Monsters Make Monsters: The Catastrophic Folly of Israel’s Post-7th October Barbarism and the Future that is Being Written
The Existential Reader’s stance on the spiralling violence in Israel-Palestine and the looming catastrophe of Western intervention in Iran.
The Future is Unwritten
In 1982, The Clash released the single, ‘Know Your Rights’, the cover of which had scrawled the words, "The future is unwritten," in blood red font.
In the song, frontman Joe Strummer juxtaposes the rallying cry with irony, exposing the blatant hypocrisy at the heart of Western, so-called “liberal democracy”. The three rights Strummer declares us to have, the right not to be killed, the right to food money, and the right to free speech, are all undermined by the structural nature of power, and how that power is executed, in our society. The right to free speech, he declares, should only be taken up if you are “dumb enough to try it.” The right to food money? Subject to “a little investigation, humiliation, and if you cross your fingers, rehabilitation.” As if food money, doled out as “welfare” in the US, or “benefits” in the UK, can only be provided when certain criteria are met, and as if poverty itself is a self-inflicted state of mind.
The first of those rights, the right not to be killed, is, you would think, most inalienable of all. But no, the right not to be killed does not apply to authority, meaning that your murder, if conducted by “a policeman, or an aristocrat”, is entirely legitimate.
Serving as art in the guise of exposé, and in true Clash style, ‘Know Your Rights’ tears away at the rhetoric of Western ideas of freedom to reveal an order that preaches rights but practises control. These rights, illusory as they are, are more applicable for some than for others. For some people, these rights, or the appearance of these rights, is so unimportant, that it can be stripped away without reason, or explanation, in the most barbaric way imaginable.
That phrase, “The future is unwritten”, that dominates the cover of “Know Your Rights”, runs contrary to religious dogma. This includes the view of fanatical Zionism, that preaches the land of Israel as being given to God’s “chosen people”. This logic, when applied to the creation of the Jewish state in accordance with God’s will, or divine prophecy, laughs in the face of this crazed, historically illiterate, belief.
By stating that the future is unwritten, The Clash are making the case for individual sovereignty over their own destinies. Our lives are planned out, nor our events. Everything is a result of individual choices. It is these choices that write the future, and that future is written as we go along. The future is formed by us; we are not ready formed by a pre-ordained future.
Right now, one particular future is being written by religious fanatics. In fairness, this narrative is a consequence of fanatism from all three tenets of the Abrahamic faith. Though Zionism is the supreme cause, all three tenets are guilty of heinous crimes in the name of religious fallacy. Of course, this is a narrative that has been long unfolding. It’s beginnings long pre-date 7th October massacres of 2023, the creation of Hamas, and even the creation of Israel itself. Yet the narrative, being unfixed to a divine will, can be taken in another direction. But that won’t be imagined here. In this piece, I analyse the future being written by the State of Israel and its band of religious fanatics, maniacs, and mass-murderers.
Violence as Original Sin
A common cliché that is often applied to cyclical violence is “Evil begets evil.” Another way of putting it, in relation to State inflicted evil, is this – if you treat people in monstrous ways, you create monsters.
In my opinion, original sin is not the mythological Adam’s plucking of the symbolic apple, but the first infliction of violence. Whoever, or whatever it was that inflicted that first blow of violence, unlocked a desire for vengeance and a wariness of others that has contaminated the human mind. Each act of violence, I believe, establishes a rupture in trust between human beings. Once violence is enacted, it leaves a scar not only on the body, but the mind, and, ultimately, on the collective psyche. It sets in motion a logic that is hard to unlearn: that power is taken, not shared; that safety can only be preserved through domination; that the other is a threat, not a fellow being. It is in this sense that violence becomes foundational - not as a natural state of being, but as a deviation so formative that everything built atop it bears its imprint.
Israel's founding, like many modern nation-states, is inseparable from violence. But what makes the Israeli case distinct is the way that violence is not merely instrumental but is sanctified.
To critique Israel in this way is not to deny Jewish suffering, nor to absolve others of responsibility. It is to reject the fatalism that justifies today’s atrocities with yesterday’s traumas. It is to say that the future cannot be written as a continuation of the past without repeating its worst chapters. Because once a nation begins to see its survival as dependent on the perpetual subjugation of another people - once it sees that domination as either natural, moral, or divine - it locks itself into a cycle from which only catastrophe can emerge. Each act of suppression breeds another act of defiance. Each humiliation sows the seeds of retaliation. And over time, the lines between victim and aggressor become not blurred, but inverted.
I believe, then, that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people, the unrelenting, merciless outbreaks of extreme violence, cannot be separated from the principles on which the State of Israel was established. This means that there is a direct link between the atrocities committed against Jewish people in Europe, culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust, and the atrocities since carried out by Israelis on the Palestinians.
There is no doubt that the promise of “Never again” was not an abstract one, but instead was a visceral response to the most industrialised form of mass extermination the world had ever seen. For many Jews, the creation of Israel represented not merely a homeland, but a shield, a place where they could never again be herded, hunted, or annihilated with impunity. This collective trauma shaped the identity of the state itself, where survival became its moral foundation, and security its most sacred principle.
But again, back to that key point, when survival becomes a permanent justification for domination, and when security is defined as the unending control of another people, trauma ceases to be a psychological ailment and becomes a weapon. The promise of “Never again” takes on different meaning, becoming “never again to us, but possibly again to others.” Or at least, this is how it has functioned in practice. The Holocaust, a crime of unimaginable magnitude, has been used not only as a shield against criticism, but as a licence for impunity. It has become a sacred narrative into which Palestinians were never written, except only as obstacles.
Yet another reemphasis, because it is important to make this clear – none of this is to deny the legitimacy of Jewish fear. It is only a questioning of what happens when that fear is hardened into a national doctrine, one that sees existential threats everywhere, and humanity nowhere. What we have learned from the creation of the State of Israel, is that a state built on trauma must either confront that trauma honestly, or risk recreating it, inverted, upon others.
With God on Our Side
Getting back to the dogma, the idea that Israel has a divine right to the land, granted by God, fixed in ancient texts, and therefore beyond discussion, is not just bad theology, but is actually political poison. What it does is transform a brutal, ongoing quasi-colonial project (I say quasi as it is distinctive from traditional forms of colonialism, undertaken by immigrants and refugees without a “motherland”, as opposed to, for example, British colonisers) into a sacred mission. It justifies cruelty as destiny, fossilises injustice into scripture, and turns every call for peace, compromise, or coexistence into heresy.
This is religious fanaticism draped in nationalism. And worse still, it is backed by a world superpower, the USA, whose top brass and established social order believe, as a basis of Christian faith, in the establishment and protection of the State of Israel. In many ways, these fanatics are the real lunatics. Whereas Israeli society has developed out of a very real sense of trauma, the beliefs held by the zealots of America are explicitly a consequence of dogmatic perversion, and a profound misunderstanding of Biblical and historical context that can only be described in a simple Americanism – as being moronic.
This theological fatalism, then, the belief that “God gave us this land” and that therefore Palestinians must vanish, submit, or die, is not a fringe concept. It underwrites the ideology of the most powerful forces in Israeli and American (and therefore Western) politics. In this worldview, the future must be what the past promised. The very concept of the future being open to negotiation or veiled in uncertainty is emphatically refused. It becomes heretical, and extremely dangerous. It is against God’s will.
The Necessity for Resistance
But for most of us, the future is still unwritten. That’s why we must speak out and challenge this insanity, because to accept this war as inevitable, to accept this violence as unchangeable, would be to surrender to the very logic that justifies the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Since 7th October 2023, Israel has not been waging a war but a project of absolute annihilation. The level of destruction we have seen in Gaza is unprecedented in modern military history, with tens of thousands of dead, an unspeakable, and unforgivable, amount of them children, civilian infrastructure razed, and entire families reduced to body counts, lying mangled under flattened homes. And that is not even considering the amount of child amputees or mass-starvation. In short, every principle of humanitarian law is being torched in broad daylight. And now, with war drums pounding once more toward Iran, the U.S. - and no doubt the U.K., being the mere extension of the U.S. empire it is, stand ready to instigate further catastrophe.
Furthermore, the binary script we are presented with day-after-day, that Israel is good, and Hamas is evil, or even to balance it out a bit, vice versa, is a simplification accepted as fact by those who can only understand history, morality, and human nature in general, as a Marvel film. The current reality of all human society has developed out of the wreckage of real decisions made by politicians and armed forces personnel, including soldiers themselves who, contrary to just following orders, always have a choice in whether or not they subject themselves to the will of their commanders. Ultimately, we are living in the fall out of decades, if not centuries, of State-sanctioned violence. And while Hamas' actions on 7th October were monstrous, let us be honest about where the monster was forged.
Hamas as an Israeli Frankenstein
Israel helped create Hamas. Not metaphorically, but strategically, and deliberately. In the 1980s, Israel supported the rise of Islamist movements in Gaza as a counterweight to the secular, leftist, and broadly nationalist PLO. As Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official, once admitted: “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
This was not an isolated phenomenon. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, we see a recurring pattern: leftist or secular nationalist organisations, whether popular, flawed, or radical, systematically undermined by imperial powers, with the intention they be replaced or allowed to wither in favour of entities perceived as being easier to manage. In Latin America, this often meant installing military dictatorships that could be integrated into the capitalist order. In the Middle East, it meant tolerating or even fostering religious movements that displaced class politics with sectarianism, and internationalism with insularity.
It would seem that for the capitalist nations, it was better to deal with something that appeared to be fragmented, tribal, or pious than with organised resistance that speaks the language of solidarity, decolonisation, or redistribution.
But the real creation of Hamas, or the empowering of Hamas, as the monstrous entity it is, was not a manifestation of typical antisemitism, as we are led to believe. Through decades of massacre, land confiscation, and subjugation, the Israeli forces created fertile ground for the Jihadist ideology of Hamas, and other groups, to take root. Decade after decade, as the apartheid regime relentlessly brutalised Palestinians, resistance became vengeance. Because when you strip a people of dignity, liberty, and the very architecture of ordinary life, you don’t achieve peaceful co-existence. You get rage.
Again - treat people monstrously, and you will create monsters.
Post 7th-October Barbarism
One of the most infuriating arguments in defence of Israel’s post-7th October insanity is that they were left with no choice. This is an absurd notion. There is always a choice, and Israel had more than one, the most sensible of which, would be to first and foremost negotiate for the release of the hostages. At the risk of sounding flippant, Israel could have still exacted its barbaric acts of retribution once the hostages were safe. This isn’t me suggesting that as the correct course of action, by the way, just stating the obvious fact that nobody in positions of power would have batted an eyelid if Israel negotiated the release of the hostages and then went to war regardless.
The right option, as difficult as it may sound to the ears of genocide cheerleaders and apologists, is to negotiate the release of the hostages, work for a two-state solution, and go after the perpetrators of the 7th October massacre within the boundaries of decency. Let’s not pretend that other countries would have done the same thing. Many countries have experienced horrific terrorist attacks in the opening decades to our century. None, not even the U.S. post-9/11, have reacted in such a frenzied, unapologetic onslaught of violence. And that is really saying something.
One counterargument could be that Israel is dealing with a threat on its doorstep. Well, Russia has been subject to attacks from terrorists on their doorstep in Chechnya, including horrific attacks on schools and theatres. Now as far as I’m aware, Chechnya still has buildings and a functioning infrastructure.
A Harsh Truth About Terrorism
A difficult but necessary truth to acknowledge, when talking about terrorism, is that in its most strategic form, it does not seek only destruction - it seeks a reaction. Its violence is real, yes, and horrifying. But its logic is psychological, not military, with aims to destabilise a targeted society, and/or to provoke a disproportionate response so severe, so dehumanising, that it reshapes the moral terrain of any established or subsequent conflict. If we look at the history of terrorist attacks, whether committed by groups or individuals we consider actual terrorists or righteous freedom fighters, the perpetrator(s) typically commit the first atrocity to invite the second. They count on the enemy to lose control. Basically, they want the retaliation. And when that control is lost, when retaliation comes, and the bombs fall on civilians and the body count multiplies tenfold, and the moral high ground begins to collapse, the oppressor is seen to be as barbaric as the assailant. And so the cycle goes on.
Hamas, I believe, are likely to have understood this. Their attack on 7th October was not just murderous, it was provocative in the extreme, an act designed to elicit Israel’s worst instincts. Let’s not be naïve here, or think from a purely biased point of view. Hamas know their enemy. They know what Israel is capable of. They have lived with it all their lives. They would have known that attacks such as the ones on 7th October would have the severest of consequences. Whether Hamas was depending on outside forces to enter the fray on their behalf, such as Iran, I’ve no way of knowing. They could, even, have anticipated an intervention on their behalf from the Saudi’s or Qatari’s. Indeed, many of Hamas’ high command were based in Qatar.
But all that is speculation. What is fact, is that Israel obliged. The bombardment of Gaza, the refusal to distinguish civilian life from military threat, the starvation, and the forced displacement, are not just war crimes, but are victories for Hamas. They confirm, in the eyes of many watching, what Hamas claims: that Israel will always treat Palestinian life as expendable, and that resistance, however bloody, is the only language the occupier understands. It is a cruel trap, but it is not a new one. What is staggering is how willingly, even proudly, Israel walked straight into it.
No Longer Able to Play the Victim
What we’ve witnessed since is not a defence of Israel but a calculated undertaking of ethnic cleansing. The intentional blocking of aid, the deliberate targeting of hospitals, schools, and UN shelters is not “fighting Hamas.” This is the collective punishment of a trapped, traumatised people. And let me be clearer still on where I stand here, for the “Hamas uses civilians as human shields” brigade - If Adolf Hitler himself was holed up in a hospital, surrounding by children, then guess what? You don’t blow up the hospital.
Furthermore, when did taking out the human shield become standard practice when dealing with a human shield situation? I’ve seen in films, Speed being at the forefront of my mind, where the human shield is shot in the leg in order to provide a shot at the bad guy. But obliterating both the bad guy and the human shield? When did that become a thing?
In the West, leaders have parroted the line of Israel’s “right to defend itself” mantra-like, as if it has ever, at any point the short history of Israel as an established State, been in doubt, while at the same time supplying weapons and vetoing ceasefires. Even as images of dead children flood our timelines and television screens, even as aid workers are killed by Israeli missiles, Western complicity deepens. What does it say about the moral state of our governments that they treat war crimes as PR problems?
The Loss of Global Support
The most damning indictment of Israel’s post-7th October insanity is the loss of support and sympathisers to the Israeli cause. If you’ve lost the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Peter Hitchens, then you know you’ve lost the plot somewhere along the line. But aside from pint pot political commentators and YouTube influencers, Israel’s post-7th October response has diminished its support massively. Yet of more significance, is the heightened awareness of Israeli crimes pre-7th October. Given its dominance of media discourse, and the volatility of opinion, a great many people will have researched this area who otherwise wouldn’t have, and have learned things about Israel’s founding and history that they would otherwise have remained oblivious to. Among younger generations, and especially among Jewish anti-Zionists and liberal Western critics, the narrative has been shredded. Support for Palestine has become global consensus, rooted not just in moral outrage, but in a recognition of power and powerlessness.
Israel, once mythologised as David, is now clearly Goliath. And as it marches toward another regional war, this time with Iran, it does so from a place of profound strategic miscalculation. The U.S. may prop it up for now. But history is not kind to settler-colonial states that mistake military superiority for legitimacy.
The Looming Folly: Iran
A war with Iran would be catastrophic. It would engulf the region, destabilise global markets, radicalise millions, and make the current humanitarian disaster look restrained. In short, it would be Iraq the sequel. And for what? To support an Israeli regime that long ago abandoned the possibility of peace in favour of perpetual domination?
Let’s not be coy: Netanyahu and his ilk want escalation. War distracts from internal corruption, delegitimises critics, and lets the far-right pursue its maximalist fantasy of an ethnically pure Eretz Israel. The U.S., addicted to the myth of its own indispensability, and gripped by its own brand of religious fanatism that is inextricably rooted in an illiterate support of Israel, continues to promote the cause. The U.K., its long-time loyal poodle, will no doubt trail willingly behind.
But none of this is destiny. It is purely ideological. The future remains unwritten.
Excellent summary, but not all Americans who support Israel see this conflict as a righteous war on Hamas and the realization of an incoherent and dishonest theological narrative. Some Americans see the cultural degradation and persecution of women and LGBTQ people as reason enough to obliterate an entire society and culture that has resided there for centuries.
Nice piece on monstrous events and the trauma of violence. Thank you.