Alligator Alcatraz was a blueprint. Creating an ICE detention center out of tents, trailers, and cages amid the sawgrass wetlands of the Florida Everglades, and all of the dangerous reptiles that live there, is equally sadistic and laughable—ludicrously cruel, medieval in form and concept, legible more as a taunt than a security measure. Before it closed in June, the conditions of that concentration camp were dismal and inhumane. Disease ran rampant, adequate medical treatment was rarely given, and prisoners were subjected to disciplinary measures that Amnesty International found edged into torture. The security perimeter, beyond the usual fences and wire, was the harsh Florida elements and the alligators that gave the facility its nickname.

Why would a country that pours billions of dollars into its military and policing, money that pays for torture programs and mass technological surveillance of its civilians, need to use tents as a prison in an area where the heat index can reach over 100 degrees and even the grass has teeth? Despite Alligator Alcatraz costing nearly $1 billion, it was defiantly and even proudly medieval in form and concept. It fits, too, that government officials engaged in manic rounds of cost-cutting as they tried to build more permanent facilities. Perhaps the Trump administration thought they would fund the project with all of the themed merch capitalizing off the racist bloodlust of the American conservative. Perhaps they didn't think about it very much at all.

And yet, among the world leaders with which the sort of stagey brutality of Alligator Alcatraz would find its most appreciative audience, it has been an inspiration. For all of the billions of dollars that despotic states spend building and enforcing a system of control and surveillance upon non-consenting populations, this turn toward such cruelty feels oddly inevitable. On the merits, though, it is just another part of the deadly exchange of policing tactics between Israel and the United States.

Early this year, Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced his plan to emulate Alligator Alcatraz by using Nile crocodiles to guard Ketziot Prison. As plans to dig a moat for the crocodiles commenced in the Negev desert, Ben-Gvir’s office insisted that this was no gimmick but a serious security plan, which is normally something that no serious office should have to say. Given Ben-Gvir’s track record, though, it’s shocking anyone would expect this to be a stunt. This is a man who popped champagne as he celebrated his successful campaign to pass a law allowing the death penalty by hanging of Palestinian prisoners, and a man who continuously joins right-wing extremist efforts to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, and threatens to "reclaim" it as a synagogue. This is a man who worked for the political party founded by the violent Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane, and whose zealous advocacy for the expulsion of Palestinians in a country founded on the expulsion of Palestinians was once considered too extreme for the military that carried out that expulsion of Palestinians. It’s only surprising that Ben-Gvir did not come up with the crocodile idea sooner.

He is enacting this plan in a prison system that has been widely condemned as a system for torturing Palestinians and continuing Israel's mission of ethnic cleansing. It is a prison system in which 3,358 people are currently held in administrative detention without trial, for unspecified periods of time, solely because they are suspected of being a "security threat." This is out of 9,300 Palestinian political prisoners. Children notably are not excluded from this law. While Israel is the only country to consistently try children before a military court, in December 2025 half of the 351 Palestinian children in Israeli prison were being held without trial.

With a prison population that has largely not committed a single crime and billions of shekels spent on policing it, Ben-Gvir stressed that these crocodiles were a cost-saving measure. Yes, it’s very expensive to establish a highly advanced security apparatus intended to crush the bodies, souls, and dignity of a population while stealing more and more of their land and culture with each passing day. But surely a few crocodiles could help bring down that cost.

As with a similar longstanding fantasy in the United States, the Zionist fascination with using animals to dominate and dehumanize Palestinians goes back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement. None of this is new. In 1950, Aime Cesaire wrote a diagnosis for this disease in his work, Discourse on Colonialism.

"First we must study how colonization works to

decivilizethe colonizer, tobrutalizehim in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread, and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and ‘interrogated,’ all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towardssavagery."

The crocodiles easily could have been the next section of his work. All the Iron Domes, long range missiles, targeted assassinations, and wiretapping in the world would not sufficiently satisfy the base instincts that feed and are fed by this domination. It would not be enough—it would be in some crucial ways too abstracted—to simply outsource the day-to-day cruelty of that work to technology. For Ben-Gvir and those like him, security is secondary and even subservient to the urge to humiliate the enemy to the point of complete decimation as evidence of their power. It is not only normal but desired, and the colonizing population will in turn desire it more and more. The appetite for this in the society that permits it will only grow as it is fed; it will not be satisfied until the decimation has been achieved in every humiliating and belittling way. What this all costs and whether it "works" is not quite what it is for. The crocodiles are not about security, for the prison or the government serves. They're about the thrill of reaching back through time to pull the tactics of the past into the present.

According to the Times of Israel, Ben-Gvir's crocodile plan drew outcry within Israel because it would be too dangerous and cruel—to the crocodiles. In addition to the concern for the crocodiles, the Nature and Parks authority also cautioned that bringing a "non-native predator into the ecosystem could create numerous and varied risks to both Israel’s natural environment and the public." Maybe the desert never should have bloomed? At the moment, the plan has been temporarily blocked by a legal challenge brought by environmental groups, arguing for the reclassification of crocodiles as a protected species.

The hypocrisy of this is as unfathomable as the plan itself. But once you reach the "how is this real life" stage of fascism, where else is there to go? There are no new points to be made here, and nothing much new to find. The pattern is old, and repeats itself anew. There’s nothing more to say, and so much work left to do.