We, the Chained Prometheus

Prometheus was the titan who dared to challenge the established order of the gods. He allied with Zeus in overthrowing Cronos, believing he was fighting for a new era. But he soon realized that the new king of the gods wanted to wipe out humanity and start everything from scratch. Prometheus, then, rebelled again. He does not accept the fate that Zeus intends to impose on humans; instead, he steals fire from the gods and gives it to mortals. He gave them light, the power to create, transform themselves, and challenge the heavens. In his tyrannical fury, Zeus decided to punish Prometheus by chaining him to a rock in the Scythian mountains. Every day, an eagle would come to devour his liver, a punishment inflicted so that Prometheus would one day recognize Zeus’s sovereignty. But he never yielded. He invoked the winds, the mountain waters, the earth, and the sun and screamed his pain to the heavens. He knew that his liberation would not come from acceptance but from his refusal to submit.

The terrible beauty of the human psyche is that it loves to repeat patterns. We struggle against our chains, and when we finally achieve some freedom, we run to other chains as if trading one addiction for another. We need the familiar, even if it devours us. We persistently repeat our mistakes, believing the outcome will be different this time. The wheel turns but always seems to return to the same point. We build heroic narratives but become prisoners of them, unable to see the world without the lens we have chosen. It is as if our minds refuse to be freed; they prefer the comfort of the known rock, the suffering we already understand, to the fear of the unknown. This is our tragedy: never wholly breaking from the past, reinventing the same shackles, becoming enchanted again by what, deep down, we already know is illusory.

We, in Israel, are chained to Prometheus. But unlike the Titan, it seems we have lost the memory of our courage. We are bound to the rock of fear and despair, deceived by those who claim to protect us. Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right group are merely men who chain us with stories that frighten us. They whisper that without their chains, we will fall into absolute chaos, that the rock is our safe harbor, and that the suffering we accept is the price of security. And, foolish as we are, we take the cold steel of these chains as if they were bonds of love.

Prometheus did not bow to tyranny. He did not wait for a miracle; he was not deluded by the passage of time. His punishment was not eternal; it was 30,000 years—enough for anyone to think there was no way out. However, Prometheus knew that his liberation would come not through Zeus’s grace but through his resistance. He defied Zeus, even knowing he could be destroyed for it. And us? We cling to the comfort of apathy, convinced that Netanyahu will go away if we wait long enough. But what if he doesn’t? What if the problem isn’t the eagle that devours us but the rock to which we are bound?

Netanyahu and his allies feed on our inertia. They do not govern; they manipulate. They say we are fragile, that we will not survive without them, and that our neighbors are monsters only they can contain. And fear, once planted, grows like a rotten tree in our hearts. This is absolute chaos. It is not what is out there; it is what is in here. It is the emptiness of our actions, the silence of our mouths, the weight of the chains we continue to accept, day after day, without asking why.

Prometheus knew that time would not bring salvation and that to wait was to surrender. The arrival of Hercules was an action, not a coincidence. He was not freed by waiting but by his stubbornness in not accepting injustice. We, on the other hand, are comfortable in our suffering. We prefer to believe it is enough to remove one figure—one single eagle—and everything will be fine. We prefer not to look into the abyss within us that has grown accustomed to being a prisoner.

The bitterest truth is that Netanyahu is not the central problem. He is just a symptom of a system that feeds on our fear. He did not create our chains; he merely reinforced them. He understood that what imprisons us is not the enemies out there but our inability to imagine a path without them. The real prison is mental; it is this idea that we need strong leaders to save us when, in fact, they are the ones keeping us chained.

Waiting for the time for a new savior to come and free us is to accept our slavery. No Hercules is coming for us. No god or hero will descend from Olympus to break our chains. If we want to be free, we must be our liberators. We must face the brutal truth: our situation will not change until we dare to change it. We can no longer afford to wait. Every day we wait, the eagle returns and devours a little more of who we are, of who we could be.

Prometheus showed us that suffering continues only as long as we allow it. And we, Prometheus of Israel, must stop waiting for someone to rescue us. We must stop looking for new leaders to do what we must do ourselves. The chains are on our wrists, but the keys are also in our hands. There is no time to wait. There are no more excuses. The moment to act is now. We must be our own Hercules, break our chains, and finally see what lies beyond the rock.