Don’t Look Away: The Children Are Dying and the World Is Watching

Gaza’s Genocide, Denial, and Empire’s Moral Decay

By Jorah Kai

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“It’s impossible to have your eyes open and not have your heart broken.” — Dr. Gabor Maté

Maté, Gabor. “It’s impossible to have your eyes open and not have your heart broken.” Instagram video, April 2025. Accessed June 2, 2025. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIJzEmQOKo3/

 Publisher’s Note

More Publishing acknowledges the evolving and dynamic context in which this book was written. The author has made every effort to ground his analysis in the most current and verifiable sources available at the time of publication. Nonetheless, readers may encounter discrepancies as new facts come to light or situations develop further. Where warranted, such updates will be addressed in subsequent editions.

The views and interpretations in this work belong solely to the author. They do not necessarily represent those of More Publishing. However, we recognize the bravery and intellectual rigor required to engage with such contested and urgent subject matter, and we affirm the value of this contribution to public dialogue.

Above all, we join the author in praying for the rapid delivery of humanitarian aid to the victims of this crisis. May this book, even in a small way, help shift public understanding toward a just and enduring solution. May it stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their ongoing struggle for self-determination, dignity, and the basic human rights — food, shelter, and safety — that many of us are privileged to take for granted.

Dedication

For my granddaughter, Naomi.

Through you, I see every child as a beam of life, love, and light. Worth everything to protect. You are my greatest joy. You remind me what it means to be a man in this world. To stand for something.

For the people of Gaza, and all Palestinians.

You are slandered, misunderstood, and mistreated by those who hold the most power and wealth. But know this: you are not forgotten. And God willing — Inshallah — you will know safety and comfort again.

Preface: The Food Was There

This is a true story. Some moments have been dramatized for narrative clarity. The events are documented and real.

Part 1: The House Went Quiet

On May 23, 2025, just after dawn, Dr. Alaa al-Najjar kissed her children and left for her shift at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Her husband, Hamdi, also a doctor, stayed home with their ten kids.

The night before, they folded laundry and drank mint tea. The youngest, just seven months old, had started sitting up. He smiled with all his gums.

By sunrise, the house was gone.

An Israeli missile, made in the USA, hit without warning. The neighbors said the sky split open. The roof lifted. A wall folded like paper. When they found what was left, there were no screams. Just dust, and blood, and the slow settling of concrete.

Nine children died instantly. Faces burned beyond recognition. Adam, the eldest, was pulled out alive. He was eleven years old, and half his skull was missing. He lived.

His father, Hamdi, was buried in rubble for hours. When they reached him, he was still breathing. Neighbors carried him to the ER. His wife Alaa was waiting — clean gloves on, no time to cry. She tried to save him. He succumbed to his injuries and died a week later, on June 1.

As her children and her husband arrived, one by one and two by two, witnesses say she didn’t break. Dr. al-Najjar stood behind glass as the bodies arrived, one after another. She touched each one. Then she scrubbed in. There were still children to save.

The Israeli government said it was a legitimate strike. They always do.

When you have the most powerful army in the world behind you, unlimited funding, and a perceived moral high ground, evidence is optional. There are no consequences.

When the dust settled, there was no Hamas base. No fighters. No military target. Just dolls. Baby clothes. Math books with stickers on the covers. The IDF said it would investigate itself, and as usual, it found no wrongdoing.

The strike was one of hundreds that week. The war had passed Rafah, deep into so-called safe zones. There are no safe zones.

The al-Najjar family wasn’t exceptional. That was the point.

In Gaza, there is no sanctuary. Not in hospitals. Not in bread lines. Not on the floor of a doctor’s living room.

The bomb was precision-guided. That’s what they call it.

What they don’t call it is genocide. Not yet.

But this is how it begins —

With a house full of children, and the silence that follows.

Part 2: The Long Walk

The trucks were parked at the border. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Engines off. Tarps tight over sacks of flour and rice, powdered milk. The food was there. Just not for them. Despite the hoarse cries of the U.N., Israel would not allow them in.

Ihab told his sons to get up early. Yazan was already awake. Yazid had barely slept.

My stomach’s eating itself,” he said. Tried to laugh, but his voice cracked.

They left before sunrise. The road to Rafah was cratered and broken. They passed a school without students. A mosque, now a ruin. The bones of a donkey by the checkpoint. The air smelled of copper and smoke and worse. Waste overflowed in the alleys, and toilets were pits dug into rubble. Flies buzzed around them.

Ihab hadn’t eaten in four days. The boys, maybe three. Aid had stopped for eighty-eight, but some people still traded batteries for onions, or soap for beans- if you could find them before the bombs did. They drank filtered greywater when they could, or whatever water ran, if anything did.

Rumors said food would come by sea. The Americans had built a pier. Yazid said Greta Thunberg was coming too, on a boat.

“Maybe she’ll hand out apples,” he said.

“Don’t count on it,” Ihab told him. “They’ll stop her. They always do. They did before.”

They passed a man carrying his skeletal child in a sack. Neither could speak. Hunger has that effect.

The three walked in silence for a while.

“You hear about Dr. Alaa?” Yazan asked.

“I heard.”

“She’s still working. After all that.”

“She stitched your hand, remember? When you cut it on glass. Told you not to cry.”

“I didn’t.”

“No. You didn’t.”

Dust in their teeth. No more words.

They walked in silence until finally, Yazid felt compelled to speak. “Greta’s coming.”

Ihab didn’t reply. The road forked near the old well.

“My father told me a story,” he said, finally. “His father told him. We came from Sajur. Near Haifa. Before the war.”

“What’s Sajur?”

“A village with orange trees. Olives so old they bent like men in prayer. My grandfather carved a cane from one. I used to hold it. It smelled like sunlight.”

“Why don’t we live there?”

“Because they took it. Turned the mosque into a police post. Raised their flag.”

The boys were quiet.

“I still dream about that tree,” Ihab said.

They passed a burned-out bakery. The air smelled sweet, like fruit left to rot.

At the al-Alam roundabout, the crowd thickened. They sat on the slope. Ahead: tents, pallets, soldiers.

Ihab scanned the trucks. USAID. WFP. One UN truck had a bullet hole in the cab.

“Where do we line up?” he asked.

A woman in a vest said, “Soon.”

Then came the sound — metal on metal. Tracks.

Ihab grabbed Yazid’s hand. Yazan was already running.

“Come back!” he shouted.

Too late.

The tank turned. The barrel swung.

Fire.

He didn’t hear the first shot. Just the scream. Then the thuds. Then the bursts. People fell. A man clutched a ration card. A girl collapsed face down in the sand.

Yazan’s stomach was open. Yazid was gone.

Ihab crawled. No strength. Just blood, and smoke, and a burning truck.

The flour turned red.

The food was there.

Then it wasn’t.

Part 3: The Food Was There

The boy lived for two hours.

They carried him on a cart pulled by a donkey. The driver didn’t speak. Ihab walked behind, one hand on the cart, the other clenched.

Yazan’s eyes were open, but he saw nothing. He didn’t cry. There was nothing left to cry with.

They reached Nasser Hospital. The same corridor. The same glass. They wheeled him into surgery.

Ihab was told to wait. Not enough doctors. Not enough gauze. Not enough time.

He asked about Yazid. No one knew. Bodies were still arriving.

Thirty-one people died at the aid site. Over 170 were wounded. Most had come for flour. They’d been told to wait in a “humanitarian zone.”

Then came the bullets.

There were no fighters. No weapons. Just the hungry.

The day before, the American lead resigned. Said he couldn’t get food in under these conditions.

People came anyway. What else could they do?

Ihab waited by the door. A nurse asked if he wanted water. He didn’t answer. The generator groaned. Outside, a boy was carried in. He had no arms.

Yazan died before noon.

Ihab walked down the stairs. The sun was hot. The wind smelled of ash.

He passed a mother shaking her child. A doctor screaming for anesthesia. The morgue.

No one said his name.

The food was there.And then it wasn’t.

The boys were there.

And then they weren’t.

Preface Bibliography

Al Jazeera English. Gaza Hunger Crisis: US-backed Aid Becomes ‘Death Trap’ Under Israeli Fire. YouTube. Posted June 2, 2025.

— — — . Israeli Forces Open Fire at Gaza Aid Distribution Point. YouTube. Posted May 29, 2025.

— — — . Palestinians Killed While Collecting Aid in Gaza. YouTube. Posted February 29, 2024.

— — — . Palestinians in Gaza Trade Food and Basic Goods on the Streets as Aid Runs Out. YouTube. Posted March 2, 2024.

Middle East Eye. Boy Recounts Losing Mother in Israeli Attack on Aid Point in Rafah. YouTube. Posted June 4, 2025.

— — — . “If I Die, I Will Die in My Homeland”: Palestinian Girl. YouTube. Posted April 6, 2024.

— — — . Nine-Year-Old Mahmoud Speaks from Gaza Camp After Losing Mother. YouTube. Posted April 10, 2024.

— — — . Wounded Child in Gaza Tells Al-Jazeera Journalist to Send a Message to the World. YouTube. Posted April 5, 2024.

The Guardian. “Gaza Doctor Loses Nine Children and Husband in Israeli Airstrike.” May 26, 2025.

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Daily Flash Update on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” May–June 2025 bulletins.

WAFA English. “Israeli Airstrike Kills Nine Children of Palestinian Doctor in Gaza.” May 26, 2025.

The Washington Post. “U.S. consulting firm quits Gaza humanitarian aid effort amid criticism. June 3, 2025.

How Did We Get Here?

This isn’t just a story about one family. It’s about a system — designed, defended, and denied — where death is deliberate.

Where food is close enough to smell, but not to eat.

Where doctors bury their own children before treating strangers.

The bombing at the al-Alam aid site wasn’t an accident.

It was a symptom.

Part of a pattern — etched into military policy and global indifference.

A pattern older than the occupation itself.

Israel claimed it struck “terrorists.”

No names. No evidence. None required.

When you’re shielded by empire, truth is optional.

“Collateral damage” becomes the script.

They say 13,000 fighters are dead — but offer no list of names.

When you’re fighting an army without a uniform, in Gaza, being twelve might be enough.

How did we get here?

To answer that, we must strip away the euphemisms.

Dig into the legal, historical, and moral foundations.

This is the blueprint of genocide.

And this is what it costs to look away.

Editor’s Note

This essay confronts one of our era’s defining moral collapses: the genocide in Gaza and the systems that sustain it.
 What began as a journalistic response to mass civilian death evolved into something deeper — a fusion of legal analysis, historical record, and lived testimony. It does not aim to comfort. It demands accountability.

Jewish dissent stands at its moral core. From rabbis to soldiers, from the children of Holocaust survivors to former IDF generals, Jewish voices have risked everything to name what Zionism seeks to obscure. As Jewish Voice for Peace insists: Zionism is not Judaism.

Few speak with more authority than Miko Peled — former IDF combatant, grandson of Avraham Katsnelson (a signatory of Israel’s Declaration of Independence), and son of General Mattityahu Peled, a key military architect of the 1967 war. Raised within Zionism’s inner circle, Peled broke with its logic after his thirteen-year-old niece, Smadar, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. He met with Palestinian families, listened to stories, studied erased histories, and emerged as a fierce critic:

“You don’t get to judge the people you’re helping cage, starve, and bomb — especially not when your taxes are footing the bill.”

Once called a “prince of Israel,” Peled now stands unequivocally with Palestine.

This edition follows Chicago Manual of Style. It numbers sections, cites sources, and centers testimony. It will not soften what happened. It will not lie.

Abstract: What This Essay Does — and What It Doesn’t

This essay is not about hate, does not erase Jewish history or deny Jewish survival. It does not attack faith or identity. Instead, it offers a direct indictment of Zionism — the secular nationalist project that has underpinned seventy-seven years of apartheid, military occupation, and now genocide in Gaza.As Miko Peled puts it:

“Open up the definition of the crime of genocide. Compare that to what has been happening to Palestinians since 1948 — you’ll see, it checks almost every box.”

From the ICJ to the ICC, courts are calling it what it is. Jewish critics — Norman Finkelstein, Gabor Maté, Ilan Pappé, Miko Peled — remind us that complicity is not a matter of faith, but of silence and power.

Some dear friends find the term “Zionist” fraught — tied, they say, to survival, not supremacy. I understand that. But that is the term used by it’s proponents. Zionism is a colonial agenda: what critics call an “apocalyptic death cult with nuclear weapons.”

This work is grounded in facts, citations, and law — but also in conscience. It is blunt where it must be, precise where it can be, and unflinching throughout. It confronts dehumanization and the machinery of denial that sustains it.

“God has placed great power in the children of Gaza. They are like crystal balls through which the souls of men are examined,” wrote a friend.

This essay is not written to persuade those who choose blindness.
 It is for those who feel this happening — and refuse to look away.
 Come with your heart open. The hard part begins now.
 Silence is no longer an option.

Why This Matters to You

Maybe this feels far away — just another tragic headline from a place you’ve never been. Yet Gaza’s crisis is about you, too — and about the world you already live in.

The bombs falling on Gaza are paid for by your taxes. “Made in the USA” is stamped on the steel that crushes Palestinian homes and incinerates entire refugee communities — livestreamed on TikTok for our children to see. The same budgets that could fund health care, housing, or schools instead underwrite drones, smart bombs, and AI-assisted warfare. And that is only part of the story.

What unfolds in Gaza doesn’t stay in Gaza.

In March 2024, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University, was walking home in Boston when masked federal agents seized her without a warrant. The ACLU called it a kidnapping. Around the same time, Kilmar Abrego García — a U.S. legal resident and father of four — was deported to El Salvador and imprisoned in a supermax facility, despite never having set foot in the country, and a court order protecting his immigration file. Officers mistook his Navy-mechanic tattoos for gang affiliation. The cost of that mistake was torture. Even after the Supreme Court ordered his return unanimously, the administration doctored evidence, escalating a constitutional crisis as the United States slid further toward authoritarianism.

At the U.S.–Mexico border, Jerce Reyes Barrios — a doctoral researcher and U.S. citizen — discovered AI-powered facial-recognition towers tracking her. She wasn’t crossing; she was observing a protest. Still, her presence was flagged and added to a watchlist. These aren’t anomalies — they’re signals.

The same surveillance systems used in Gaza — thermal sensors, biometric towers, AI threat modeling — now line the southern U.S. border. Hundreds of “virtual walls” are already in place. Elbit Systems, the Israeli defense contractor that builds them for occupation, is now a major U.S. government supplier. This feedback loop of oppression is neither dystopian nor hypothetical: tested abroad, deployed at home.

But it isn’t just about borders. It’s about ideology.

The language of “terrorism,” “security,” and “preemptive defense” — rooted in Zionist logic that frames Palestinian resistance as an existential threat — is now repackaged to brand migrants, students, activists, and even journalists as enemies. Gaza is not simply a war zone; it is a prototype — a testbed for technology, rhetoric, and policy. Refined overseas, exported, then turned inward.

Yet some in the Global South see through this. In January 2024, China officially recognized Palestinian statehood. That October, it hosted the Beijing Declaration, convening fourteen Palestinian factions — including Hamas and Fatah — for the first time in years. This was more than symbolism. It rejected Western “strategic ambiguity” and affirmed that negotiation must include all voices, not just those selected by Washington.

So when someone says, “This isn’t your fight,” ask them:

· Why are your dollars paying for it?

· Why are your neighbors being tracked by towers built for war?

· Why is dissent in your own country treated like sedition?

Gaza is not just a headline. It is a mirror. And if you’re watching, then you’re already part of it. Silence is not neutrality. It is complicity.

The question isn’t whether this matters to you.
 It’s whether you will admit that it already does.

I. The Cost of Silence

I did not grow up thinking much about Palestine. In Canada, it felt distant — just another headline about “Israel defending itself,” with Palestinians portrayed as irrational, angry, collectively suspect. Then came 9/11, the War on Terror, video games in which every enemy spoke Arabic, and newsfeeds that collapsed an entire region into caricature. I absorbed it. We all did. The ideology was structural, cultural, total — and for my silence, I am ashamed.

I am a children’s author, teacher, journalist, and grandfather — and now, like many students around the world protesting on their campuses, as their parents once did during the Vietnam War, I am awake. No one can watch families starve under siege, hospitals reduced to rubble, and children buried beneath it, and still pretend this is complicated. I couldn’t.

What radicalized me to speak out was grief: imagining my granddaughter Naomi crying from hunger, sick with no medicine, begging for help — and knowing I could do nothing. That helplessness is the unbearable weight every Palestinian parent carries. A settler-colonial state built on ethnic supremacy is trying to erase their people — and it is doing so with Western money, weapons, and full support.

British planes conduct reconnaissance to designate targets. American bombs enforce the siege, while U.S. vetoes block United Nations aid. Western media spin atrocity into ambiguity — and still, leaders wonder why the youth turn away. What was once “security technology” in Palestine has become “border management” in Arizona and Texas: virtual walls of apartheid, exported. This is not mere surveillance — it is domination. Gaza’s forced starvation, mass detention, and algorithmic dehumanization are not anomalies; they are blueprints for authoritarianism at home.

An old French documentary has resurfaced for reasons that sting. Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity shattered the myth of widespread French resistance under Nazi occupation. The film revealed an uncomfortable truth: the French elite largely tolerated and cooperated with the Nazis, while true resistance fighters were mocked, isolated, and feared.

“The French actually were pretty content in many places… resistance fighters were isolated, hated, considered a nuisance… The film never made it to big theaters in Paris. It was soft-banned. Only decades later did it gain fame — outside France.”

That history is not just about World War II. It is about what power protects — and what it suppresses. Today, dissident voices calling out genocide in Gaza are demonized, jailed, and surveilled. Journalists like Asa Winstanley and Richard Medhurst, and activists from Palestine Action, face raids under the same logic that once labeled resistance to fascism a nuisance. Collaboration was once wrapped in nationalism; today, it is draped in diplomacy and “security.”

Popular Jewish vlogger Matt Bernstein, host of A Bit Fruity, put it plainly:
 “The idea that me, a Jew, is somehow safer because a student is getting deported or because a university lost its funding? That’s not safety. That’s fascism.”

He’s right. Authoritarians always cloak violence in the language of protection. But protection for whom? When silence in the face of atrocity becomes the only way to be seen as “good,” that’s not safety — it’s submission.

Yet some voices break the mold, naming crimes with uncompromising clarity. Miko Peled, once expected to carry the torch of a Greater Israel and now one of the most vocal supporters of a free Palestine, understands what many in the West refuse to confront: that resistance is a symptom, not an obscenity; that funding annihilation while calling for restraint is moral cowardice; and that judgment without context is hypocrisy.

The Jewish community has often been among the most vocal critics of colonial violence. Holocaust survivor and acclaimed trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté once raised his son to support Israel — but later confessed, “Everything I had been told was a lie.” His sons, Daniel and Aaron Maté, now carry that legacy forward — not in betrayal, but in fidelity to justice.

The horror of this moment is the realization that, a century after our grandparents fought the Nazis, fascism has returned — and this time, it wears our uniform.

We did not destroy it.
 We absorbed it.

Now, the empire that once vowed “never again” is funding its next genocide.

We no longer have the right to look away.

II. It’s Not Complicated. It’s a Crime

The forbidden word is genocide. Utter it, and you risk being dismissed as hysterical, political, or unhinged. But what else describes the deliberate starvation and bombardment of a besieged civilian population? When food convoys are blocked, hospitals leveled, aid workers killed, and children lie in mass graves, it is reality — not metaphor.

Yet we are told, “It’s complicated,” a rhetorical shield that disables thought, compassion, and action. As Ta-Nehisi Coates observes:

“Everyone says it’s complicated. But it’s not. Apartheid is wrong. And there’s nothing in history that justifies it.”

In Gaza, the landscape itself testifies to intent: this is not a war zone but engineered erasure. As Arwa Damon notes:

“There is nothing about Gaza’s landscape that says anything other than this is the annihilation of a population.”

Buildings reduced to rubble, children scavenging for scraps, entire neighborhoods erased — these are not incidental wounds of combat. They are the blueprint of destruction. When the terrain screams systematic liquidation, any claim of “collateral damage” crumbles beneath photographic evidence and survivor testimony. Gaza is not merely a battlefield. It is the scene of a crime in progress.

Aid as a Weapon

For eighty-seven consecutive days, Gaza endured a total blockade — no food, no water, no medicine, no fuel. This violates international humanitarian law and flagrantly defies emergency orders from the International Court of Justice demanding unrestricted aid.

“How many more dead girls and boys will it take?”
 — Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF Middle East and North Africa Director

More than 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured since October 2023. Beigbeder asked, “What level of horror must be livestreamed before the international community fully steps up, uses its influence, and takes bold, decisive action to force the end of this ruthless killing of children?”

Under mounting pressure — former colonial powers are finally flinching. France and Canada issued rare condemnations. Spain went further, formally recognizing the genocide. In response, Israel opened a narrow “aid corridor.” What followed was chaos, not relief. As Ryan Grim reported:

“Four people were crushed to death beneath sacks of flour. Initially blamed on Hamas, eyewitness accounts and video footage revealed the truth: panic, desperation, and bullets.”

This was only one of many tragedies after UNRWA — a trusted humanitarian agency — was sidelined in favor of a new entity that weaponized biometrics and abduction. The result: dozens killed, hundreds injured. Aid became another front in the assault.

After sustained protests at MIT, the institution cut ties with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. Yet Elbit’s drones continued bombing tents in Gaza, killing civilians. Gaza’s Government Media Office accused Israel of a “horrific and deliberate crime,” charging that occupation forces bait desperate Palestinians into so-called aid centers — placed in exposed, high-risk areas — only to gun them down.

Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, a physician at al-Tahrir Hospital, lost nine of her ten children when her home was bombed. Days later, her husband succumbed to his wounds.

“The children were completely burnt,” she said.

This is not collateral damage. It is pure erasure. A hospital becomes both sanctuary and morgue; parents become first responders to their own annihilation.

Under the guise of humanitarian relief, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — tied to U.S. mercenary firms — forces civilians through biometric-scanned corridors patrolled by drones. The system proved so dehumanizing that Jake Wood, the U.S.-appointed director, resigned in protest. As Krystal Ball explains:

“The guy the U.S. picked to run the program resigned, saying it was too much. That tells you everything.”

This is siege warfare rebranded: starvation as strategy, militarized distribution as smokescreen. Over 18,000 children now face imminent death by malnutrition. Body bags outnumber food trucks. The United Nations has declared Gaza the hungriest place on Earth.

“They’re using starvation to herd people into concentration camps. American mercenaries guard starving civilians. This is Nazi shit.”
 — Dimitri Lascaris

Genocide, Legally and Literally

The Genocide Convention defines genocide as inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group in whole or in part. Backed by the United States, United Kingdom, and — until recently — Germany, Israel meets that threshold. South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice, and the 2025 International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, confirm this legal reality.

“If this is not genocide, what is?”
 — Miko Peled

Even Germany — the symbolic custodian of Holocaust memory — has begun to waver. In punishing the Palestinian people to ease its own conscience, it now finds itself complicit. On May 30, 2025, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul announced a formal review of arms exports to Israel, citing violations of international law. “This is about ensuring basic human rights. The sick, the weak, and children are first to die.” When governments question arms sales and file genocide cases, consensus emerges from rubble.

And yet, the U.S. vetoes ceasefire resolutions. The U.K. ships weapons. The EU turns a blind eye. This is not complexity — it is complicity.

Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admits without hesitation:

“What we’re doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians… Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

If even a chief architect of generational apartheid can say this plainly, what excuse remains?

The Red Line

Genocide doesn’t begin with bombs. It begins with excuses, euphemisms, paperwork, and silence. But even if we set aside international law, what does our moral compass say?

In the United States, if an active shooter were reported inside a school or hospital, we would never consider bombing the entire building. The innocent would matter. Police would wait, evacuate, negotiate. Lives would be spared.

So why is it acceptable for the Israeli military to flatten a hospital in Gaza because Hamas might be hiding below? Why do we apply one standard of human rights to ourselves, and another — soaked in blood and indifference — to people in Palestine, Sudan, or Yemen?

There are signs the blanket acceptance of Israeli justifications is beginning to crack. Just days ago, a Sky News analyst dismissed claims of Hamas tunnels beneath a bombed hospital, noting the only evidence presented was a water stain. “There’s no conclusive evidence of a tunnel,” they concluded — a rare, public challenge to the official narrative.

Miko Peled captures the absurdity of the moment:

“If you believe it’s okay to bomb a hospital and hurt a child because the devil is in the basement, then that’s one set of values. But I do not believe — even if the devil is there — it’s okay to harm a single hair on a child’s head.”

This isn’t about military tactics. It’s about moral foundations. A civilization that weighs a child’s life against “terror” is already lost. Peled forces us to confront what many still refuse to say:
 Genocide is not complicated. It’s a choice.

Silence and Repression

Fear is the currency of silence. In the United States, repression cloaks itself in national symbols: student visas revoked, protesters jailed, schools defunded — not in the name of safety, but of silence.

As Holocaust scholar Norman Finkelstein puts it:

“They don’t call you antisemitic because you hate Jews. They call you antisemitic because they hate truth.”

Criticizing a state that breaks international law and bombs civilians is not antisemitism. Conflating political dissent with hatred dilutes a once-potent word, rendering it hollow. It cheapens real antisemitism and shields war crimes from scrutiny.

To hesitate now is not neutrality.
 It is betrayal.

III. Franck Magennis and the Legal Case Against Apartheid

“You can’t compare this to apartheid,” people often caution. But international law demands exactly that comparison — and British human rights barrister Franck Magennis proved it.

As former head of the U.K.’s largest civil-service union, Magennis sued the Home Office on behalf of a Palestinian man seeking asylum. This was no ideological protest. It was a legal challenge to Israel’s dual legal systems in the occupied West Bank. Magennis anchored his case in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. He avoided rhetoric and stuck to statute. In January 2025, the court agreed.

“Separate laws, movement restrictions, dual systems of justice — these are not opinions; these are facts. These are the elements of apartheid under international law.”
 — Franck Magennis

Zionism’s colonial logic — intended to remake Jewish identity into a racialized, territorial claim — meets its legal reckoning here. Journalist Dan Cohen, speaking in November 2023, described Zionism as a

“pseudo-Messianic, colonial nationalist movement that rebranded Jewish identity into a racialized nation-state project. It is not Judaism — it is the rejection of it.”

Herzl’s late-nineteenth-century prescriptions for “redeeming” Palestine by force gave way to the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. Today, Zionism’s secular and religious factions unite around forced expulsions and the vision of a supremacist ethnostate. Christianity’s Old Testament language fused with European imperialism now produces an apartheid reality on the ground.

Settlers seize Palestinian homes while families shop for groceries — shrugging. A viral video captured the infamous phrase:

“If I don’t steal it, someone else will.”

They bulldoze villages, torch ancient olive groves, fire homemade rockets from fortified hilltops, and host barbecues beside the apartheid wall as children starve on the other side. They loot aid convoys, beat farmers, poison livestock, and desecrate mosques and cemeteries — often under the protection of Israeli soldiers. These are not rogue actors. They are agents of policy.

Under international law — Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, and dozens of U.N. resolutions — the settlement enterprise is unequivocally illegal. Yet it continues, funded by the state and protected by Western silence.

In May 2025, in another astonishing act of accountability, the U.K. sanctioned settler leader Daniella Weiss for “promoting and supporting acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals.” If international law means anything, it must apply not only to rockets — but to rooftops built on stolen land.

In October 2023, South Africa submitted a 5,000-page dossier to the International Court of Justice, formally accusing Israel of genocide. Despite intense pressure from the United States, Israel, and others, the International Criminal Court moved forward. In 2025, it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant — alongside leaders of Hamas — for crimes committed during the conflict.

These are not symbolic gestures. They are formal indictments under the highest instruments of international law.

What began in British courts now ripples across the globe. Some still dismiss “apartheid” as hyperbole. But Magennis’s victory proved it is precise. South Africa enforced pass laws and forced removals. Israel enforces checkpoints, segregates roads, and allocates civil rights based on ethnicity.

When pro-Israel lobbyists moved to have him disbarred, Magennis replied simply:

“They didn’t come after me because I lied; they came after me because I told the truth.”

He also dismantled the misuse of antisemitism as a shield for Zionism:

“You can’t fight racism while supporting Zionism,” stating that a movement rooted in ethno-national supremacy cannot coexist with genuine anti-racist ethics.

Finally, Magennis exposed the politics behind the “terrorist” label. By today’s standards, Nelson Mandela would have been disqualified from peace talks. Yet Mandela famously declared in Palestine in 1999:

“Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

States often label the oppressed as terrorists while shielding powerful perpetrators — because their interests are tied to preserving the colonial project. Franck Magennis’s legal victories are not just symbolic. They are a blueprint. Justice, law, and moral courage require us to name apartheid for what it is — and to end it.

In a parallel act of legal accountability, Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal upheld the revocation of the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s charitable status — effectively dismantling an institution complicit in apartheid policies.

Sidebar: A Legal Win — JNF Canada Has Its Charitable Status Revoked

In a landmark decision on May 30, 2025, the Federal Court of Appeal in Jewish National Fund of Canada Inc. v. Canada (National Revenue), 2025 FCA 110 upheld the Canada Revenue Agency’s revocation of JNF Canada’s charitable registration — a revocation first announced in August 2024.

The court found “repeated and serious non-compliance” with the Income Tax Act — citing opaque bookkeeping, missing receipts, and transfers to Israeli military-affiliated projects — to justify the CRA’s notice of intention to revoke and its publication in the Canada Gazette (FCA 110 ¶ 23).

With the appeal dismissed, JNF Canada must wind down its operations and dispose of its assets, effectively terminating 57 years of Canadian fundraising for land and settlement projects in historic Palestine.

Despite the case’s significance, no standalone coverage appeared in leading Canadian outlets such as CBC, The Globe and Mail, or the National Post; reporting remained confined to community and legal-trade publications like The Canadian Jewish News and Canadian Lawyer.

This ruling marks more than a technical tax-law victory: it signals a shift toward holding charities accountable for contributions to illegal settlement expansion and occupation.

Civil society campaigns — most notably by Independent Jewish Voices — mobilized grassroots pressure that forced the CRA to scrutinize JNF Canada’s records and bring this matter before the courts.

For Palestinians — especially children living under siege — this is a rare moment of accountability and legal redress.

Alongside International Criminal Court indictments and rising global solidarity movements, the revocation contributes to a growing narrative of hope and justice.

This decision sets a critical legal precedent for other charities whose foreign funding practices appear to violate Canadian law, potentially inspiring similar reviews of organizations tied to occupation policies.

It demonstrates the power of legal institutions, when paired with civic activism, to enforce ethical standards and constrain funding that contributes to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and occupation.

IV. Hamas: Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?

A Settler-Colonial Legacy

To understand Hamas, we must first understand the world that built it — not through ideology, but through history, layered with betrayal, occupation, and violence long before 1987.

In 1916, Britain and France signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement, carving the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into colonial zones — dividing lands they had not yet conquered. To hasten the collapse of Ottoman rule, Britain promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca independence if he led a revolt. He did. The Arabs bled for empire — and were repaid with a knife in the back.

In 1917, the Balfour Declaration pledged Palestine not to its people, but to “a national home for the Jewish people” — without the consent of the Arab majority. What followed was textbook settler colonialism, refined in Ireland, India, and Kenya: redraw borders, rename cities, suppress resistance, and replace the ruled with rulers. Europe armed, trained, and installed Zionist settlers as imperial proxies to pacify the native population. The racial hierarchy was clear: Europeans on top, Arabs beneath.

By 1947, the United Nations had partitioned 55 percent of Palestine for a Jewish minority. Within a year, more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee. What remains today is a fractured archipelago of occupied zones — disconnected, blockaded, and rationed. Systematically strangled. Slowly erased. Now, faster. Electricity, water, movement — even breath itself — is controlled. This isn’t governance. It’s incarceration. A network of open-air prisons.

From this crucible of loss and domination emerged Hamas. Formed during the First Intifada as an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas blended religious identity with social infrastructure — building schools, clinics, and food distribution networks alongside its armed resistance. Over time, it became Gaza’s de facto government — and a movement willing to use violence for political ends.

Whether Hamas is called a terrorist group or a resistance force depends not on morality, but on legal frameworks — and political convenience. The United States, European Union, Canada, and Israel designate it a terrorist organization, yet many Global South nations — China, South Africa, Iran, Turkey — recognize it as a legitimate resistance group under occupation.

This debate is not new. Nelson Mandela and the ANC were once labeled terrorists. So were Irish republicans — and Zionist militias like Irgun and Lehi. History is full of the oppressed criminalized by the powerful. Under the Geneva Conventions and multiple U.N. resolutions, peoples under foreign military occupation have the right to resist, including by force, so long as civilians are not deliberately targeted. This is not semantic hairsplitting; it is international law. Without that right, resistance collapses into criminality — and occupation becomes eternal.

Some insist on symmetry, claiming that all sides commit evil and must be equally condemned. But as Miko Peled reminds us:

“You cannot create symmetry between the oppressor and the oppressed… The way you fight for every life is by ending the source of suffering — and that is the apartheid state established by the Zionists in Palestine in 1948.”

We are told to denounce Hamas before we can grieve Gaza’s dead. But we are never asked to denounce Zionism before mourning Israeli lives. This is not justice. It is conditioning.

Peled cuts through the myth:

“There’s no good Zionism. There’s no bad Zionism. There’s Zionism. It’s a racist ideology. It’s an apartheid ideology. It needs to be dismantled.”
 — Miko Peled, June 1, 2025

This isn’t about Hamas or even Hamas’s actions. It’s about the conditions that guarantee their emergence. Until we dismantle the system that cages a people, we will keep condemning symptoms while funding the disease. Like the ANC or Irish republicans, Hamas did not arise solely from ideology — it was born from dispossession, humiliation, and the vacuum left by failed diplomacy. If we want fewer rockets, we must dismantle the walls and checkpoints that cage a people.

Moreover, blanket claims that “they all voted for Hamas” collapse under scrutiny. As Aaron Maté notes:

“It’s dripping with racist contempt that completely dehumanizes two million people… More than 50 percent of Gazans weren’t even alive or old enough to vote when Hamas came to power.”

This debunks the idea that Gaza “chose” Hamas and fits this section’s broader analysis of resistance under occupation.

Louis Theroux’s documentary The Settlers makes this personal. A Texas-born settler casually declares, “Gaza is ours.” Daniella Weiss, the self-described “godmother” of the settler movement, boasts:

“There will be no option left for a Palestinian state.”

On the ground, settlers steal homes, bulldoze villages, torch olive groves, and plant flammable pine trees that feed wildfires. They fire rockets into Palestinian neighborhoods, barbecue beside apartheid walls while children starve, and loot aid convoys with impunity. These are not isolated incidents. Under international law, the entire settlement enterprise is illegal.

And yet, the narrative is reversed. Israel, a nuclear power, not-so-secretly funded Hamas for decades — hoping to divide Palestinian factions, sabotage diplomacy, and justify the siege. When blowback came, Netanyahu’s government bombed indiscriminately, killing civilians to avoid their capture. Palestinian prisoners are tortured, starved, and raped in Israeli jails — while the media calls those who resist “barbarians.”

“The goal was never to defeat Hamas,” says Shahid Bolsen. “It was to need Hamas — to sabotage diplomacy, provoke violence, and maintain permanent siege.”

Bolsen, often dismissed in Western media as a “radical Islamist,” argues not from morality but structure: resistance was not just inevitable — it was cultivated. The system feeds off Hamas. And the longer it survives, the longer the siege remains justified.

“You cannot understand Hamas,” Bolsen warns, “without understanding the system that benefits from its survival.”

This is not just physical violence. It is narrative warfare. The jailers are called civilized. The jailed are called terrorists. By this logic, equating Hamas and the Israeli occupation is like accusing a rape victim and her attacker of equal aggression. It is a moral hallucination.

And yet, in the rubble, a poet speaks. In 2025, Mosab Abu Toha won the Pulitzer Prize for essays written while mourning his children under Israeli bombardment.

“My poems are not weapons,” he said. “They are windows.”

Through those windows, we see grief — not hatred; truth — not propaganda. To call that humanity “terrorism” is a second erasure.

Understanding Hamas does not require endorsement. But it does require memory. Zionism was born of imperial ambition. So was its resistance. International law demands we distinguish resistance from terror — not to excuse all tactics, but to preserve the fundamental right of the oppressed to struggle for freedom.

Only then can we begin to imagine justice — not for one side, but for all.

SIDEBAR: THE WAR WAS A DEAL: HOW HAMAS AND NETANYAHU PLAYED CHICKEN WITH GAZA

“The war was not a failure. It was a trap.”
 — Anonymous IDF source, March 2025

In March 2025, a classified leak revealed that Israeli intelligence had known Hamas’s October 7 operation was coming. Egyptian officials had issued repeated warnings. IDF analysts flagged drills. Surveillance tech detected unusual movements near the fence. Netanyahu’s government quietly reduced guard presence and left border gates vulnerable. The warnings weren’t missed — they were shelved.

Hamas, for its part, also needed a slaughter. With peaceful protest suppressed, they played chicken — hoping to capture hostages for prisoner exchanges or provoke an Israeli overreaction. They offered Gaza as a stage and thousands of civilians as martyrs — knowing that only overwhelming brutality might force the world to finally pay attention.

This was not a war. It was Mutually Assured Destruction — not with nuclear weapons, but with narrative gravity. Each side gambled with lives to secure legitimacy. Each relied on the other’s monstrosity to justify its own.

“Hamas needed a collapse. So did Bibi.”
 — Shahid Bolsen

Hamas got outrage. Netanyahu got obedience. Gaza got the grave.

As Jewish Voice for Peace put it:

“This isn’t about religion. It’s about power. And power, unaccountable, always hungers for more.”

By design, both sides fed the cycle: the more Hamas’s violence shocked global opinion, the more Israel’s escalation was rationalized. As headlines fixated on October 7’s horrors, few asked why Netanyahu had left Gaza’s southern border wide open. And as Israeli reprisals leveled entire neighborhoods, the world was told it was “forced,” “necessary,” “self-defense.”

This wasn’t a breakdown of intelligence. It was a breakdown of morality.

In a nightmarish calculus, civilians became leverage on both sides. Gaza’s children were bait to provoke the most extreme response — and the siege that followed proved the trap. For Hamas, it meant international outrage. For Netanyahu, it meant unwavering domestic support.

For the people of Gaza, it meant annihilation.

V. Michael and the Settler-Colonial Blueprint

MICHAEL ISN’T THE ARGUMENT — HE’S THE ALIBI

Michael doesn’t argue; he deflects. His slogans — “There was no Palestinian people before 1964,” “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” “Hamas started it,” “If we don’t cleanse them, they’ll cleanse us” — ring through comment threads and lecture halls. He speaks not to persuade, but to overwhelm. His volume betrays fear: the ideology he defends is collapsing under its own contradictions.

While promoting posts and raising funds for UNRWA food kitchens, I met a man named Michael. He seemed to take manic joy in dehumanizing and mocking pro-Palestinian voices — sharing memes of bombed-out cities with smirking emojis, deriding starving children as “props.” It was not an argument. It was cruelty rehearsed as performance.

And yet, Michael wasn’t the source. He was the echo.

In 1896, Theodor Herzl opened Der Judenstaat with fiction:

“A land without a people for a people without a land.”

With those words, Herzl erased over 400,000 Arabs living under Ottoman rule. His diaries brimmed with plans to “redeem” Palestine through Jewish labor, forging a “New Jew” rooted in conquest rather than diaspora. At the First Zionist Congress in 1897, delegates endorsed land deals with absentee landlords — quiet transactions that ended in the eviction of Palestinian peasants.

That blueprint hardened into policy. In 1909, David Ben-Gurion warned:

“The country cannot absorb all its children if we do not restrict foreign labour and implant Hebrew labour alone.”

Mandating “Hebrew labour” excluded Arab workers, creating a dual economy — Jewish settlers above, indigenous Arabs below. British Mandate policies after 1922 codified inequality: immigration certificates, land trusts, labor quotas — all tools to entrench demographic dominance.

This was no accident. By 1948, Zionism’s design had expelled or driven out over 750,000 Palestinians — return forbidden. Post-1967 expansions entrenched Ben-Gurion’s vision through zoning laws, segregated roads, and biometric checkpoints.

The myth of an empty land collapsed decades ago. Ottoman census records, British surveys, and Palestinian memory all confirm: Palestine was never terra nullius. Historians Ilan Pappé and Rashid Khalidi document this erasure and displacement exhaustively.

Under international law — the U.N. Charter, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and multiple Security Council resolutions — sovereignty cannot be declared over a people by fiat. Herzl’s “redeemed land” became stolen villages. Ben-Gurion’s “Hebrew labour” yielded unemployment, dependency, and restricted movement. These were not unintended consequences. They were the system working exactly as designed.

Meanwhile, Michael’s slogans are camouflage. When he shouts, he defends not Israeli security but a nineteenth-century settler ideology aimed at erasure. He is not debating. He is drowning dissent. His talking points are not controversial; they are calculated distractions from the colonial machinery at work.

There are countless voices online like him — bots, true believers, the passionately misinformed — pursuing a dehumanizing agenda. Whether scripted or sincere, they echo propaganda. They manufacture fog.

Magennis’s British court victory underscored apartheid as infrastructure: dual legal systems, racially gated permits — Herzl’s “redemption” made tangible. But the deeper question is why Michael’s echoes still reverberate. When people recite these slogans instead of naming the root injustice — settler colonialism — they become alibis for genocide.

It is time to unmask this blueprint for what it is:
 A colonial project built on dispossession,
 sustained by propaganda,
 And enforced by violence.

Michael is not the argument.
 He is its alibi.
 And echoing him only deepens the lie.

VI. The Collapse of the Zionist Narrative

The ground is shifting. Protests surge from Cape Town to Berlin. Politicians who once stood lockstep behind Israel now hesitate. In a recent YouGov survey, fewer than one in five Europeans views Israel favorably — only 14 percent of Britons side with Israel, while 32 percent side with Palestinians. Over half say they can understand the Palestinian perspective. The old refrain — “It’s complicated” — no longer holds. Genocide unfolds in real time, and no Holocaust memorial or sacred trauma can justify starving children and mass graves.

For decades, Israel cloaked itself in Shoah memory, wielding victimhood even as it bombed hospitals. That shield is cracking. Grief has catalyzed truth.

“The way you fight for every life is by ending the source of suffering — the apartheid state established in 1948.”
 — Miko Peled

Inside Israel, the cracks are material and brutal. By early 2025, more than half of draft-age Israelis refused front-line service — many citing moral or mental-health exemptions. The IDF quietly suspended its female combat-fitness program. At least two reservists diagnosed with PTSD were killed in Gaza, and rising veteran suicides underscore how demoralizing this war has become. Netanyahu’s coalition nearly collapsed when Haredi partners demanded yeshiva exemptions. Abroad, Canada opened a war-crimes investigation into IDF veterans. Israel’s “united front” has shattered — not just in European opinion polls, but inside Israeli society itself.

The collapse is not rhetorical.

In May 2025, Operation Gideon’s Chariots forcibly displaced over 250,000 Palestinians from Jabalia into so-called “humanitarian zones,” deepening a catastrophic crisis. More than 54,000 Palestinians have died — most of them women and children. Thousands remain under the rubble. Famine is imminent. Amnesty International, U.N. rapporteurs, and the International Court of Justice warn: genocide is not only imminent — it is in progress. This is systematic ethnic cleansing.

Alarm bells ring even within empire’s halls. Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes broke rank on MSNBC:

“Everything I’m hearing from people on the inside is that it is materially worse [in Gaza] over the last few weeks than it has been since October 7th… When people can actually get into Gaza, what they’re going to find is much, much worse than anything that’s been reported.”
 — Ben Rhodes

Journalists are barred from entering Gaza, but Rhodes’s words cut through euphemism: the U.S. holds ultimate leverage — yet chooses bombs over ultimatums. This is not diplomacy. It is complicity.

When those who built the wall begin to denounce its purpose, the collapse is irreversible.

Narrative warfare has weaponized memory. Touring the West Bank, Ta-Nehisi Coates called it “Jim Crow on steroids.” Aaron Maté dissected the imbalance:

“No Israeli is asked: ‘Do you accept Palestine’s right to exist?’ Palestine doesn’t exist yet — it’s actively being destroyed.”
 — Aaron Maté

Norman Finkelstein condemns the “Holocaust industry” for deflecting criticism. Ilan Pappé calls the Nakba “an ongoing structure.” Noam Chomsky describes Israel as “an instrument of imperial power.” Even within Israeli intelligence, a Hebrew-language investigation by Mechohomitz revealed that despite publicly discrediting Gaza Health Ministry casualty figures as “Hamas propaganda,” the IDF relies on those same numbers in its own briefings. Truth is weaponized to muddy international understanding — and insulate decision-makers from moral accountability.

Even empire’s scribes now see the cracks. In May 2025, Thomas Friedman quoted former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert again:

“What we’re doing in Gaza is a war of extermination — indiscriminate, cruel, criminal.”
 — Thomas Friedman, The New York Times

Rising suicides and shattered families underscore a nation haunted by its own actions. This is disintegration — not resilience.

In early June, Hamas offered to withdraw completely from Gaza. Israel refused. As Kyle Kulinski observed:

“BREAKING: ISRAEL REJECTS HAMAS OFFER TO STEP DOWN & LEAVE GAZA! That’s not about security anymore — that’s about conquest.”
 — Kyle Kulinski, June 2, 2025

If even total withdrawal is rejected, then “security” is no longer the aim. Annexation is.

Meanwhile, settlements multiply: twenty-two new outposts approved, settler-led pogroms escalate, Palestinian children are imprisoned. Louis Theroux’s The Settlers captures the entitlement:

“If we waited for permission, there’d be no Israel.”

Analyst Shahid Bolsen diagnoses the moment:

“Israel isn’t fighting Hamas; it’s fighting reality. Zionism doesn’t do diplomacy — it dominates or disintegrates.”
 — Shahid Bolsen

And again:

“This genocide marks the end of Zionist strategy.”

The collapse is tangible: mass military refusals, mass emigration. As Lee Camp summarizes:

“There’s no military doctrine left — just collapse.”
 — Lee Camp

This is the end of the Zionist narrative.
 And for many, it is not tragic.
 It is long overdue.

VII. A Vision Beyond Apartheid

This is not a call for revenge.
 It is a call for justice.

True justice demands that no one’s safety be built on another’s oppression. At its core, anti-Zionism does not aim to erase a people — it seeks to dismantle a system of domination: one in which a single ethnic group controls land, water, laws, and roads, while millions remain trapped behind walls, checkpoints, rubble, and hunger.

As Franck Magennis puts it:

“This is not about dismantling people. It’s about dismantling systems.”

Contrary to the claims of pro-Israel critics, ending Zionism does not mean ending Jewish life in the region. It means ending apartheid: race-based land laws, dual legal systems, bureaucratic cruelty. It means imagining something unprecedented in historic Palestine — a secular democracy from the river to the sea, where every adult, regardless of religion or ethnicity, holds one equal vote.

In that democracy, the millions displaced in 1948 and their descendants would finally return home — not just in body, but in dignity. Reparations would be acts of recognition, not transactional settlements. Education would be shaped by truth rather than myth, offering future generations the full story of their land — and of each other. Justice would no longer be a weapon wielded by the powerful. It would become a path to healing for all who have suffered.

“The only way out of trauma is through truth. The way to heal is not to dominate — but to repair.”
 — Gabor Maté

Miko Peled makes it plain:

“The Palestinians are not the victims. They are the liberators. Because through their resistance, they’re going to liberate all of us from Zionism, and then we can all be free.”
 — Miko Peled, June 1, 2025

At first glance, this may seem to contradict the unbearable truth: over 14,000 Palestinian children have been killed, and millions starve behind fences. But Peled does not deny their suffering — he honors their agency. His point is not that Palestinians do not suffer, but that they are more than their suffering. To see them only as victims is to reduce them to a humanitarian plea. They are a moral force. In resisting occupation, Palestinians expose empire. In refusing silence, they force the world to choose.

That is not pity.
 That is power.

Liberation, in this vision, is collective. Zionism has not only caged Palestinians — it has trapped Jews in a cycle of fear, militarization, and moral erosion. Freedom for one people cannot come at the cost of another.

“Palestine is an entire country… The apartheid regime drew these borders. The reality is one state — an apartheid state — or the only hopeful alternative: a free, democratic Palestine.”
 — Miko Peled, June 1, 2025

We have a precedent. South Africa chose truth over amnesia, dignity over domination. Its Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not erase anyone. It confronted atrocities, acknowledged pain, and planted seeds for a multiracial democracy. Imperfect. Painful. Incomplete. But real.

If South Africa could do it, so can Israel–Palestine.

But only if we reject the lie that safety can be built on another’s grave. Only if we choose to believe in something greater than survival.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
 — Desmond Tutu

The time for neutrality has passed.
 The vision must now be justice.

VIII. Why Is This So Dangerous to Say?

Labeling Gaza’s deliberate starvation and bombardment “genocide” invites immediate censure in much of the West. Calling it “apartheid” risks professional ruin. Criticizing Zionism — even as a political ideology — can lead to social exile, platform bans, or defunding.

In the 2020 U.S. election cycle, pro-Israel interests gave roughly $3.75 million to Joe Biden and $894,000 to Donald Trump, signaling a bipartisan consensus that chills dissent. AIPAC funnels multimillion-dollar campaigns into congressional races — not to foster debate, but to suppress it. College presidents resign under pressure to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Peaceful protests are branded “terrorism.” Textbooks erase Palestine. Celebrities like Sharon Osbourne posture as defenders of tolerance while backing organizations that stifle survivors and shield war crimes behind the language of “fighting hate.” This is not diplomacy — it is ideological enforcement by fear, not persuasion.

Project Esther and the Criminalization of Dissent

In early 2024, a leaked strategy memo — codenamed Project Esther — exposed how U.S. power brokers are rebranding pro-Palestine activism as a national security threat. Behind closed doors, senior DOJ and intelligence officials argued that anyone protesting Gaza’s siege — whether a nurse handing out water bottles, a software engineer sharing statistics, or a high schooler marching on campus — could be labeled part of what they termed the Hamas Support Network (HSN).

One chilling passage reads:

“All of the people who have come out to protest the genocide — nurses, software programmers, port workers, teachers, veterans, high schoolers — are part of a global clandestine network to support Hamas. If they had any actual evidence, we’d see it plastered in every newspaper 24/7. But we don’t, because the evidence doesn’t exist.”

From this assumption — that pro-Palestine sentiment equals terrorism — Project Esther lays out a blueprint for repression.

Under its logic:

• Any campus group or student club that fails to expel or discipline pro-Palestine members risks losing federal funding.
• Foreign students can have their visas revoked for wearing a keffiyeh or posting a viral TikTok about Gaza.
• The DOJ is empowered to pursue material support charges — typically reserved for terrorism cases — against individuals who donate to relief efforts, share petitions, or organize rallies.
• Social-media companies are instructed to “deprioritize” pro-Palestinian content in algorithms, while local officials are told to “dissuade” protest permits that suggest solidarity with Gaza.
• Universities and nonprofits could lose entire grant lines if their leadership fails to suppress speech critical of Israeli policy.

One internal slide states it plainly:

“The Department of Justice has the right to go after pro-Palestine groups for providing material support for terrorism — punishable by heavy prison sentences, bank-account shutdowns, and asset seizures.”

Under this framework, a letter to Congress becomes grounds for surveillance. A GoFundMe page risks seizure. A classroom discussion becomes actionable cause. The boundary between peaceful protest and criminal conspiracy disappears.

The memo even lays out public-relations strategies:

• “Cancel visas for foreign students that support Palestine.”
• “Withhold federal funds from institutions that don’t enforce anti-Palestinian policies.”
• “Frame the Palestine movement as anti-American.”
• “Present the movement as criminal.”

Criminalizing dissent is not new. But Project Esther codifies it as official U.S. policy. It builds on a long legacy — McCarthyism’s blacklists, COINTELPRO’s infiltration of civil rights movements, the PATRIOT Act’s post-9/11 surveillance — but with a crucial difference: the target is not a foreign ideology or armed cell, but Americans exercising their First Amendment rights to protest genocide abroad.

The results are already tangible. In 2024 alone:

• Over 200 foreign students were told to leave the country — many after posting innocuous messages of solidarity.
• A Boston-area university barred a registered nurse from clinical rotations for signing a ceasefire petition.
• A small liberal-arts college lost a federal grant after its president refused to discipline a professor who screened footage from Gaza in a political science class.
• Community members — postal workers, firefighters, adjunct professors — have been subpoenaed or investigated simply for sharing fundraisers.

The heart of Project Esther is not public safety.
 It is ideological control.

When calling for a ceasefire becomes terrorism, the line between thought and felony blurs. Once the government can coerce any university, nonprofit, or social-media platform into compliance, any conversation about Palestinian rights becomes impossible.

The memo’s logic is linguistic warfare:

• Peaceful speech becomes “material support.”
• Campus flyers become “recruitment tools.”
• Academic research becomes “terrorist propaganda.”

And dissent becomes treason.

As long as Project Esther circulates through the corridors of power, every tweet, every rally, every syllabus mentioning Gaza carries risk. That risk doesn’t just silence pro-Palestine voices — it silences anyone afraid of guilt by association. When tenured professors, frontline nurses, and high school teachers can be labeled enemies of the state for speaking out, true academic freedom and civic participation collapse.

The memo concludes with this telling phrase:

“Resistance is a nuisance — power demands silence.”

But silence is not safety. And obedience is not peace.

The only remedy is exposure: to show that what Project Esther calls “counter-terrorism” is, in fact, a campaign to erase dissent. If we allow peaceful speech to be treated as criminal, then no peaceful speech will remain.

This is not security.
 This is authoritarianism — one gag order at a time.

Elites and Public Apathy

Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity exposed how elite collaboration and public apathy flourish under the cover of national security. Resistance was not honored — it was feared. Today, the pattern repeats. Protesters are labeled extremists; journalists are surveilled or deported. In the United Kingdom, authorities — lobbied by Israeli diplomats — have pressed charges against genocide protesters. Resistance is dismissed as a nuisance. Power demands silence.

Weaponizing Language

Words matter. Semitic includes both Jews and Arabs. A campaign of extermination against Palestinians is, by definition, antisemitic. To use the charge of antisemitism to shield state violence against Semitic people is a moral obscenity.

Incompetence and Collapse

Even the architects of this genocide recoil from its execution. After Netanyahu’s offhand remark — “We can’t have photos of children starving — not starvation itself” — journalist Aaron Maté observed:

“Starvation was the tipping point — for PR, not humanity.”

Canadian human rights lawyer Dimitri Lascaris added:

“What horrifies me is not just the evil, but the stunning incompetence of this genocidal regime. They couldn’t even pick a compliant puppet to run humanitarian aid — he had a conscience and resigned.”

That resignation punctured the myth, revealing collapse alongside cruelty.

Humanitarianism as Containment

In a world where naming genocide is punishable, clarity becomes contraband. Calling it what it is risks accusations of antisemitism, sedition, or naïveté. Aid convoys, PR corridors, drone footage of bread trucks — these are not solutions. They are distractions. As Miko Peled insists:

“That should not be the conversation — humanitarian aid. The conversation should be the liberation and dismantling of the apartheid state… and, of course, dismantling the concentration camp so people are free.”

“It’s not about getting the genocidal regime to allow humanitarian aid to go into a population they want to kill anyway… That only makes things worse.”

Food trucks offer moral cover, not moral clarity. The sharper the dissent, the harsher the punishment. The real threat to empire isn’t resistance — it’s articulation.

Holocaust Memory and Genocide Denial

By wrapping Israeli violence in Holocaust imagery — flying the Star of David over bombed hospitals, invoking “Never again” to justify siege warfare — Israel collapses Judaism’s moral authority into a militarized ethnostate. That not only endangers Palestinians. It fuels real antisemitism and endangers Jews worldwide.

At a Toronto fundraiser for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative, Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan lit candles on a birthday cake and declared:

“We will wear yellow stars until you condemn the atrocities of Hamas.”

Days later, on i24, he said:

“The UN building should be wiped off the face of the earth.”

This was not satire. It was diplomatic theater — desecrating Jewish trauma to rationalize Palestinian annihilation. The yellow star, once a symbol of persecution, was repurposed into a costume of moral supremacy. As Israel bombed UN schools, warehouses, and shelters — killing hundreds of staff — the symbolism became not just grotesque, but genocidal.

Global Enforcement and Soft Fascism

Across the Global North, dissent is punished. In the UK, children are suspended for wearing keffiyehs. In Germany, lectures on Palestinian suffering prompt investigations. In France, pro-Palestinian marches are banned. Criticize Israel, and you become the threat.

Meanwhile, Zionist militias operate with legal protection and charitable status. As Samira Moyed reports:

“Magen Herut, a vigilante Zionist organization operating on Canadian campuses and protests, takes its name from a Zionist terror group — and it holds charitable status with the Canada Revenue Agency.”

Palestinian students lose scholarships for keffiyehs. Zionist enforcers intimidate protesters under the banner of “community defense.” Canadian institutions don’t just ignore this. They endorse it.

This is how soft fascism gets subsidized.

Immigration Litmus Tests

The Abraham Global Peace Initiative publicly calls itself a peace group, but functions as ideological enforcement. Moyed continues:

“The Abraham Global Peace Initiative is a Zionist lobby group with charitable status… fronted by a man who uses Holocaust trauma to criminalize dissent. They want a Canadian ‘values test’ requiring immigrants to affirm Israel’s right to exist.”

This is not immigration policy. It is dogma.
 It is genocide denial repackaged as national identity.

Commencement Censorship and Academic Repression

In May 2025, NYU valedictorian Logan Rozos told his graduating class:

“The genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars, and has been livestreamed to our phones for the past 18 months… I condemn this genocide and complicity in this genocide.”

The audience rose in applause. NYU withheld his diploma, accusing him of “lying” and “abusing a privilege.” The Anti-Defamation League praised the punishment. The livestream vanished.

Two weeks earlier, MIT graduate Megha Vemuri acknowledged Palestinians and quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in her commencement address. MIT cut her mic. The apology that followed wasn’t to her — it was to donors.

Meanwhile, under Donald Trump’s 2025 executive pressure campaign, the U.S. Department of Education threatened institutions like Harvard and Columbia with funding cuts unless they suppressed anti-Zionist activism. Republican lawmakers echoed the message: equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism — or else.

This is not free speech.
 It is ideological policing.
 It is censorship with a velvet glove and a federal budget.

Weaponizing Victimhood

In April 2025, a viral TikTok showed Zionist influencer Lizzy Savetsky berating an Arab taxi driver for antisemitism — for speaking Arabic in his own cab. His crime was being threateningly Arab in America.

Jewish commentator Matt Bernstein responded:

“Jews occupy so many powerful positions… it’s embarrassing to say we’re persecuted.”

He didn’t deny antisemitism exists. He rejected its weaponization. When privilege cloaks itself in eternal victimhood, history becomes a tool of suppression — not remembrance.

Sometimes, it’s even staged. In 2019, a Winnipeg kosher café reported an antisemitic attack. Police later revealed it was a hoax, staged by the owners. False claims corrode trust. They delegitimize real cries for justice.

As Shahid Bolsen put it:

“You’re not censored because you’re wrong. You’re censored because you’re a threat to power.”

Cracks in the Silence

Voices are beginning to push back. On The Greyzone, Daniel Maté rejected the label “antisemitic” in describing a 2025 D.C. shooting of Israeli officials:

“I read the manifesto. I couldn’t find antisemitism. He was upset by the Gaza genocide.”

Max Blumenthal agreed: conflating a militarized settler state with Jewish identity recasts dissent as hate. One victim, Yaron Lischinsky, identified as a Christian Zionist and glorified Israeli military violence on social media.

This is not diplomacy.
 This is death-cult politics dressed up as foreign policy.

When bombs become blessings, atrocity becomes salvation. This is annihilation, not strategy. The bipartisan machine enabling apartheid and genocide cannot claim the moral high ground. It will collapse beneath its delusions.

Cultural Figures Speak Out

In May 2025, over 300 UK cultural icons — including Dua Lipa, Benedict Cumberbatch, Riz Ahmed, and Tilda Swinton — signed an open letter demanding an end to arms sales to Israel:

“You can’t call it intolerable and keep sending arms.”

When pop royalty adopts the language of international law, rupture is real.

Preparing for Reckoning

British Muslim sociologist Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui vowed:

“One day, I’ll teach Nazism and Zionism together. Students will ask how the world stayed silent with video evidence.”

“Are you one of them?”

The truth endures. Since October 2023, over 14,000 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza — more than in all other global conflicts combined. Gaza now has the highest per-capita child amputee rate in the world. Over 100 journalists, mostly Palestinian, have died. Hospitals lie in ruins. Aid workers lie buried.

In the West, losing a job is tragedy. In Gaza, losing a child to an airstrike is daily horror. And yet the former is weaponized to silence outrage over the latter.

Miko Peled puts it plainly:

“You don’t get to judge the people you’re helping cage, starve, and bomb — especially when your taxes pay for it.”

This is dangerous not because it’s false — but because it’s true.

Once people realize Zionism does not shield Jews, but generates violence for all, they ask harder questions. They see their own cities, police, and surveillance mirrored in Palestine.

Malcolm X saw it in 1964:

“The Palestinian struggle is not just a cry for justice — it’s a blistering battle for the most fundamental human rights… If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the oppressors.”

And Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

“I’ve never felt racism’s glare more intensely than in Israel. Once you see the system — violence disguised as order, humanity erased — you can never unsee it.”

Calling genocide and apartheid by their names is dangerous precisely because it reveals uncomfortable truths.

And empire fears those truths more than anything else.

SIDEBAR: THE COMMENT SECTION IS THE CRIME SCENE

How Genocide Is Normalized in Plain Sight

Genocide doesn’t begin with bombs. It begins with words — anonymous avatars, coworkers, neighbors posting in comment threads. A woman named Katalina insists that calling Zionism “colonization” is like accusing someone of “trespassing on their own front porch.” A man named Gee Miller replies to a plea for Palestinian rights: “It’s time to disappear them from the neighborhood. Simple, like you. Did I type slow enough for you?”

This isn’t satire. It isn’t rare. It’s the banal, unfiltered voice of genocide — thriving in plain sight. Genocidal systems begin with myths. And myths need messengers.

Before presenting these rhetorical specimens, the author and publisher note that we had mixed feelings about giving a spotlight to such crude arguments, bad-faith distortions, and obscenities passed off as logic. But these are not private opinions. These talking points are out in the open — amplified by Western media, repeated by elected officials, and often accepted as fact. For that reason, they must be dissected, not dismissed. We do this not to dignify them, but to expose them — forensically and fairly.

Scrolling through social media reveals a repetitive pattern of refrains:

• Erasure as Fact: “There never was a Palestine.”
• Elimination as Defense: “Just level Gaza.”
• Victimhood as Shield: “How dare you compare this to the Holocaust.”
• Gaslighting as Logic: “If Israel wanted genocide, there’d be no Gazans left.”
• Dehumanization as Humor: “Let them live in tents. That’s what they’re used to.”
• Dissent as Threat: “If you support Palestine, you support terrorism.”

These aren’t just opinions. They are scaffolding for mass violence.

When future historians ask how Gaza’s children were starved in full view of the world, the evidence won’t just be in military records. It will be here — in the threads.

We archive them not to argue, but to remember.

Anatomy of a Facebook Rant

Here’s a real Facebook rant that encapsulates nearly every rhetorical trick used to deflect from genocide. Below, each quote is followed by a reality check — a legal, historical, or ethical correction that dismantles its logic:

“Think of the true meaning of genocide. The Islamists and their far-Left ‘useful idiots’ chant about destroying the Jewish race. That is genocide.”
 Reality: Genocide requires state-level intent to destroy a group. Fringe chants ≠ military campaigns. Israel’s siege of Gaza, which has killed over 50,000 children, is. This is textbook false equivalence.

“The Palestinians are Arabs, but there is not an actual Palestinian race.”
 Reality: Genocide law protects ethnic, national, or religious groups — not just “races.” Palestinians were formally recognized by the PLO in 1964 and the UN in 2012. Erasing this identity is not semantics. It’s an act of erasure.

“The far Left doesn’t care about Yemen or Ukraine. All their hate is directed at Israel. Why? Antisemitism.”
 Reality: Many activists oppose injustice globally — from Gaza to Sudan, Haiti to Ukraine. Jewish-led groups like JVP denounce both antisemitism and occupation. This is a false dilemma meant to discredit intersectional solidarity.

“Islamic terrorism kills many people. The far Left ignores this.”
 Reality: Over 95% of Muslim-majority countries report zero jihadi attacks annually. Equating all Muslims with terrorism stokes Islamophobia and diverts attention from state-led atrocities in Gaza.

“Many of you claim to care about women, gays, and animals, but support radical Islamism.”
 Reality: Supporting Palestinian rights ≠ supporting ISIS. Many Gazans fight for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ protections, and social justice. This is a guilt-by-association smear tactic.

“How many of you would survive in a Muslim country?”
 Reality: Countries like Indonesia, Tunisia, and Jordan have vibrant civil societies. Painting all Muslim nations as death cults is a racist straw man.

“Israel is the last bastion of human and animal rights. I’m a vegan — I support Israel.”
 Reality: No diet excuses complicity in genocide. Tel Aviv’s vegan cafés don’t cancel out bulldozed olive trees or mass starvation. This is a moral non sequitur.

“There are six million Muslims and thirty thousand Jews in the UK. I’d feel safer if it were the other way around.”
 Reality: This is textbook demographic panic — Islamophobia posing as concern. The same logic justified exclusion and extermination in Europe’s darkest eras.

Myth vs. Reality Table

Myth

Reality

“There never was a Palestine.”

Ottoman and British records confirm thriving Palestinian towns. Denial is the first step in erasure.

“It’s just security.”

The ICJ demanded aid access. Israel responded with a blockade. Starvation ≠ self-defense.

“Critics are antisemitic.”

Holocaust survivors and rabbis condemn Zionist atrocities. Moral duty ≠ hate.

“Resistance = terror.”

The Geneva Conventions affirm the right to resist occupation. Mislabeling it is legal gaslighting.

“Palestinians chose Hamas.”

Over 50% of Gazans were too young to vote in 2006. Collective blame is collective punishment.

“Israel is a democracy.”

Segregated roads, race-based laws, and apartheid rule are not democratic.

“Humanitarian aid proves compassion.”

Drone-patrolled “aid corridors” that end in shootings are control, not compassion.

“Israel always wants peace; Hamas refuses it.”

Historically, Hamas has repeatedly accepted ceasefires and long-term peace proposals. Israeli hardliners rejected most, including the Oslo Accords. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed a deal, was assassinated by an Israeli extremist. The only “peace” sought now is territorial expansion.

Summing Up the Fallacies

These rants and myths reveal a cascade of rhetorical distortions:

• Straw Man & False Equivalence: Fringe chants =/= state siege; veganism =/= morality.
• Hasty Generalization & Fear Appeal: “All Muslims are terrorists”; “Muslim countries are dangerous.”
• False Dilemma & Black-and-White Thinking: “Support Israel or support terror.”
• Cherry-Picking & Red Herring: “What about Yemen?” is a deflection, not a defense.
• Non Sequitur: “I’m vegan, so Israel is ethical.”
• Ad Hominem & Prejudice: “Critics are Jew-haters”; “Too many Muslims make us unsafe.”

Each fallacy is a weaponized narrative. Each desensitizes us to atrocity.

Supremacy hides in plain sight. These comments demand impunity for Gaza’s siege while criminalizing anyone who questions it.

Speech isn’t neutral when it enables mass death.
 Comments are not collateral. They are evidence.

When historians seek the roots of genocide, they will look beyond the bombs — to the hashtags and threads.
 We save these posts not to argue, but to remember.
And perhaps the greatest irony is this:
Every time these bad-faith arguments resurface — repackaged as outrage or moral panic — they don’t challenge the case for genocide.
 They confirm it.
 They show how mass atrocity is rationalized in public: not through evidence, but through repetition; not through truth, but through narrative control.
 For decades, these claims went unchallenged — because they wore the costume of consensus.
 They appealed to Western guilt, media laziness, and the illusion of objectivity.
 Only now, as the body count becomes undeniable, are they being publicly dismantled.
 These comments are not just mirrors.
 They’re confessions.

IX. The Blueprint of Genocide and Apartheid: How History Repeats — and How It Ends

We are told: “Never again.” Yet again, it happens.
 Weapons change. Borders shift. Bodies pile up — and the world feigns surprise.

Genocide doesn’t begin with bombs. It begins with excuses, euphemisms, paperwork, and silence.

Earlier, we traced how European powers fractured the Arab world and installed Zionism — not as justice, but as leverage. Now we zoom out. The violence in Gaza is no anomaly; it is the latest expression of a global pattern. The real problem isn’t just that genocide recurs — it’s that we’ve built a world where it’s allowed.

Every genocide starts with a story of necessity, a pretext of self-defense. Victims become threats. In 1939, Adolf Hitler infamously asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” It wasn’t a question — it was a warning. Silence grants permission. Impunity invites repetition.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” understood this intimately. “I became interested in genocide because it has happened so many times — and the criminals guilty of it were not punished,” he wrote. Lemkin knew: impunity is genocide’s oxygen.

The blueprint spans continents and centuries:

• The Americas: The Doctrine of Discovery justified extermination under settler colonialism. Thanksgiving mythology masked massacres. Treaties became tools of dispossession.
• Africa: Black lives were commodified and enslaved, empires built on racial capitalism.
• Nazi Germany: The Holocaust refined the logic. Hitler praised America’s conquest of Indigenous nations and saw silence over Armenia as license for his own atrocities.

In 1948, Zionist militias expelled over 750,000 Palestinians — not as collateral, but by design. Primo Levi warned, “Everyone has their Jews. For the Israelis, they are the Palestinians.” It was not a betrayal of memory, but its replication.

By mid-2025, the same logic reappeared in Western Sahara. Britain and France endorsed Morocco’s “autonomy plan” as the best path forward. Two permanent Security Council members effectively handed the fate of the Sahrawi people to Rabat and Washington — not to Laâyoune or Smara. When Washington recognized Moroccan sovereignty, millions of Sahrawis were reduced to bargaining chips. A superpower redrew borders with a policy memo. It was annexation by signature.

Today, that same logic plays out in Gaza. More than 60 percent of Palestinians lack documents proving land ownership. Israeli airstrikes obliterated the Palestinian Land Authority office, erasing cadastral data, maps, and deeds. As TRT World reports, “The widespread loss of homes, boundaries, and official records makes it nearly impossible for Palestinians to prove ownership — and easier for Israel to annex what remains.”

Genocide doesn’t always arrive with bombs. Sometimes it comes with paperwork. First they flatten your home. Then they erase your right to it. Legal erasure follows physical destruction. This isn’t postwar cleanup — it is a digital Nakba unfolding in real time.

South African apartheid followed this same pattern: race laws, segregated economies, controlled movement. “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” said Nelson Mandela. Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it plainly: “The parallels to my own South Africa are painfully stark.”

Rwanda’s genocide killed nearly a million Tutsis in just 100 days, while the world delayed calling it “genocide” until rivers ran red. In Darfur, villages burned, women were raped, and civilians vanished amid indifferent press releases. Mukesh Kapila put it grimly: “The only difference between Rwanda and Darfur now is the numbers.”

These aren’t disconnected atrocities. They’re a system. A cycle. It always begins the same way: a people framed as a problem. Their destruction reframed as stability. Then come the permits, the walls, the graves.

Marcel Ophuls, in The Sorrow and the Pity, shattered myths of heroic resistance in Vichy France: “Resistance fighters were isolated… considered a nuisance. The French elite, especially, had no problem with Nazi occupation.” Today, in London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington, those who expose genocide’s machinery are smeared, investigated, even jailed. Collaborators thrive. Resisters suffer. “National security” becomes the mask of annihilation.

Narrative Warfare and Weaponized Memory

“Israeli media amplified false atrocity claims — like babies murdered in a nursery and hanged on laundry lines — despite local denials.”
 “Fabricated stories were used to desensitize Western audiences, justifying massive civilian casualties in Gaza.”
 “Even Holocaust survivors were falsely reported killed, highlighting how propaganda exploited emotional resonance.”

When a state conflates dissent with terrorism and weaponizes unverified tales of brutality, democracies lose their capacity for critical scrutiny. Ordinary citizens become accomplices. The only defense is vigilant journalism, transparent reporting, and relentless skepticism.

Miko Peled, who has lived on both sides of the conflict, lays it bare: “Open the definition of genocide. Compare it to what Palestinians have faced since 1948 — you’ll see it checks almost every box.” Why won’t the West name it? Because doing so would demand a reckoning — not just with Israel, but with the system that armed, funded, and shielded it.

Norman Finkelstein was among the first to say the quiet part aloud: “For a hermetically sealed population, that’s genocide.” When Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced, “No food, fuel, water or electricity,” it wasn’t policy. It was extermination. That’s not war. That’s intent.

Finkelstein put it bluntly: “The goal of Israel was to solve the Gaza question through three methods: ethnic cleansing, making Gaza unlivable, and mass death and destruction.” This is not theory. It’s execution. The destruction of 90 percent of Gaza’s housing, half its hospitals, and half its farmland is not accidental. It is design.

And his final warning — perhaps the most chilling: “It’s the final stage of the final solution.” Finkelstein, son of Holocaust survivors, doesn’t deal in metaphor. He is sounding the alarm.

And still, the world remains silent.

Narrative Warfare and Weaponized Aid

Genocide in Gaza is not only waged with bombs — it is maintained with bread, branding, and bandwidth.

Cindy McCain, head of the World Food Programme, condemned the Israeli blockade plainly: “We need the Israelis to let us in so we can do our job… We are the best at what we do.” Her frustration wasn’t about logistics — it was about siege. The U.S. — Israel’s main supplier — blocks aid under the guise of diplomacy while starvation is deployed as a weapon.

Journalist Aaron Maté exposes the deeper manipulation: “Israel is trying to use this fake aid group… to push Palestinians to the south so it can carry out ethnic cleansing.” This isn’t humanitarianism. It’s strategic displacement — masked as mercy.

Comedian Lee Camp strips the charade to the bone: “The system we live under doesn’t just allow genocide — it funds it, supplies it, and then sends aid to hide the evidence.” When the mask slips, media becomes the second front.

Kei Pritsker reported, “Israel is paying influencers in the U.S. to spread its propaganda… Spamming people with canned talking points isn’t going to change that.” These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are forensic insights — proof that today’s wars are fought both on the ground and in the cloud.

Shahid Bolsen’s analysis cuts to the root. Labeled a “radical,” Bolsen rejects moral euphemisms and instead exposes the operating system: “Zionism, and the empire that sustains it, was designed to expand. When expansion becomes impossible, they start burning everything.” His conclusion is blunt: “Genocide isn’t a glitch — it’s a feature. It’s not a failure of the system. It is the system.”

SIDEBAR: “God’s Chosen State” — Christian Zionism and the Unquestioning Support of Israel

In the United States, one of the most powerful and least discussed engines of unconditional support for Israel is not the State Department — it’s the pulpit.

For millions of evangelical Christians, particularly within the Christian Zionist movement, Israel is not just a modern nation-state. It is the stage for prophecy. These believers see Jewish control of the Holy Land as a biblical prerequisite for the return of Jesus Christ. In this view, the role of Arabs and Palestinians is tragically predetermined — as obstacles or collateral in a divine plan.

Leaders like Pastor John Hagee, who founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI), preach a version of scripture where supporting Israel is not just good politics but holy duty. This means that no matter how many children die, no matter the weight of war crimes or siege, questioning Israel becomes blasphemy.

“God will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel,” Hagee once told a congregation. In such a moral schema, Palestinians are not just dispossessed. They are erased — spiritually, morally, politically.

This theological scaffolding enables American politicians to justify billions in military aid and diplomatic cover, all while presenting empire as eschatology.

Why did the Holocaust result in a state, while Indigenous genocide, African enslavement, and the Armenian massacre did not? Because power chooses which legacies endure. Palestinians were granted a flag without land, a vote without borders, and a “peace process” built to stall. Today’s genocide doesn’t feature gas chambers — it looks like checkpoints, rubble, starvation, and red tape.

My granddaughter Naomi was born in China. She will never grow up under a colonial flag. No foreign power will redraw her rivers or rename her borders. China was carved up, humiliated, nearly erased — but it refused to die. Now she inherits sovereignty: imperfect, but self-determined.

Let her be strong yet kind, rooted in memory, not vengeance. Let her walk in a world no longer ruled by victors writing history in the language of empire.

And if those empires tremble — let them.

Because this time, history is not ending.
 It is being rewritten.
 And maybe Naomi will help write the next chapter.

X. China and the Global South: Diplomacy of Principle

To grasp today’s diplomacy, we must confront the chasm between the United Nations’ ideals and the imperial machinery that undermines them. In the General Assembly — where all 193 member states vote — Palestine won “non-member observer state” status in 2012 by a margin of 138 to 9. Resolutions condemning Israel’s siege of Gaza routinely pass with over 150 votes. Yet in the Security Council, a single permanent “no” can override the will of the world. Since 2009, the United States alone has vetoed over twenty resolutions calling for ceasefires, human rights inquiries, and ICC referrals. Global consensus is sacrificed to the ambitions of five.

In that justice vacuum, China and the wider Global South offer a counter-vision — not empire, but principle. When Beijing formally recognized Palestine in January 2024, it marked a deliberate break from the Western script. By October, China hosted fourteen Palestinian factions — including rival wings of Hamas and Fatah — for the first time in years. This wasn’t mere symbolism. It was a rejection of Western “strategic ambiguity” and a demand that all voices be heard — not just Washington’s chosen few.

Sometimes, China’s rhetoric has matched its actions. The Foreign Ministry invoked the Geneva Conventions: “Civilians should never be targeted, and humanitarian access must never be denied.” Over $70 million in emergency Gaza aid followed, alongside Chinese calls at the UN for independent war-crimes investigations. China affirms what Western powers refuse to name: that occupation and apartheid are not shields against accountability.

And yet, contradictions remain. State-owned Adama supplies agricultural technology to Israeli settlers, funds scholarships for illegal outposts in Hebron, and sells herbicides to military contractors. Chinese firms pave roads in Beit El and build factories near occupied land — literally reinforcing the machinery of apartheid. These are not oversights. They are realpolitik.

As economist Richard Wolff observes, China’s rise is “faster-growing than any seen before.” But its hybrid approach — blending moral posturing with capitalist expansion — raises a question: can clarity survive entanglement with profit? Shanghai International Port Group’s recent greenlight to double Haifa’s Bay Port capacity — just 1.8 km from Israel’s naval base — exemplifies this tension. A port once hailed for trade now sits at the intersection of commerce and surveillance. Intelligence agencies whisper of sabotage; the optics speak volumes.

Meanwhile, voices from the front lines insist that principle cannot be compromised.

Miko Peled, Israeli general’s son turned dissident, lays it bare:

“The way you fight for every life is by ending the source of suffering — the apartheid state founded by Zionists in 1948.”
 Peled doesn’t ask Palestinians to disarm. He demands the world stop arming their oppressors.

Canadian lawyer Dimitri Lascaris issues a stark warning:

“They want Israel to complete genocide. Losing this region means losing Western hegemony. Gaza is the frontline of that war.”

Former IDF soldier Shahid Bolsen — branded “radical” for refusing empire’s script — describes Gaza not just as tragedy, but template:

“The West cannot allow Israel to lose because that would symbolize their strategic model’s collapse. Israel isn’t rogue; it’s a prototype. What’s tested on Palestinians is meant for export.”

He catalogues the rollout: surveillance towers, predictive policing, and crowd-control drones — all perfected in Gaza, now deployed on U.S. borders and European streets. For Bolsen, the war is not just kinetic. It’s epistemic:

“Genocide is enforced not only by bombs but by epistemic control — narrowing speech, criminalizing knowledge.”
 Gaza is a message as much as a massacre.

And yet, while many in the Global South speak — only Yemen acts.

In early June 2025, Houthi spokesman Saif AbuKeshek declared:

“Gaza, for us, is the last stand of humanity.”
 This statement, made on the eve of the Global March to Gaza, captured the ethical clarity absent in so many Western capitals. AbuKeshek’s words joined a rising chorus from Tunisia, Spain, Brazil, and beyond — young, decentralized, transnational. They don’t wait for UN permission. They mobilize.

Rooted in Shia resistance theology and a legacy of anti-imperial defiance, Yemen’s Ansar Allah has long tied Palestinian liberation to resisting foreign domination. In June 2025, under siege and battered by blockade, Yemen launched missiles, shut down Ben Gurion Airport, halted container ships to Haifa, and declared Israeli flight paths “legitimate targets.” The poorest country in the region — dismissed as a “Houthi wasteland” — disrupted the military and commercial heartbeat of a nuclearized state.

“The poorest country in the Arab world just did what the richest nations won’t: stand up to genocide.”
 — YouTube narration, Mahmood OD Channel, June 2025

The cost is immense. The choice is clear. While diplomats tweet, the Houthis blockade. While monarchs shake hands, rebels in sandals make Israel’s skies unsafe. If resistance were measured in sacrifice, Yemen would be rich.

And resistance isn’t limited to the battlefield.

In Paris, mathematician Michel Broué offers free Zoom lectures to Gaza’s students under siege. As bombs fall, he teaches.

“There is no such thing as pity. Respect is the first thing.”
 His solidarity is not charity — it’s mutual recognition of dignity. A form of resistance to erasure.

The Global South may not speak fluent UN jargon. But it knows the language of justice. As this is written, the Global March to Gaza — planned for June 15, 2025 — feels less like protest, and more like a tectonic shift. Coordinated from Egypt, echoed in Tunisia, Yemen, Spain, India — it is rare, potent, grassroots, transnational refusal.

This is not just a march to Gaza.
 It is a march against genocide.

Whether it breaks the siege or is crushed by it, the world is watching. And one day, we may look back and say:
 This was the turning point — when humanity remembered itself.

SIDEBAR: ARAB NORMALIZATION AND DOMESTIC REPRESSION

Normalization between Arab states and Israel is not diplomacy — it is betrayal disguised as handshake. As Dr. Maha Azzam warns:

“Arab normalization with Israel is not peace — it’s survival for dictatorships built on repression. By siding with Israel, these regimes abandon anti-colonial principles and embrace the structures of domination the Global South claims to reject.”

Consider Egypt, often lauded as a regional anchor. As Azzam notes:

“Fear is immense — over 100,000 people in prison: 80,000 political prisoners, 40,000 pretrial detainees — about 116 imprisoned per 1,000 population. Indefinite detentions, disappearances, executions: that barrier of fear must be broken.”

A state that perfects occupation tactics at home cannot mobilize for justice abroad. While its security services crush pro-Palestinian marches, Cairo signs “strategic cooperation” agreements with Israel. Fear becomes foreign policy.

Historic peace deals reveal this lopsided logic. Reflecting on Camp David, Azzam observes:

“Sadat’s 1978 surrender returned Sinai as a demilitarized zone where Israel retains freedom of maneuver. Egypt gained little. It was a ‘cold peace’ under Mubarak that served Israel first and foremost.”

Camp David was not a victory — it was a velvet leash. Egypt accepted nominal sovereignty while Israeli control persisted. That model has since proliferated across the region: sacrifice resistance, accept foreign aid, stay silent. When peace is brokered on colonial terms, it is not peace — it is prolonged subjugation.

In today’s world, that “cold peace” stands as a warning: concessions do not guarantee justice, only quieter forms of domination.

XI. They Have Friends Everywhere: Youth, Rebellion, and the Collapse of Official Truth

“You don’t need all of them. Just enough to shake the ground.”
 — Andor

Empires don’t collapse from above — they crack from below. In Gaza, children die. On campuses, tents rise. The chant is not revenge but dignity.

When 19-year-old Gazan TikTok vlogger Mohammad “Medo” Halimy was killed in an airstrike, 40,000 mourned online. In his videos — planting mint in a refugee camp, sharing jokes beneath drone shadows — he said, “Planting is resistance. They take life; I bring it to earth.”

At the University of Minnesota, students renamed a building Halimy Hall. A reminder: Gaza’s children are not statistics. They are friends. Heroes. Seeds of hope.

As one campus mural declared:
 “If you bomb a watermelon, you only scatter its seeds.”

Where politicians equivocate, youth speak with clarity:
 “This is not about Hamas. This is about protecting Palestinian lives.”

Where media dulls the language, activists sharpen it:
 “There is only one side to genocide.”

When universities threaten expulsion, students persist:
 “Risking futures to defend Palestinian rights means standing on the right side of history.”

Across continents, the rupture grows. A UK student said, “It shattered my understanding of democracy and free speech.” Another wrote in The Guardian, “These activists are the conscience sadly missing in their president.”

While elders recycle talking points, youth stream Gaza live — raw, unfiltered, unignorable.

In Canberra, on March 26, 2025, MP Kat McNamara stood in Parliament, visibly shaken. She described scrolling Instagram late at night, haunted by “images of little Palestinian babies mutilated, their feet poking out of the rubble.”

Her baby slept beside her. Elsewhere, infants lay buried in concrete.

“Men weeping over the wrapped bodies of children — small cloth bundles the brain cannot process.”

Her tears were a breach in the wall. A parent could no longer look away.

At Cambridge, students re-encamped outside Trinity College, demanding divestment from Elbit Systems and L3Harris. Their message:

“Trinity invests millions in arms manufacturers complicit in occupation. If King’s College can divest, so can every college.”

When Trinity served an injunction, they responded:

“Trinity can serve all the injunctions it wants. Israel can bomb every inch of Gaza. There will always be Gazawi left to exist and resist.”

Repression cannot erase solidarity.

Some resistance finds joy. In Mo Amer: Mohammed in Texas, comedian Mo Amer says:

“When people hear ‘Palestinian,’ I want them to think of me. Not a terrorist. Not a victim. Just… a guy. A refugee with anxiety.”

His joy is defiance. His jokes — proof that truth can survive craters.

Not all rebels come from tents or camps. Some wear Imperial uniforms on screen. Denise Gough — known as Dedra Meero in Andor — is one of them.

After October 7, she immersed herself in Gaza’s truth: reading Voices from Gaza, watching Ambulance, studying Said and Maté.

“I don’t have kids,” she said. “In twenty years, it won’t be them asking what I did. It will be me, looking at myself in the mirror.”

She added:

“We were asked by people of color during Black Lives Matter to educate ourselves — and we did. Now Palestinians are asking the same.”

And this time, she listened.

Her rebellion risks her career. But she refuses complicity.

Then came Greta Thunberg, the girl who cared.

In May 2025, the first flotilla she backed — The Conscience — was bombed by Israeli drones in international waters. Greta had said:

“Even in a world of cowardice, the courageous will not be silenced.”

On June 1, she boarded a second aid ship, The Madleen. Wrapped in a keffiyeh, flanked by doctors, artists, and lawmakers, she sailed into the blockade.

“We are seeing the systematic starvation of two million people,” she declared.
 “Every single one of us has a moral obligation to fight for a free Palestine.”

Senator Lindsey Graham sneered, “Hope Greta and her friends can swim.” Israeli lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky called her “a little jihadi.”

But Greta did not flinch.

“I’m not doing this because I’m brave. I’m doing this because I can’t stand by while others are starved, bombed, and erased. If that makes me dangerous, so be it.”

Her words broke the dam of indifference.

Then came the raid.

On June 9, 2025, the Freedom Flotilla’s aid ship Madleen was seized by Israeli forces in international waters as it approached Gaza with urgently needed food, medicine, and baby formula. On board were twelve unarmed civilian activists, including climate advocate Greta Thunberg and Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham — known for playing Davos Seaworth, the Onion Knight, who once smuggled food through a siege to save a starving people. This time, it wasn’t fiction. It was his birthday.

The ship’s communications were jammed. Its location was blocked. Its passengers were detained — and the aid they carried never reached the hungry families it was meant for.

One image from that night endures: Greta, silent in an orange life vest, accepting a packaged meal from the very soldiers who had stopped her from feeding others. The occupation sought a photo op — to appear lawful, restrained, benevolent. But her quiet, defiant gaze became a nail in the coffin of that moral façade.

As famine tightens its grip on Gaza and mercy itself becomes criminalized, the world must decide what it sees — and what it dares to do next.

Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer’s book signing at the New York Public Library turned into a reckoning. Protesters rose:

“There’s no debate in genocide!”
 “You have Palestinian blood on your hands!”
 “Zionism is not Judaism!”

Security dragged them out. But their echo lasted longer than any signature.

Across 118 countries, over 18,000 people signed the Anti-Genocide Pledge. Rua Daas of the Palestinian Youth Movement said:

“This moment is an ultimatum. You are either with genocide, or against it.”

Then the war came home.

In June 2025, ICE agents prowled Los Angeles. They raided workplaces, hunted the undocumented, and moved through immigrant neighborhoods in unmarked vans. Dressed in tactical gear, they created waves of fear — abductions, deportations, disappearances.

The raids intensified in the Fashion District and near big-box stores like Home Depot, where agents began arresting workers in broad daylight. But the people formed human barriers — mothers, neighbors, students — standing resolute. The agents retreated into a federal building, overwhelmed by a community that refused to be silent.

By morning, the federal response escalated. Surveillance drones filled the sky. Armored vehicles moved into the streets where people had gathered to pray hours earlier.

Observers called it martial law in all but name. It felt like a rehearsal for something darker.

Then came the signal. Donald Trump, bypassing California’s governor, ordered 2,000 National Guard troops into Los Angeles. No consent. No discussion. Hurricane Katrina — a disaster that submerged a city — brought 7,000 federal troops to rescue people. Los Angeles had no storm. Only fear. Only protest. And for that, it was met with force.

What begins at the edge of empire always finds its way home.

Yet, while states stall, young people mobilize. While governments delay, communities decide. In the midst of fear, voices rose together.

From Gaza, a friend wrote: “Thank you for not forgetting us.”
 From Los Angeles, the people replied: “We won’t.”

Their courage inspires ours — and our witness becomes their defense, because they have friends everywhere.

XII. The Time to Speak Is Now

Fear is the currency of silence. People tremble at being labeled antisemitic, fired, or accused of supporting Hamas. Others fear being shouted down, ostracized, or canceled. Yet every second of silence empowers the oppressor. Every hesitation is a choice to ignore genocide.

Populist rhetoric from Western politicians only deepens the abyss of nihilism. As Senator Joni Ernst declared, “We’re all going to die. So for heaven’s sakes, folks . . .” Her fatalistic shrug epitomizes a culture that abandons moral responsibility for cynicism.

Take Mahmoud Khalil — a Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist. For speaking truth about U.S.-funded war crimes, the Trump administration tried to deport him. A federal judge in New Jersey blocked it, ruling:

“Arguments that Khalil represents a threat to national security and foreign policy are not likely to hold up.”

That was not just legal rebuke; it was a warning. Governments once fearful of protests now deport peace advocates. Silence remains complicit.

Even intimate knowledge of atrocities can’t break Wall Street–style loyalty to career and command. As State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confessed on Sky News:

“He routinely defended Israel’s war crimes and never missed an opportunity to protect war criminal Netanyahu and his medieval gang members.”

That is not naive ignorance — it is calculated damage control. And when Miller finally admitted:

“I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes . . . but I didn’t say that at the podium, because I was expressing the conclusions of the United States government,”

he laid bare how “democratic rhetoric” can — and does — shroud genocide.

During Vietnam, students marched. Today, they’re surveilled and expelled. We cannot wait for another Napalm Girl moment to awaken us. The time to act is now.

Attempts to discredit Franck Magennis, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappé, Gabor Maté, and Noam Chomsky have failed. Yet Irish rap trio Kneecap faces terrorism charges for waving a Palestinian flag. Ironically, Sinn Féin and the IRA — once called “terrorists” — now lead Ireland. Labels shift. Power remains.

When children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel lamented, “When it’s controversial to advocate for children killed in the thousands . . . we have lost our way,” The New York Times responded with a hit piece. Compassion is not controversial. This is complicity.

The brutality of inverted moral logic fuels this culture of repression. As Matt Lieb observed:

“She antagonizes a Palestinian on the street, then claims she feels ‘unsafe’ — she’s the aggressor living in an inverted reality.”

Cry wolf. Shoot first. Blame the children.

Lizzie Savetsky claims calls to stop killing children make her “unsafe” on campus, while every Palestinian university lies in rubble. The empire cheers her on, then deports Palestinian students for speaking out — while empowering Elon Musk, a ketamine-addicted billionaire who shares Nazi memes and oversaw deep public service cuts under Trump.

Let that sink in: a government branding peaceful protesters terrorists also works with a ketamine-addled man shrugging off Nazi symbolism — trusting him with budget policy, while punishing student activists.

This isn’t about fighting hate. It’s about control. “Antisemitism” is a branding tool, a weapon to crush dissent, a moral panic masking genocide. What they fear isn’t hatred — it’s accountability.

Israeli journalist Lee Caspi writes:

“We’re punished for helping people living through unimaginable conditions. As a mother to a 10-month-old, I carry shame over what my country is doing to children just an hour from Tel Aviv.”

Meanwhile, a Middle East Eye investigation revealed Israel’s bombing campaign emits more carbon annually than one hundred countries combined. This is not only genocide — it is ecocide.

Remember Hind Rajab. Six years old. Trapped in Gaza City in a car surrounded by tanks. Her cousins and uncle dead. She whispered into a phone:

“Come get me. I’m scared.”

“The children were completely burnt,” her uncle recounted. “I carried my nephew Adam and my wounded cousin and rushed them to the hospital.”

The ambulance trying to rescue her was shelled — twice. Days later, her body was found charred, riddled with over three hundred bullet holes. This was methodical murder. The world looked away.

Yet truth bleeds through. In May 2025, Channel 4 News reported over one hundred Israeli reservists refusing Gaza service. One, Yamil, after 270 days, confessed:

“Unarmed people were shot because their lives didn’t matter. We refused to risk ourselves.”

He called the campaign illegal, immoral, genocidal.

“When governments conflate dissent with terrorism and weaponize unverified tales of brutality, democracies surrender their capacity for critical scrutiny, and ordinary citizens become complicit in atrocities.”

TRT World and the Associated Press exposed Palestinians used as human shields. Ayman Abu Hamadan was forced for seventeen days to walk ahead of soldiers with a camera strapped to his head — “Do this or we’ll kill you.” The Israeli army called this the “mosquito protocol.” Palestinians were “wasps.”

These are not errors. They are policy.

Even as Gaza burns, Western nihilism grows. Arwa Damon reminds us:

“This is the annihilation of a population.”

Her words demand action — before it is too late.

But Hind’s whisper sparked rebellion. Macklemore’s “Hind’s Hall” became an anthem:

“You can bury us, but we are seeds.”

That line blossomed across campuses and streets. When Kneecap returned after arrest, 20,000 roared: “Free Palestine.” Movements and songs cannot be jailed or silenced.

On May 29, 2025 — day 600 of Israel’s war on Gaza — protesters stormed Likud headquarters demanding a cease-fire and hostages’ return:

“There’s a deal waiting. We just need a push. We pray we don’t reach day 700.”

What was once called “defense” now looks like political self-preservation.

If you feel no sorrow for Hind, your empathy has died. If you excuse bombing ambulances, you forfeit your claim to justice. Dr. Gabor Maté, trauma specialist, wrote:

“I cried daily for two weeks after visiting Gaza. The world stood by and let it happen. ‘Never again’ means never again for anyone — not a slogan but a burden.”

This is not about sides. It is about lines — between truth and silence, complicity and resistance. Speaking is terrifying. Speak anyway. Each act of defiance chips away at tyranny.

Lee Camp sums it up:

“Calling out genocide gets you fired. Funding genocide gets you reelected.”

If the empire weren’t lying, it would collapse.

Tony Gilroy, Andor showrunner, warns:

“Fascism destroys not just the oppressed, but those who built it.”

We rave about Andor Season 2. Season 3 is already here — in our streets, our screens, our silences.

This is not fiction. This is rebellion. It has begun.

The question is: Which side are you on?

XIII. A Final Call to Action

“When the ‘Napalm Girl’ photo shocked the world in 1972, it became a catalyst — a symbol of a war losing moral ground.”
 — Jehad Abusalim, Zeteo, May 27, 2025

“In Gaza, there are dozens of ‘Napalm Girl’ moments daily — live, unfiltered, haunting.”
 — Jehad Abusalim

We have borne witness. We have named the crime — genocide, apartheid, complicity — and traced it from Herzl’s myth to Gaza’s burning children. We have exposed slogans as settler-colonial dogma, followed ethnic-cleansing blueprints, and shown that international law demands resistance.

Yet the world hesitates.

This is Gaza’s Napalm Girl moment. Unlike 1972, the image is relentless — livestreams, message threads, raw testimonies haunt every feed, classroom, and dinner table. The question is not whether we’ve seen enough. The question is: Will we act?

What Must Be Done

1. Demand an immediate, permanent cease-fire.
 Call and write your representatives. Refuse to bankroll war crimes. End the blank checks arming apartheid.

2. Open humanitarian corridors.
 Support vetted aid organizations. Pressure international bodies to guarantee safe passage for the wounded and displaced.

3. Amplify Palestinian voices.
 Share poems, footage, and first-person testimony. Elevate journalists and artists risking everything to document the truth. As Pulitzer winner Mosab Abu Toha writes:

“They kill our children and destroy our homes — and we write poems about it.”

4. Expose complicity at home.
 Investigate how surveillance firms, weapons manufacturers, and tech giants profit from occupation. Host teach-ins, forums, and town halls to make the invisible visible. Lee Camp reminds us:

“You don’t live in a country with a mainstream media — you live in one with six corporations funded by war profiteers.”

5. Stand in solidarity with all justice struggles.
 Gaza is not isolated. Its echoes resound in detention centers, checkpoints, and stolen lands worldwide. You cannot oppose colonialism abroad while ignoring violence and broken treaties at home.

If one photo helped end a war, Gaza’s endless livestreams must shatter the foundations of this one. We have named the horror, unraveled the myth, and heard the children.

Now: speak — clearly, loudly, relentlessly — until Gaza’s children, like Kim Phuc before them, can say:

“The world heard us. And it changed.”

“Silence is not neutral. It is participation.”
 — Miko Peled

Make no mistake: this is Gaza’s moment of reckoning — and ours.

XIV. Listen to the Children

As this essay reaches its final chords, it is the youngest witnesses who compel us to reckon with truth. In their voices, we hear displacement, siege, and the wrenching toll of family lost. Their words must not only be heard — they demand our conscience.

1. Defiance in Jenin Camp

In a Jenin refugee camp, Israeli forces urged a young girl to abandon her home. Her reply was resolute.

بقوللك اطلعي من المخيم اسكني بمكان ثاني
 “I tell you: leave the camp, live somewhere else.”
 بتروحي لا
 “Are you going to go? No.”
 طبعا لو شو ما ينطوني إن شاء الله ينطوني مليون إن شاء الله ينطوني 2 مليونين مش طالع
 “Even if they give me a million — God willing, two million — I will not leave.”
 ولو الجيش بلش يقصف بخاف منها، بس المهم أنو الكلاب، ولو فلتت الطيارات والسلاح بصير بوسوا
 “Even if the army bombs us, I am terrified — but they are dogs. If planes and weapons come, we will be crushed.”
 جرّنا بده يطلعونا من أرضنا، مش رح نطلع، ها أرضنا وأرض جدودنا، صامدين صامدين
 “They want to force us from our land; we will not go. This is our land, our grandparents’ land. We stand firm — firm.”
 صامدين يعني ما تخافي من أي صوت رصاص أو قصف أو انفجار — ما بترعبك ولا رصاص ولا قصف ولا انفجار
 “Standing firm means you are not afraid of any gunshot, any shell, any explosion.”
 أنا بخاف شوي، بس بخاف إلا من الله — الله حامينا
 “I am a little scared, yes, but I fear only God — God protects us.”
 بدي استشهد على أرضي، بدي أموت على أرضي. إذا هربت من أرضي، ما بدي أموت هناك. منيح نموت هون أرحّ شهداء عند رب العالمين
 “I want to be martyred on my land. I want to die on my land. If I run away, I don’t want to die elsewhere. Better to die here and become martyrs before the Lord of the Worlds.”

Her “No” embodies centuries of displacement distilled into unwavering refusal. Her home in Jenin is more than stone and dust — it is her identity, her ancestors’ promise. To accept exile, even for vast sums, would be to sever that bond. By declaring “we stand firm,” she alchemizes fear into resolve: bombs may fall, but exile is a fate worse than death. In her vow — “I want to be martyred on my land” — she reclaims agency over life and death. In her defiance, rootedness becomes resistance.

2. Testimony from a Hospital Bed: Omar’s Plea

Lying on a hospital bed, his body burned and his family gone, Omar ushers his anguish into the world. His scars speak both violence and endurance.

أنس، وصل لي رسالة للعالم
 “Anas, send me a message to the world.”
 كنت أتفرج عليك، أنت كنت تقول “أنس الجزيرة، شو غزة” وتوصل رسائل للعالم
 “I was watching you when you said ‘Anas Al-Jazeera, what about Gaza?’ You were sending messages to the world.”
 وصل لي رسالة واحدة: إنه أنا بدي أسافر وأتعلّج. أنا مريض، حالي صعبة، بدي أسافر برازي.
 “Send me just one message: I want to travel and be treated. I’m sick — my condition is serious. I want to go abroad.”
 سوّت طواعق نزلت عليّ، اتعرضت لحروب. أهلي توفّوا واستشهدوا كلهم، وأنا وأبوي الناجيين الوحيدين. عندي حروق. كل ما يغيروا الضمادات، بفظع؛ كأنه تابوت.
 “Shells rained on me; I was caught in the bombardment. My family — all martyred — perished. Only my father and I survived. I have burns. Every time they change my bandages, it is terrible — like a coffin.”
 أنا تحت الأنقاض، أنفَق، يخنق فيّ، وأتعذّب. ما حطّوا لي فنج أو ماء أو شيء…
 “I’m under the rubble, suffocating; I’m being tortured. They don’t give me even a cup of water…”
 طيب، إيش رسالتك لأطفال العالم؟
 “Okay, what is your message for the children of the world?”
 أطفال العالم، أنا وأنهار الدموع… هذا هو حال عمر، الناجي الوحيد بعد المجزرة اللي ارتكبتها قوات الاحتلال بحق عيلة الحصري حول مستشفى الشفاء. رسالة عمر لازم توصل لكل العالم. هناك آلاف الأطفال بحالي.
 “Children of the world, I and my rivers of tears… This is Omar’s state, the only survivor after the occupation committed a massacre against the Al-Husari family near Al-Shifa Hospital. Omar’s message must reach the entire world. There are thousands of children like me.”

Omar’s plea — “I want to travel and be treated” — is no mere request; it is an indictment of siege as an assault on life. His burns transform every bandage change into fresh agony — “like a coffin” — revealing medicine twisted into torture. By addressing “children of the world,” he claims moral agency: his survival is testimony, his scars loud proof that borders have become prisons. In insisting “Omar’s message must reach the entire world,” he demands that we bear witness. His body under rubble renounces anonymity, insisting that when institutions trap hope, hope itself becomes rebellion.

3. Remembering a Mother: Mahmoud’s Appeal

Among the ruins of what once was home, nine-year-old Mahmoud grieves his mother’s death. Even as agony rips his body, he insists on memory.

أمي قُتلت قدامي وأنا كنت صغير. الانفجار ودّمر البيت، دمعت عيوني، دمعت قلبي.
 “My mother was killed before my eyes when I was small. The explosion destroyed our home; my eyes cried, my heart cried.”
 قالوا إن الأمان كان يبعد عن هنا، بس هنا هو بيتي.
 “They said safety was far from here, but this is my home.”
 لو بحاول أهرب، بأي مكان رح أروح؟ ما في مكان… الأرض كلها تدمرت، كل الناس رحلوا.
 “If I try to run, where would I go? There is nowhere… the land is all destroyed; everyone has left.”
 أمي ماتت وأنا مع أبِي الوحيدان. حالي صعبة — مكسور عظامي وجسمي كله يحرق، وبدموع ما توقف.
 “My mother died, and only my father and I survived. I’m in terrible shape — my bones are broken, my whole body burns, and my tears never stop.”
 بس بدي أخبر العالم: أمي كانت تعلمني أقرأ، تحرسني، وتضحك. هي أمي. رح ينسوها بس إنتو لا تنسوها.
 “But I want to tell the world: my mother taught me to read, protected me, and made me laugh. She is my mother. They will forget her, but you — do not forget her.”
 أنا بموت على أمل إن صوتي يوصل، وما حد ينسى اسمي. اسمي محمود، عندي تسع سنين.
 “I will die hoping my voice reaches, and no one forgets my name. My name is Mahmoud; I am nine years old.”

Mahmoud’s words pierce the heart. His home lies in ruins; his mother was murdered before his eyes. When he asks, “Where would I go?” he unmasks the lie of safe havens — every path leads to ash. His broken, burning body bears witness to survival as torment. Yet even amid agony, he demands remembrance: “They will forget her, but you — do not forget her.” By naming himself — “My name is Mahmoud; I am nine years old” — he rejects erasure. His plea becomes a last stand for memory: if his voice reaches, his mother’s laughter will endure beyond violence.

Conclusion: A Call to Conscience

These children speak through fear and loss, forging defiance into song. Their stories share a single thread: home is worth more than any promise of safety; survival itself is testimony; and memory stands as resistance.

To ignore them is to accept that children — no less than adults — can be uprooted, starved, and silenced. When they say “we stand firm,” “my message must reach the entire world,” and “don’t forget my mother,” they compel us to choose: silence or action.

Let their words echo beyond this page. If “never again” means anything, it begins here — with a resolve to bear witness, to amplify their voices, and to act on their truth.

XV. Appendix: Controversial Claims, Backed by Evidence

This essay makes several claims that may challenge assumptions or unsettle comfort. Each rests on verifiable facts, legal precedent, and testimony from respected scholars and human rights experts. Below are the most contested claims — and why we stand by them — followed by supplemental entries illustrating how historical literacy, eyewitness testimony, and foundational scholarship strengthen our arguments.

A. Core Claims

1. “Israel is committing genocide.” The United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction — including starvation, mass displacement, and bombing of bakeries, hospitals, and schools — meets this threshold. As of mid-2024, over 14,000 Palestinian children had been killed in Gaza. Water systems were targeted, hospitals leveled, and famine persists. In June 2025, Israel approved the largest-ever West Bank settlement expansion and passed laws sentencing Palestinian minors as young as twelve to life imprisonment. This is not occupation; it is a calculated campaign of racial elimination. UN Special Rapporteurs, former ICC prosecutors, and legal scholars — including drafters of the Rome Statute — affirm that Israel’s actions meet genocide criteria. The International Court of Justice is adjudicating South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention. In 2025, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

“Israel is not defending itself. Israel is committing genocide. I know because I was raised to believe the opposite — and I served in that army.” — Miko Peled, The General’s Son

1. “Zionism is not Judaism.” Zionism is a political ideology rooted in nineteenth-century European nationalism; Judaism is a 3,000-year-old faith and culture. They are not synonymous. Many Jews — religious and secular — have long opposed Zionism on ethical or theological grounds. Conflating Zionism with Judaism erases dissent, flattens Jewish identity, and weaponizes faith to shield state violence.

“To equate Zionism with Judaism is to slander Judaism. Zionism is a political ideology built on racism and dispossession. It is the very antithesis of the Jewish values I was raised with.” — Miko Peled

1. “Israel has weaponized Holocaust memory to deflect criticism.” This is not Holocaust denial but a critique of trauma’s political misuse. Scholars like Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappé document how Holocaust memory silences dissent and shields Israel from accountability.

“Using the Holocaust to justify Israel’s crimes is like using 9/11 to justify torture. It dishonors victims and empowers perpetrators.” — Miko Peled

1. “Palestinians have a legal right to resist occupation.” International law — including the Geneva Conventions and multiple UN resolutions — recognizes the right of occupied peoples to resist, including by force, provided civilians are not deliberately targeted. While many Western governments label Hamas “terrorist,” states such as China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and South Africa do not. The Rome Statute affirms that resistance against military occupation is distinct from terrorism. Palestinians, under decades of foreign domination, retain the legal right to resist erasure.
2. “The United States and United Kingdom are complicit in war crimes.” Complicity under international law requires material support and knowledge, not shared intent. The United States provides over $3 billion annually in military aid to Israel, vetoes most UN cease-fire and investigation resolutions, and supplies weapons and intelligence used against civilians. The United Kingdom exports fighter-jet components and shares surveillance data — fully aware of their use. In early 2025, a UN Special Rapporteur called Israel’s starvation blockade “genocide by attrition.” By enabling it, the United States and United Kingdom are not bystanders — they are accessories.

“U.S. elites funnel unparalleled resources to Israel — ‘despite constituting about 0.01 percent of the world population, they’ve received 30 percent of all U.S. foreign aid since World War II … about $4 billion every year.’” — Independent analysis, June 2025

1. “Zionist vigilante groups in Canada operate with state protection and charitable status.” Investigative journalist Samira Moyed (June 2025) exposed Magen Herut — a Canadian-based Zionist vigilante organization that has surveilled pro-Palestinian demonstrators and impersonated police officers at the University of Toronto. Despite these actions, Magen Herut holds charitable status, receiving tax-deductible donations. A subsequent campaign pressured the Canada Revenue Agency to revoke that status. The same exposé highlighted the Abraham Global Peace Initiative — a Zionist lobby group that hosted Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan at a luxury Toronto fundraiser. Erdan has publicly declared that the United Nations should be “wiped off the face of the earth” while defending Israel’s bombing of UN facilities and the deaths of over 300 UN staff. That group’s 2025 white paper called for federal oversight of Canadian universities and curricula, and a “values test” for immigrants requiring affirmation of “Israel’s right to exist.”

“Zionism is not content to occupy land. It seeks to occupy language, policy, and law — even in countries where it has no border.” — Samira Moyed

B. Supplemental Sidebar: Historical, Eyewitness, and Legal Foundations

Below are nine entries — controversial quotes and claims — to illustrate how historical literacy, firsthand testimony, and foundational scholarship bolster the core arguments above.

1. Rabbi Weiss (Orthodox Jewish Theological Rejection of Zionism) “It is antithetical to Judaism to have our own state. … Zionism is the vilest movement … empowered by ‘the most expensive PR and the power of AIPAC.’” — Rabbi Moshe Weiss, lecture at Jerusalem Yeshiva, April 12, 2025. Transcript obtained from rabbiweiss.org.
2. “The Palestinians Made the Desert Bloom” (Agricultural Evidence) “The Palestinians made the desert bloom long before the first Zionists arrived.” — Saleh Abu Khalil, spokesperson for a local farming cooperative in Ramallah, June 2025.
3. “Narrative Warfare and Fabricated Atrocities” (Propaganda and False Atrocity Claims) “Independent investigations — both by Israeli media and international correspondents — revealed that some of the most horrific atrocity claims used to justify bombing civilian neighborhoods in Gaza were fabrications … This pattern of manufacturing outrage to sanction military aggression is not new …” — BreakThrough News investigative report, May 2025.
4. Zachary Foster (Historical Study Leading to Moral Clarity) “The more you study Palestinian history and Israeli history, the more pro-Palestinian you become.” — Zachary Foster, quoted by Raisa Orthy on social media, June 2, 2025.
5. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and Biometric ID “Death Traps” (Eyewitness Testimony) “We cannot approach the U.S. aid distribution post. Israeli drones open fire and drop bombs on us.” — Eyewitness testimony, Al Jazeera English, June 2, 2025.
6. Raphael Lemkin (Foundational Legal-Historical Reference) “I became interested in genocide because it has happened so many times — and the criminals guilty of it were not punished.” — Raphael Lemkin, as quoted in Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (Verso Books, 2000).
7. Franck Magennis (Definition of Apartheid) “Separate laws, movement restrictions, dual systems of justice — these are not opinions; these are facts. These are the elements of apartheid under international law.” — Franck Magennis, quoted in The Jewish Chronicle, May 1, 2025.
8. Noam Chomsky (On Industrialized Silencing) “The Holocaust industry exists not to honor victims but to deflect criticism of the powerful.” — Noam Chomsky, as cited in Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (Verso Books, 2000).
9. Ta-Nehisi Coates (On Jim Crow in the West Bank) “No country establishes its existence through rights. They establish it through force — as America did. Israel’s existence is fact, not a moral entitlement.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message (One World, 2024).

By anchoring each claim in history, law, and firsthand testimony, this appendix demonstrates that discomfort does not equal falsehood. The evidence stands: genocide, apartheid, and complicity are not abstractions but lived realities.

Final Note: Why We Speak

This essay is not a call for violence, nor does it erase trauma. It calls to end genocide and apartheid — and affirms that no people — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or otherwise — should live under racial supremacy.

Zionism is a political project born of trauma and sustained by domination. Ending it does not erase Jewish life in the region; it ends a regime that justifies starvation, displacement, and bombing children in the name of safety.

There is no moral defense for ethnic cleansing, no excuse for flattening hospitals, no justification for silencing a child’s cry for help.

The world watches.
 The children watch.

If conscience remains, we must speak — clearly, loudly, without apology — until freedom comes.

Speaking truth is not only an act of protest — it is an act of transformation. For those born into power, that truth can be excruciating. But it can also be redemptive.

“I describe myself as an Israeli who was liberated by Palestinians… I liberated myself from a very racist ideology thanks to Palestinians who allowed me, very graciously, to go through that excruciating process.”
 — Miko Peled, June 1, 2025

Peled’s words remind us: liberation is not a gift given to the oppressed. It is a light they carry — and sometimes extend to those who once denied it. To speak now is to walk that path with them. Not out of pity. Out of respect. Out of necessity.

We do not speak because it is safe.
 We speak because silence kills.
 We speak because there is no other honest way to live.

This Is All It Means to Be Human
 (Anonymous Palestinian Poet)

We read each name
 of the 15,613 children
 who had been killed in Gaza.
 We began at 10 a.m.
 We had not even got to
 the 5-year-olds by 3 p.m.

What does it mean
 to be part of a world
 that allows this?
 Each child was a beacon.
 A glowing light that was loved.
 So many of us cried
 through the names we were given to read.
 It took till 2:30 a.m. to read
 every name out loud.

What does it mean
 to be a human in a world
 that allows this to happen?
 A Holocaust survivor,
 his eyes full of tears and kindness,
 carried the names he read like a prayer.
 His voice tender as a cradle to guide
 thousands of lights to the stars.

This is all it means to be human.
 To know the beating heart
 of the world even when it is a wound.

Let their words echo beyond this page. If “never again” means anything, it begins here — with a resolve to bear witness, amplify these voices, and act on their truth.

Further Reading & Voices of Conscience

Legal & Human Rights

• Franck Magennis

• UN Special Rapporteurs & ICC filings

• Human Rights Watch / Amnesty International

Jewish Voices of Dissent

• Norman Finkelstein

• Gabor Maté

• Noam Chomsky

• Miko Peled — Israeli author, former IDF soldier (The General’s Son)

Historical & Political Analysis

• Ilan Pappé

• Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Rashid Khalidi

• Edward Said

Global Contrast & Alternative Models

• China’s Foreign Ministry White Papers

• The Beijing Declaration (2024)

• South Africa’s ICC Filings

Author’s Note

I wrote this essay — now a book — under duress, hoping to release it between Children’s Day (June 1, 2025) and the Global March to Gaza (June 15, 2025).

My granddaughter Naomi has completely stolen my heart. Holding her — feeling her warmth, her tiny fingers wrapped around mine — I felt an overwhelming sense of joy, and a primal need to protect. And yet, as I held her, I read about other children, children like her, being starved, burned, and buried beneath rubble. I read about babies dying of dehydration and hunger in so-called safe zones. I saw the faces of children who had been displaced not once, but through generations of siege and exile.

And my heart broke.

Before this war, I knew little about Palestine. Like many, I had accepted the story I’d been told without much thought. But as the bodies piled up and the images became unbearable, I — like so many around the world — was shaken awake. I saw the silence of governments, the cowardice of institutions, the cruelty of media spin. I saw the human cost of indifference.

So I wrote.

I wrote to understand. I wrote to document. I wrote to bear witness. And though I know this book may be controversial — and that I may face criticism for speaking this truth — whatever discomfort I bear is nothing compared to the suffering of those I speak for. I will sleep well knowing I did not stay silent.

Many others will not be able to say the same.

If this book moves you, I ask that you do more than read. Speak. Share. Act. Write to your representatives. Attend a vigil. Demand a cease-fire. Demand aid. Demand justice.

Do not let this civilian catastrophe be forgotten — or forgiven without accountability.

The children of Gaza deserve a future.

And the rest of us will one day have to answer for what we did — or didn’t do — while they died.

Let your voice be among the ones that refused to look away.

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“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
 — Arundhati Roy

About the Author

Jorah Kai is a Canadian author, journalist, and educator whose work bridges storytelling, truth-telling, and cultural commentary. After an early career as a touring musician and DJ, Kai transitioned into writing and teaching, eventually settling in Chongqing, China, where he has taught English, literature, and art history since 2014.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kai became the first Canadian journalist in China to contribute frontline reports for CTV News, earning international recognition for his early warnings and prescient analysis. His nonfiction works — including Kai’s Diary, The Invisible War, Year of the Rat, and Aye of the Tiger — blend memoir with media critique and philosophical inquiry. His debut novel, Amos the Amazing, became an international bestseller. The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu showcased his literary range through a bold fusion of horror and cosmic satire, while Sad Songs from an Old Goth in a Tree offered a haunting collection of lyrics and melancholic poetry.

Don’t Look Away marks a moral turning point. Written in the face of unspeakable atrocity, it represents Kai’s most urgent and courageous work to date. Galvanized by the global silence surrounding the mass killing of children in Gaza — and by the birth of his granddaughter, Naomi — he now writes not only to document but to awaken.

Kai splits his time between East and West, drawing inspiration from beaches, classrooms, and late-night comment sections. His work is cinematic, defiant, and deeply human.

Learn more at jorahkai.com.

Other Books by Jorah Kai

阿莫斯的奇幻世界

Amos the Amazing,

Aye of the Tiger

凯哥的日记

Kai’s Diary

Lobster Revolution and the Rot of Pop Culture

The Invisible War

Sad Songs from an Old Goth in a Tree

The Sun Also Rises on Cthulhu

Year of the Rat