“Every year, on taking office, the principal magistrates of Sparta, the ephors, made a formal declaration of war upon the Helots, so that they became enemies of the state, polemioi, and could be killed as occasion required, without bringing on the Spartans the religious pollution involved in putting to death otherwise than by due process of law, anyone who was not officially a polemios.”  The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: G.E.M de Ste. Croix (p.149).

Israel’s political leaders have given exactly the same permission to their settlers, army and prison service. The current massacres in Gaza and the West Bank dwarf anything that the Spartans were able to do, but there is an historical continuity between the IDF and the Cryptia. This was an elite group of young Spartan men whose initiation rituals involved murdering Helots with a dagger.

We will never know how many Israelis are directly or indirectly responsible for killing, torturing or ethnically cleansing Palestinians, but it must be a very high proportion of Israeli adults. We know that young people are conscripted at 17, there are 169,500 active personnel and 456, 000 reserve troops out of a population of 9.7 million.

The Spartans didn’t leave much of a literary or cultural tradition, so we don’t know what they thought about the ethics of making war against the people with whom they shared the land. Future historians will have no trouble finding out just how much young Israelis relished murdering, torturing and humiliating Palestinians because they have left a vast amount of visual and documentary evidence. Here’s a video of some of them dancing on a tank. Their obsession with posting photos of themselves with looted women’s underwear is as notorious at the pleasure they take in smirking in front of destroyed Palestinian homes.

There are a couple of ways in which the slave owning Spartans have the moral high ground over the Israelis. The Helots did all the productive work in Spartan society, so while they had to be kept in a state of permanent terror, they had to be kept alive and on the land. The Israelis want the Palestinians dead or off the land. Also, the Spartans didn’t kill in large enough numbers that would have required bulldozers or retain corpses to be dumped decomposing in containers.

Sparta is fashionable with the Trumpian racist right and the sort  of ancient history buff who has only ever heard about Thermopylae. Yet, in addition to being a highly militarised slavocracy Ste Croix also points out that it was “the great supporter of the oligarchy and the propertied classes”. In another echo of Israel and the class split in who supports the right of Palestinians to a state today, he quotes Xenophon as saying “that when there is a division in society on class lines, the rich will naturally turn to Sparta, the demos to Athens”.