Israel didn't invent collective punishment. The Israelis learned most of the fundamentals, and inherited many of the legal tricks, from the British, who used it effectively against Palestinians in 1937, Iraqis in 1920, and Indians in 1857. The British learned it from the long history of warfare, but especially from the Romans, whose ancient empire held a warm spot in the British heart. Of course, the British could just have well cited the Mongols, who have recently been touted as models for American managers, but that never quite fit their self-image.

But the Israelis seem to have missed one subtle point in the British model: once you win, back off a bit. After the British crushed the 1937 revolt, they issued the famous White Paper which cut Jewish immigration to Palestine way back. In doing so, they conceded the main issue behind the revolt, all the while keeping their hands on the levers of power. The Israelis, by conceding nothing, keep having to fight the Palestinians again and again. You'd think they never learn, but obviously they love the fight too much. They've just launched another blitzkrieg into Gaza. The flimsy excuse is to rescue an Israeli soldier captured by a renegade Palestinian group and held hostage somewhere in the territory. The effect of their tanks and aircraft will be to damage much property and to kill or injure many people. Israel's justification for doing this is their belief in collective responsibility: any time any Palestinian attacks them, they feel justified in punishing any or all Palestinians.

A few years back there was a big uproar when some people asserted that Zionism was a form of racism. To parse this assertion you need to consider what it is that makes racism a problem. It's not simple existence of racial differences. (That such differences turn out to be a confused scientific problem does not matter here. Racists were happy to construct their theories on fantasy as on fact.) No, the big problem with racism is that it identifies arbitrary groups and justifies members of one such group in their discrimination against and domination over some other group or groups. In other words, the problem with racism is that it justifies collective punishment.

That the grouping methodology may be something other than race suggests that "racism" may not be the clearest, most comprehensive term to describe the phenomenon behind what's wrong with racism, but that's mere wordplay to evade the point. Racism leads to collective punishment. If Zionism also leads to collective punishment, then Zionism shares the most essential characteristic of racism. Maybe there are some Zionists who don't share this trait, and who don't support collective punishment of others, in which case it would be unfair to tar them with this brush. But based on what the Israel's current political leaders are doing in Gaza, you have to conclude that Israel is acting as a racist state. Or if you must quibble with words, pick another word that has the same function in this context as racist. (In my household the most popular such word is Nazi, but my wife is Jewish, so that's what pops into her mind first when she thinks of collective punishment.)

Israel's collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza is nothing new. It became everyday practice in 1967 when Israel set up its military occupation regime, but it effectively goes back to 1948: most people in Gaza are Palestinian exiles from Israeli territory or their descendents, so the first collective punishment was Israel's denial of their repatriation. The root, then as now, was the Zionist notion that Israel should be a Jewish State: collective punishment of the other is the flipside of collective promotion of one group. Israelis have rationalized this in many ways, but their only point has been to obscure the basic fact: the only thing that promoting one group at the expense of others ensures is constant struggle, for the other group has no options but to struggle or succumb. This is what Israel has done ever since 1948, and that is why Palestinians struggle. Blaming the Palestinians for this is dishonest: Israel's own actions suffice to cause this struggle.

The kidnapping of the Israeli soldier isn't collective punishment. It is, rather, collective punishment's poor cousin: an attack on a purely arbitrary representative of the other side. This is a consequence of the same grouping logic that Israel practices, but the scale is different, because the imbalance of power is extreme. If Palestinians had the same power Israelis have, they would be able to engage in precision bombing of targets within Israel, and they would be able to punish Israeli imprisonment of their soldiers by driving tanks into Israeli territory. Palestinian leaders would be able to enforce curfews and checkpoints in Israeli territory. They would be able to demolish houses. They would be able to prevent Israel from trading with other countries. But Palestinians have no such power. Without power, how can Palestinian leaders be responsible?

The kidnapping of that Israeli soldier is tragic, but it's not a cause for what Israel is doing. Even if Israel manages to save the soldier, they will wind up doing harm to many people who had nothing to do with the kidnapping -- whose only offense is the one thing they cannot change: that they're Palestinian. And Israel will have demonstrated to the world how brutal and how racist (or substitute your word) they are. The former will result in more struggle against them, regardless of how desperate or vain. The latter should result in universal opprobrium, but probably won't: if it did, it should have happened already, but Israel's leaders feel secure enough that they don't feel any need to worry about world opinion.

Still, why does Israel behave like this? The obvious answer is that they think they're winning, that it's only a matter of time before the Palestinians have to give up. Either the Palestinians fight or surrender. If they fight, they give Israel an excuse to crush them. If they don't, Israel has no need to recognize them. Winning matters to Israel because it saves them from looking back at what they've done and what they've become. But winning is a rut, one you're stuck in until that dread moment in the future when it ends. Losing WWII was the best thing that ever happened to Japan and Germany. Had they not lost they'd still be fighting. Having lost, they've prospered as normal nations, unable to do anything but get along with their neighbors. Losing Vietnam was the best thing for the US; otherwise we'd still be in the middle of that fight. Winning WWII set the US and the Soviet Union up to struggle further, bringing us all to the brink of catastrophe. And the US has been even more deranged ever since we thought we won that Cold War.

Israel won't change, and therefore won't free its people from the prison of racism (or whatever) and militarism, until it loses. Nothing the Palestinians can do can effect this change. The only hope is that world opinion, including American opinion, starts to recognize that Israel's perpetual collective punishment of the Palestinians is a real problem -- is nothing less than an attack on world civility. Then maybe Israel will realize that such acts have consequences for Israelis too. Then maybe Israel will change its behavior to lessen the struggle instead of intensifying it. Then maybe we can reach some compromise that lets all parties get on with their lives in peace.

So the only good that can possibly come out of Israel's latest escalation of their prickly little war with Occupied Palestine would be for world opinion to turn on them, to denounce them without equivocation for increasing the strife, to deny any of their excuses. Because what we know from long and painful experience is that collective punishment in any possible guise -- racism, colonialism, Nazism -- cannot be excused.