I remember reading The Fly as a teenager. I’d seen the film – the 1950s version, not the 1980s one – we kids were rather keen on sitting up late on Saturdays to watch daft old horror movies but, as you’re probably already thinking, Katherine Mansfield’s story of the same name is nothing like that. I wasn’t reading what I’d expected to read.

Mansfield’s story was quite profoundly, horribly fascinating though. Kids are regularly slandered by the suggestion they spend their time idly torturing insects — but here was a full-grown man, with an important man’s desk and pen and inkwell, profoundly, horribly fascinated by torturing a fly.

But we have established, haven’t we, by looking at posh schools, especially the public school system in the UK, that if a man is lied to, mistreated, then rewarded for lying and mistreating others, he becomes a lost, brutalised torturer.

Many women have also noticed that there’s a difference between men who abuse women and men who abuse other men. Abusing women appears to be a power-trip, but men who torture get quite attached to male victims. As the fly-torturer in Manfield’s story demonstrates, he’s profoundly, horribly fascinated by the fly’s attempts to survive his abuse. He’s all but cheering it on.

He’s mad. He’s traumatised. And it’s made of him a torturer.

The Fly was a story about war. In Claire Harman’s All Sorts of Lives, extracts from Mansfield’s diary and letters, written in 1918, she quotes Mansfield saying: ‘everything is poisoned by it, it’s here in me the whole time, eating me away … nothing is the same.’ Harman reports that Mansfield was frustrated by her awareness that people weren’t acknowledging what the war had done to them. She wanted her generation ‘to come forward and start a crusade.’

And that’s why we cannot ignore the fact that our government is allowing UK citizens to go and have a spell in the IDF – Israel’s force of torture, abuse and mass murder – in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, or whichever country Israel decides to brutalise next… Our government allows citizens to go and take part in that, then come home, and melt into the population. What are we to do, hope they’ll make do with torturing flies when they get back?

Israel put a lot of time and effort into brutalising its own citizens…

…Let’s not let them do it to ours. There are petitions – click here for Change.org’s petition.

… but I think it’s going to take more than that. I think most of our politicians went to posh schools, and I imagine them now, sitting in their offices, torturing flies and eating themselves away trying to dream up excuses for UK complicity in military atrocities.

How do we do it? How do we wash the acceptance of violence as a legitimate tool out of our government, out of our society? Did the left just fail yet again. abandoning Corbyn and his ‘better, kinder politics’?

Is the Green Party really radical enough to build a world that will not tolerate politicians who oversee mass death and destruction?

I think not, but I begin to think the #FreePalestine movement might be the one with the vision to take us there.

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