This essay contains descriptions of violence in Gaza and US prisons.

When I was 18 years old, I watched from the door of my Ohio prison cell as two correctional officers brutally beat a man while he was asleep in his cell. One officer held him down by the legs and repeatedly yelled "Stop resisting!" while the other punched him in the face over a dozen times. When they were finished, they sprayed an entire can of mace into his bleeding wounds and hauled him away in handcuffs.

"Get out of the window!" screamed a voice from somewhere behind me. "Get away from the door!" I snapped out of my shock and realized that it was my cellmate, a man much older than me who had been in prison longer than me, too. When I turned to look at him, he explained, "Sit down on your bunk so they don't see you watching and decide to come get us next."

After witnessing a correctional officer beat, harass, and write a false conduct report against an incarcerated person, I will often hear the rationalization, "He shouldn't have been arguing with the officer" or "He shouldn't have come to prison in the first place." And when I'm watching TV, and I hear a Fox News commentator say, "Israel didn't start this war, the Palestinians shouldn't have supported Hamas," I get déjà vu. The people who say these things all have the same self-righteous, uncritical indignation in their voices and scowls on their faces. I've come to realize that this is not a coincidence.

The US and Israel both have histories in a constantly shapeshifting process known as settler colonialism, which in both cases began as an explicitly racist and ethno-nationalist endeavor and now must be rationalized in terms that are ostensibly race-neutral and colorblind. The bureaucrats and apologists of these regimes accomplish this by painting Black people as "criminals" and Muslims as "terrorists" to justify the use of police, prisons, and military force. They frame every attempt to discover the root causes of crime and terrorism as a lack of moral clarity while proudly promoting their refusal to examine history and context as some sort of moral virtue. Finally, they silence any dissent that could expose these practices in the name of combatting "reverse racism" and antisemitism. For example, banning critical race theory and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions [BDS] movement and painting Black Lives Matter and Pro-Palestine protests as "riots."

In her book Freedom Is A Constant Struggle, Angela Davis wrote that if you juxtapose photographs of Black Lives Matter protests in the US with photographs of Palestinian protests in Israel, you can barely tell them apart. In both cases, predominantly white police officers use military hardware to crack down on Black and brown people for demanding their right to live. 

The equipment is manufactured by the same corporations, and the US and Israel even exchange tactics in violence. In 2020, for example, during the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd's murder, Palestinians took to social media to share tips on how to deal with police violence and assaults.

The similarities do not end there. The United States, the so-called Land of the Free, incarcerates a higher percentage of its people than any other "independent democracy" in the world. Israel, which touts itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, is the only nation in the world that routinely uses military courts—which do not have ordinary due process protections—to imprison children. They were prosecuting 500-700 Palestinian children each year even before the current genocide in Gaza. In absolute terms, the US is the world's biggest military spender while Israel is one of the biggest per-GDP military spenders. Both nations are also proponents of building walls along their borders, a medieval practice. Yet even with all of this, neither the US nor Israel are the safest places to live. A person would be better off living in just about any other major industrialized nation.

All of this begins to make sense once we realize that the US and Israel are but two strands of the tangled mass that is European colonialism. In "The Communist Manifesto," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were perhaps the first to so eloquently describe the importance of colonialism to the development of the modern world order:

"The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known…"

Most of the colonies were controlled by the big European empires, resulting in the mass plunder and export of natural resources, such as timber, rubber, tobacco, and cotton. But for America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Israel, it takes the specific form of settler colonialism, a violent phenomenon in which white settlers attempt to exterminate and replace the original inhabitants.

In America, John Locke, who was widely read by the colonizers—including the founders of the United States—provided rationalization. According to him, land only becomes property when it is "mixed with labor," or in other words, when it is cultivated. Through Locke's view, because the Native peoples in America were not farmers, they had no claim to the land they'd lived in harmony with for millennia—a convenient notion that positioned almost 3.9 million square miles as ripe for the taking, ready to be fenced-in and made profitable by slave labor. Similarly, Israel would invoke modern (European) notions of property and statehood to justify destroying over 500 villages and forcibly expelling over 750,000 Indigenous Palestinians in 1948, as Prime Minister Golda Meir flatly stated in a 1969 Sunday Times interview, "There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with an independent Palestinian state?"

The US colonial impulse would also be justified with the idea of manifest destiny, where it was the white man's divinely ordained mission to expand his domain, bringing progress and civilization to the "savages." Compare this to the language used in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, where "pioneers" from Eastern and Western Europe came, "made deserts bloom" and "built villages and towns… bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants."

Despite these striking similarities, some people argue that Israel's situation is too unique to be lumped in with the other settler-colonial states. But they ignore the fact that all settler-colonial states are different in some ways and that colonizers can continuously re-draw and manipulate racial categories to meet any contingencies that may arise. For example, the definition of whiteness has continuously evolved to benefit those in power. At different points in time, Italians and the Irish were racialized and considered non-white. While skin color serves as an outward marker, race is not really about biology. A person's race is a person's position in a matrix of laws, economic arrangements, "commonsense" assumptions, and military, surveillance, and carceral technologies.

For example, consider Wolfe's analysis of differential racialization in the United States. Native people needed to be erased while Black slaves needed to be kept from obtaining any measure of equal-rights-holding whiteness. This explains two seemingly contradictory versions of the infamous one-drop rule. One drop of non-Native blood meant you weren't a real Native person while one drop of Black blood meant you were irrevocably Black.

Just as Blackness as a race was, according to Hortense Spillers, "routinely created by the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet," Palestinians as a race were "routinely created by the calculated work of sponge, rubber and metal bullets, tear gas, riot control equipment, air bombardments and ground offenses, military court systems, administrative detentions, walls, and extrajudicial executions," according to Ronit Lentin in her academic article "Palestine/Israel and State Criminality." Israel's racial lines are only drawn differently than those in the US because its colonial needs are different.

Israel explicitly defines Jewishness in terms of heredity, and thus its Orwellian-named "Law of Return" offers automatic citizenship to people from places like the US, Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and Russia, while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to land they've lived on, some of whom still have the keys to their old houses. A man named Hasan Hammami who was expelled during the Nakba visited his old neighborhood after 45 years in exile and saw Russian Orthodox Christians buried in a graveyard. These people had come as Jews but later converted to Christianity. "Several hundred thousand Russians had the right to move to my country," he said, "yet neither I nor any Palestinians have the right to return to this holy land."

While Arab and Ethiopian Jews are treated as second-class citizens, descendants of the few non-Jewish Arabs who managed to stay in Israel proper fared even worse. This should not be surprising. The 1929 constitution of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that, to this day, manages much of the public land in Israel, stated that it did not exist to promote the rights of all inhabitants, but the rights of "the Jewish People only." Compare that to the US Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford: "The enslaved African race was not intended to be included, and formed no part of, the people who framed and adopted [the Declaration of Independence] … consequently, the special rights and immunities guaranteed to citizens do not apply to them."

Black people did not initiate the American settler colonial project, nor were they treated as beneficiaries. As Thomas Jefferson put it when writing about maintaining slavery, Black folks are the "wolf" held by the ear, and the white ruling class must occasionally adjust its grip. Thus, the two biggest projects of police and prison expansion in American history came immediately after the two biggest victories for the rights of Black people: Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement.

First of all, the Thirteenth Amendment does not abolish slavery. It merely qualifies it: 

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to its jurisdiction."

Southern lawmakers did not miss the obvious strategy suggested by this language, which is to make sure that Black people get "duly convicted." As slaves had lived and worked on their masters' properties their entire lives, Emancipation would, by definition, automatically render many of them jobless and homeless. In response, legislatures promptly passed new laws criminalizing loitering and vagrancy. The prison population went from being predominantly white to predominantly Black almost overnight. The states then leased these newly incarcerated Blacks back to their former masters for labor. To this day, you can find photographs of incarcerated Black people picking tomatoes in the hot sun at the Louisiana State Penitentiary—which is also known as Angola, after the former slave plantation that occupied its territory. The incarcerated folks get paid around 30 cents an hour for their labor, while white, rifle-carrying officers watch them from horseback.

Secondly, the War on Drugs and the tough-on-crime era began immediately after the Civil Rights Movement. Between 1970 and 2000, the US. built nearly a thousand new jails and prisons, and the number of incarcerated people at any given time grew from around 200,000 to over one million. To dispel any lingering doubts as to why this occurred, consider the confession made by the Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Richard Nixon, John Erlichmann: 

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be against the [Vietnam] war or Black [people], but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."

This is an example of what W.E.B. Dubois described in The Souls of Black Folk as white supremacy's tendency to mask itself as purity against crime. Perhaps it explains why the media kept increasing their coverage of crime stories even during those periods when actual crime rates were decreasing. All of those Black mugshots have ensured that white people implicitly associate Blackness with criminality.

On a few occasions, I've broached these subjects with staff members here in prison. Sometimes they're skeptical. One educator thought I was a delusional conspiracy theorist until she researched it herself. "Oh my God," she exclaimed the next day, "I thought you were crazy, but it turns out it's all true. I can't believe I've worked in this system for 15 years and nobody's ever spoken about it." Nobody wants to think of themselves as a modern-day overseer, nor, in the case of our system's teachers and social workers, as white pastors on a slave plantation. 

And Israeli people don't want to think of themselves as colonizers. Linda Dittmar writes of her idyllic childhood in Israel and recounts her horror when, as an adult, she finally discovered the true extent of her nation's founding crimes, visiting the sites of massacres and other atrocities. Just as it's much easier for whites to reassure themselves that they're not racist by shackling "criminals" rather than Blacks, it's much easier for Zionists to reassure themselves that they're not racist by bombing "terrorists" rather than Arabs.

The US and Israel refer to Iran as "the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism." Yet the US and its proxies have killed millions more people than any Islamic militant group could ever dream. For example, while Iran has given Hamas an estimated $100 million yearly—and while the organization has killed about 30,000 Israelis since 1948, consider the fact that Israel killed an estimated 15,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba, at least 40,000 people since October 7th, and has displaced millions. Since the US. gives Israel $4 billion a year, doesn't that make the States the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism? If the prison industrial complex were really about keeping people safe from crime, then every single Purdue Pharma executive would be serving a life sentence. If the military-industrial complex were really about keeping people safe from terrorism, then every single living US president and Israeli Prime Minister would be languishing in administrative detention without a trial.

One of the actual functions of borders, police, prisons, and militaries is to define "us" by controlling, banishing, and killing a racialized "them." While this is true for all nation-states, it's doubly true for settler-colonial states like the United States and Israel. As settlers, their identity is always at stake. This is why they're so insecure and sensitive about anything that seems to threaten it. It's why so many members of the dominant groups in these countries are so aggressively and obnoxiously patriotic. It's why they try to control anything that could interfere with "good breeding," like reproductive rights for people with uteruses and the affirmation of LGBTQ+ identities. It's why they angrily and mindlessly repeat slogans like "lock them all up" or "push them into the sea," even after they're presented with evidence that these policies make the world much more dangerous. Sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously, they're more than happy to sacrifice some of their physical safety to preserve the identities they've raped and pillaged to create.

This also explains why so many people recoil in horror when they hear any mention of context. Context only matters if you're trying to solve problems. If you're trying to preserve your unearned privilege and your sense of legitimacy while absolving yourself of any responsibility for the social conditions that produce crime and terrorism in the first place, context is an obstacle. This is why you get Senator Mitch McConnell facetiously stating that if somebody is pointing a gun at you, you wouldn't want to wait for a therapist to come talk to them about their mental health. Or, the so-called liberal journalist Bari Weiss claiming she "does not need context" to know that the events of Oct. 7 were "pure evil."

We should call this phenomenon one-dayism. One-dayism is where people focus on the day of a crime or terrorist attack while ignoring the events which inevitably caused it. Just as we boil down a person's history to a single criminal event, we boil down Palestine's history to a single event or day. To discuss crime and punishment without the context of 400 years of structural racism in America, or to discuss Hamas without the context of 75 years of colonialism in Israel is not moral clarity. It's moral myopia.  

I've seen more than my fair share of one-dayism in prison. I once knew a man in his sixties who had been incarcerated since he was a child. As a young child, he was sex-trafficked by his mother and kept locked in the basement where he had to supplement his diet by eating cockroaches and spiders. He was first incarcerated at age 12 for hitting one of his rapists in the head with a hammer and had only been released two months earlier when he killed somebody during a robbery at the age of 18. During his 50 years of incarceration, he experienced the horrors of solitary confinement, physical and sexual abuse, and innumerable other acts of humiliation and dehumanization. Prisons are filled with people who have similar stories, and it's these stories that are not told when you see their mugshots on the evening news.

Critics will inevitably conclude that I'm somehow justifying crime and terrorism. But if I were to explain the causes of cancer and then argue that preventing its development is more effective than absurdly trying to cure it with the same carcinogens that caused it in the first place, I would not be "justifying" cancer. The solution to violence and hatred cannot be more violence and hatred. Far from minimizing the importance of taking responsibility for atrocities, I'm arguing for an infinitely deeper level of responsibility, the realization of the truth expressed by Father Zosima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me."

Following the politics of an insecure identity, members of the dominant groups who accept this responsibility are cast out of the circle by those who cling to their status as oppressors. White Americans who oppose structural racism and its climax, mass incarceration, are suffering from "white guilt." Jewish organizations who oppose Zionism, like If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, are "self-hating Jews." Black, Palestinian, and other minorities who criticize the extant order are beyond the pale altogether, and the alternative frameworks they produce are often banned outright. For example, consider what happened to both Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.

Just as Emancipation and the Civil Rights movement were followed by insidious white backlash, so too was the Black Lives Matter movement. While Derek Chauvin's high-profile murder of George Floyd provoked a desire to understand systemic racism even in some previously recalcitrant segments of the US population, reactionaries could not watch this happen and do nothing. For several years now, they've trumpeted the alarm that CRT is supposedly being taught in schools.

This claim is not true. Critical Race Theory is a specific framework in the field of constitutional law and is not taught in any K-12 schools, but propaganda campaigns are not about telling the truth. Christopher Rufo, the far-right culture warrior who originally manufactured this hysteria, has been very clear about his intentions.

"We have successfully frozen their brand, 'critical race theory,' into the public conversation," he wrote on Twitter back in 2021. "We will eventually turn it toxic, as we out all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category… The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans."

Influenced by Rufo, President Trump later issued an executive order banning the discussion of certain "divisive concepts" in any federal civil service education. Among them is the idea that "an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex." Several states have since adopted bans with similar provisions. In other words, educators cannot talk about slavery, Jim Crow, KKK lynchings, redlining, police brutality, or mass incarceration because it might hurt white people's feelings. The "reverse racism" of having to listen to uncomfortable truths in a classroom is considered a greater evil than the actual racism of oppressive policies that physically destroy people's lives.

Of course, now that people are protesting against Israel, a wealthy nation with a vast carceral and military apparatus, these same reactionaries are suddenly champions of Civil Rights, obsessed with rooting out antisemitism wherever they can find it. I do not doubt that genuine antisemitism exists here and around the globe. But the definition of antisemitism used by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League is so expansive as to deem any substantive criticism of Israel as antisemitic. If we describe Israel's founding as illegitimate, for example, or if we refer to its actions as ethnic cleansing or apartheid, this means we're antisemitic. Any critique or callout of Zionism is immediately branded as antisemitic, too. 

The irony is that the ADL brands itself as a Civil Rights organization. They're supposed to be defending free speech against powerful state actors, not defending powerful state actors against free speech. A number of their employees have recognized this and have resigned.

Similar to Critical Race Theory bans are the laws prohibiting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. BDS was created by Palestinian civil society organizations who were inspired by the successful boycott movement against the South African apartheid regime. Individuals and firms who participate in BDS are refusing to do any business with the Israeli government and with certain Israeli firms until specific demands are met. Several US states, after having been lobbied by the ADL and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, have responded to this by passing laws that keep government contracts from going to anybody participating in BDS. This unique government boycott of a civilian boycott flagrantly violates the First Amendment, as American jurisprudence has long recognized that boycotts by private entities are a protected form of expression. 

It's telling that the same people who condemn Hamas for its violent tactics and its stated goal of eliminating Israel also routinely condemn BDS, even though BDS was explicitly created as a nonviolent alternative and does not demand the dissolution of the Israeli state, but rather an end to activities which have mostly already been deemed illegal by the United Nations—such as Israel's constant killing of civilians and the building of walls and settlements in the occupied territories.

Once again, the legal, carceral, and military systems of settler colonial states, as well as the ideological apparatuses that support them, are not really about preventing violence. Just look at the way these societies use the word "violence." When Black Lives Matter or Pro-Palestine protestors destroy property—which can be replaced—it's called violent. But when corporations destroy oceans and rainforests, which cannot be replaced, this is never called violent. You will never see the following phrases in any headlines: "Police violently arrest protestors," "Judge violently sentences teenager to life in prison," or "Israel violently imposes a blockade on food and medical supplies into Gaza." Whether or not something is called violent in official discourse has little to do with how much harm it does to people. It has everything to do with whether the actions are reinforcing or threatening traditional power relations between races, nations, classes, and genders. 

So much for official discourse. If we really want to reduce violence in all its forms— criminal, terrorist, corporate, carceral, and military—we've got to realize that questions like "How much time should criminals serve?" and "How many civilian deaths are acceptable when going after terrorists?" aren't just useless, but harmful. Rather, we should ask, along with philosopher Andrea Smith, "What forms of governance can we build that do not rest on the continual deaths of racialized others?" We can experiment by diverting funds from police, prisons, and militaries into reparations for BIPOC communities. We can end stakeholder capitalism and move towards sustainable development. And we can offer the Right of Return to all people by instituting global freedom of movement. Any one of these things may not abolish settler colonialism, but it'd be a good start.

Michael Ray has been incarcerated since he was 18 years old and has dedicated his life to freeing others from the prison-industrial complex. He focuses on exposing harmful thought patterns lurking beneath the surface of mainstream society.