²⁶

What Zayd and Assata Shakur and other leftists understood in the 1970s is something many are coming to terms with now: the primary power of all these domes—the purpose of their huge war chests, the function of the prisons—is to limit both mass organizing and the public imagination. But as the rulers of empire have, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor put it, “given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world,” the facade is crumbling.²⁷ The genocide is undeniable, even inside the dome (not that some don’t still try). The rapaciousness of the economy is undeniable. The absurd barbarism of the antitrans panic is undeniable. It is no longer possible for massive amounts of money to guarantee the exclusion of left ideas—from fast and free busses to a free Palestine, from redefining gender to reinventing the electorate. The rapid immiseration of the planet, most dire in Gaza, might still inspire society to reinvent itself following a left vision and instigated by left organizing.

Israeli authorities inspect the scene of a prison escape outside Gilboa prison. Photo Credit: Sebastien Scheiner, Associated Press — Israeli authorities inspect the scene of a prison escape outside Gilboa prison.
Photo Credit: Sebastien Scheiner, Associated Press

Those able to see that the dome is really a prison illuminate a path forward. As Shakur laid out in his 1970 essay, “The prisoners have the answer to the penal society in this country, because they know more about it than [anyone else].” And perhaps this, finally, is what tethers centrists to their domes—not the money, not even the self-righteousness, but the impetus to follow the leadership of others, without fanfare. Both Mamdani and Einbinder, for example, were also part-of-the-crowd Palestine solidarity protesters before they were famous. The task is not to work within the dome. The task is to tunnel out, as Jim Carrey’s character in the Truman Show did—but more importantly, as Assata Shakur did in 1979, as six Palestinian political prisoners did in 2021, and as Gaza fishermen did while Israel was busy arresting the activists on the Global Sumud flotilla.²⁸ The task, in other words, is to escape and join the rest of us in building something better. A growing number of us are getting to know our neighbors at mass demonstrations, while canvassing, and at the neighborhood ICE watch.²⁹ And of course, insiders jettisoning their old ideas of how change happens are being received with a warm welcome.³⁰ Join those who are, as Dylan Saba recently wrote of Black and Palestinian struggles against colonial domination, “plotting the next escape.”³¹ We are holding close the memory of Gaza as a home and the solidarity encampments as a possibility. It is a hopeful sign that beyond falsehood and repression lies a better future.

In other words, Go birds, fuck ICE, free Palestine.³²

Abolitionism, Anti-Zionism, Israel/Palestine, Mass Incarceration

Dania Rajendra and Dan Berger

Dania Rajendra is an organizer and writer, at work on a project on the lessons from the US labor movement for Jews organizing desperately-needed new religious and cultural institutions. Her recent essays have appeared in Truthout, Dilettante Army, and In These Times, and her poetry in Killing the Buddha.

Dan Berger is the author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey, among other books. He is currently writing Prison: A History of the United States, which is forthcoming from Basic Books. His articles have appeared in Boston Review, Jewish Currents, and Truthout. He lives in Seattle, where he directs the Washington Prison History Project.

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