Patrick Lawrence • October 18, 2025

I have been reading a lot these past days about how the Israelis treated those they detained when they illegally boarded the vessels that comprised the now-famous aid flotilla that never made it to Gaza’s shores. The Irish — naturally, given their bitter familiarity with imperial aggressions — gave fulsome accounts of the gratuitous brutality they endured while in Ktzi’ot Prison. Barry Heneghan, a member of the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish legislature, reported afterward that he was “treated like an animal.” Liam Cunningham and Tadhg Hickey, actors and activists, described how they were kicked, spat upon, slapped, zip-tied and left in the beating Negev Desert sun.

Nothing comes close to the account of her detention Greta Thunberg gave on Oct. 15 to Lisa Röstlund, a reporter for Aftonbladet, a Stockholm daily. This comes to me via Caitlin Johnstone, that Australian force of nature, who published machine-translated extracts in her newsletter the same day Röstlund’s interview with the courageous Swedish activist came out. I had already read of the dehydration, the purposely foul prison food, the bedbugs, the refusal of medical care. Now Thunberg gives the world a long list of “monstrous abuses” — Johnstone’s summarizing phrase — that is beyond infra dig.

Dragged by her hair, incessantly punched and kicked, stripped naked, wrapped in an Israeli flag, sexually humiliated in her own language (lilla hora, “little whore;” hora Greta, “Greta whore”), threatened with gassing (revealing detail, this), uniformed guards all the while taking “selfie” photographs as they stand next to her laughing and jeering: What is this about, what the purpose here?

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In history chutzpah has been variously cast as an admirable trait in the mode of “gotta be me,” and alternatively as an odious disregard for others. I have always been of the latter persuasion. I find chutzpah in any manifestation — whether it is a case of table manners, the conduct of public discourse, or any other small thing — repellent. It is one thing to liberate oneself from deadening orthodoxies. It is altogether another to hold oneself, garishly and abusively, above others.

There are many ways to think about what the Zionist regime has done these past two years, or about what prison guards did to Greta Thunberg, or how Israeli soccer fans behaved in Amsterdam or how Bibi shows off his power over the United States. There is history, there is politics, there is geopolitics, there is the inherent insecurity of a small nation in a region hostile to it since the violence associated with its founding. There is no dismissing any of this.

But I have been convinced these past two years that something larger is at issue. Israel proposes to live and act in the community of nations, I mean to say, not according to law or what we know as morality or common forms of decency but according to what amounts to a biblically authorized project of subjugation and domination in the name of a righteous presumption of superiority. And with Zionist-nationalist fanatics now in control of the country’s direction, Israel has chosen this moment to insist that the world beyond its borders swallow this project as legitimate in the 21^st century.

This is the ultimate in chutzpah, in my interpretation, and as a psychological and characterological question we ought to understand it as such. This phenomenon cannot be understood as distinct from Israel’s idea of itself as exceptional and as the earthly expression of a chosen people. What we know as chutzpah reflects both.

Read full piece at link below:

https://www.unz.com/plawrence/against-chutzpah/