Hope you're happy
The recent ceasefire in Gaza was as brief as it was predictable, with the IDF already advancing further into the West Bank—a move that was not only foreseeable but effectively predestined by the underlying logic of settler-colonial expansion. Trump’s thinly veiled fascination with Gaza’s beachfront real estate speaks volumes about the commodification of human suffering and land under late-stage capitalism. In his eyes, the value of sand eclipses the value of lives.
How does this feel? I pose this as a question in bad faith because I struggle to imagine the moral calculus required to justify, let alone defend, such a travesty. To watch human beings slaughtered, boys executed in the street, mothers clutching their children as debris chokes the life from their lungs, and to dismiss this as "karma" is a grotesque distortion of justice. This is not retribution; this is annihilation. And it stands as one of the most horrifying human tragedies since the Great War—a moment when the machinery of modernity was turned against humanity itself.
Allegiance to one’s homeland is a powerful thing. I understand that. National identity can bind us to a history, a place, a people. But when that allegiance becomes an uncritical loyalty to a government led by a designated war criminal—a leader whose policies have enshrined violence and apartheid as the de facto order—then that allegiance becomes complicity. Netanyahu’s regime has not only deepened the structural oppression of Palestinians but has also yoked Israel’s survival to the precarious whims of global powers, particularly the United States.
Herein lies the irony: Israel, a nation so deeply invested in its own resilience, cannot sustain itself without the financial and military lifeblood provided by the U.S. And yet, the United States itself teeters on the edge of internal collapse. Our government is fractured, our people are alienated, and our social fabric is fraying under the weight of inequality, privatized healthcare, and political corruption. The far right agitates for a coup, and the left is mired in disorganization and despair. This is the precarious foundation upon which Israel’s future rests.
And as this foundation cracks, understand this: there is no deep well of American sympathy to draw from. The far right, even in its support of Trump, cares little for Israel beyond its utility in apocalyptic fantasies. The rest of the U.S., exhausted and enraged by our own crises, is increasingly unwilling to bankroll a state that shows no empathy for the lives it decimates leagues away. The violence inflicted on Palestinian children, the destruction of homes and communities—these are not distant atrocities. They are intimately connected to the broader web of capitalist imperialism that destructs us all.
Empathy, if it exists, must transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. The idea that survival can be secured through the eradication of another is a fallacy. Violence only breeds more violence, precarity only deepens precarity. Netanyahu is not the answer; he is the embodiment of a system that has failed. And as that system continues to unravel, both in Israel and in the United States, the question is not whether we can afford empathy, but whether we can afford its absence.
Stop this. Stop the travesty. Stop the violence. Not only for the sake of those you have displaced and destroyed but for the survival of your own humanity.