Prisons are not made for rehabilitation. Imprisonment is a mode of punishment and nothing else. For time in prison teaches the convict nothing about the “what?” and the “why?” but only the “what happens if?”. The reason the institutionalization of the crime is necessary is often less about corruption. Rather means of regulating crimes into essential ones.

In the utopia of punishment for instance, a prison inmate convicted for robbing a bank would be a polished stock broker by the time they served their sentence. Still robbing, except the bank is now the regulator rather than the victim of robbery.

Now when Germans show up to court defending genocide in Gaza, do not say “Germans are the scum of the earth” for they are not solely so. And frankly, it is hard to make a case against them or blame them in any way. See when Germans got a chance to learn from their Nazi experience, the West, dictated by the economies of scale, dumped Nuremberg on them: prosecution only. The question of “Why Germans turned Nazi?” was of far less importance to the Western bloc than “How can we make Germany like the rest of us? Genocidal in a conforming manner.” Or in today’s language “Genocidal in accordance with the international law.”

At the ICJ, Germany made the West, and the international law for that matter, proud.

But regulation of far-right German tendency was not the only outcome of Nuremberg. For if one tried to visualize Nuremberg it is much more likely to appear a circle than a line. A high profile Israeli official in the Mossad made a “no-brainer” statement to anyone with even a shallow grasp of the notion of popular armed struggle: dismantling Hamas, and eliminating all its leaders will not make the Palestinians stop fighting, for these combatants neither need nor fight for their leaders.

So is it collective punishment, or revenge that Israel is looking for in this war? A granted question and a granted confusion. But first: what is the difference between revenge and punishment?

A state does not, for instance, take revenge against an individual. At least that is never how it is framed, and rightfully so. Instead, it punishes the individual. Not for the sake of justice, but rather for its own good. Unlike punishment, revenge is an affair involving equals, and with equality what is state-privilege? A state capable of revenge against an individual is already a perished one.

By this token, an insurgent against state and order can never punish the state, but only take revenge against it, for state disorder starts from equality, and not reverse inequality as the perverted mind might think. So naturally, from a human point of view, there is a positive sentiment that is associated with revenge. If one decides to rate the ugly reality higher than beautiful delusion: its a cleansing act, that takes a stab at both the philosopher-king, and the induced-monster of oppression within its victims. Punishment on the other hand, that which can only breath the air of inequality, works in reverse: feeds the two monsters at the two ends of the superior-inferior interplay.

See, American atrocities in Vietnam, and French atrocities in Algeria stirred, to some extent, the contribution of the American and French popular body to putting an end to their colonial presence in the corresponding countries. While each colonial entity has its particularity, not limited to locality in space and time, Israel’s particularity, so far at least, seems to lie in the fact that Israeli atrocities work in the opposite direction: atrocities fuel more atrocities. Genocide on TikTok. But why not? For the implications of Nuremberg, and the economies of scales that incentivized it, fed the monster a confusion between revenge and punishment.

A confusion particularly sensitive in the context of the Zionist ideology that is centered around a delusion: one can be simultaneously a stateman and a victim. The result is a sick, blood-thirsty, society for as long as it persists.