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The Demographic Dodge: How Israel Plans to Win the One‑State Game by Making Palestinians Disappear

by damagecollateral

So the two-state solution is dead. Not wounded, not on life support—dead. And finally, after decades of watching the corpse get dragged through the mud, the international community is starting to mutter the words nobody wanted to say: one state with equal rights for all. A single democratic entity from the River to the Sea, where a Palestinian has the same rights as a Jew.

Cue the panic in Jerusalem.

Because here’s the thing about equal rights in a single state: it’s a demographic death sentence for the Zionist project, which was never about a safe haven for Jews—it was about enforcing a Jewish demographic majority, period. As scholars have noted, the Zionist movement treated the indigenous Palestinian population as an “existential obstacle” from the start. Theodor Herzl himself wrote in 1895 about doing the deed “quietly and carefully”. The 1948 Nakba expelled 750,000 people and flipped the demographic script from 30% Jewish to 81% almost overnight.

But now? Equal rights means the demographic math that Israel has spent 75 years fixing through ethnic cleansing comes roaring back. And they know it.

The New Math: Shrink the Problem Before the Solution Arrives

The Israelis aren’t stupid. They see the writing on the wall. The UN’s International Commission of Inquiry has already concluded that Israel has committed “genocidal acts” with “specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza”. The International Court of Justice is weighing South Africa’s genocide case, with 159 countries now recognizing Palestine. Even the scholars who coined the “One State Reality” concept aren’t advocating it as a solution—they’re just acknowledging what already exists: an “ugly reality” that “forces you to shy away from using a theoretical promise of two state as a way of camouflaging that unjust reality”.

So how do you beat a one-state solution with equal rights? Simple. You just make sure that when it finally arrives, there are as few Palestinians left as possible to enjoy it. You create an apartheid system and then you shrink the minority population down to a manageable size—like Israeli Arabs, who have been reduced to 20% within the Green Line and are still structurally discriminated against.

The Strategy: Make Life So Unbearable That Leaving Seems Like a Good Idea

This isn’t speculation. We’re watching it happen in real-time.

Jenin. January 2025. Israeli forces roll in with Apache helicopters, drones, and bulldozers. They don’t just raid the refugee camp—they expel 32,000 people. They demolish over 850 homes. They create “access routes” by flattening entire city blocks. And then? They don’t let anyone come back. Human Rights Watch called it ethnic cleansing. War crimes. Crimes against humanity .

Gaza. As if the holocaust of our time isn’t enough, over 1.9 million Palestinians have been forcibly displaced since October 2023. The UN Commission found that Israel has destroyed 75% of the Gaza Strip, creating “buffer zones” and “corridors” that effectively shrink the territory available to Palestinians down to almost nothing. They’ve destroyed infrastructure, bulldozed civilian buildings, and inflicted “conditions of life calculated to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza”. That’s not a war crime. That’s the literal definition of genocide, according to the UN .

The West Bank. Demolition orders. Checkpoints. Settlements. Land confiscation. Settler violence. Over 2,300 arrests just in the Jenin and Tulkarm governorates in a single year, accompanied by systematic destruction of homes, torture, and “colonial erasure operations”. The UN Commission found that Israeli policies demonstrate “clear intent to forcibly transfer Palestinians, expand Israeli Jewish civilian presence and annex the entirety of the West Bank” .

And the beat goes on. Destroying orchards. Killing cattle. Withholding Palestinian tax money. Impoverishing entire regions. Making sure that for a Palestinian, staying in Palestine means watching your future die one settlement expansion, one home demolition, one check-point humiliation at a time.

The Billionaire’s Buyout: Why Western and Arab Governments Just Watch

Now, about those governments watching this and doing exactly nothing.

You know how Trump just openly admitted on the floor of the Israeli parliament that he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognized the Golan Heights because Miriam Adelson—an Israeli-American billionaire with “$60 billion in the bank”—came to the White House and “got me thinking” about it? He even said, “I know you love Israel. What do you love more? The United States or Israel?” and when she refused to answer, he just laughed it off.

Let that sink in. The President of the United States, on foreign soil, publicly admitting that he’s taking foreign policy direction from an Israeli oligarch who donated over $424 million to his campaigns . If that were a Russian, it would be the biggest scandal in American history. But because it’s Israel, it’s just Tuesday.

And let’s not pretend the Arab regimes are innocent bystanders in this grotesque pageant. From Cairo to Riyadh to Amman, the so-called “guardians of the Palestinian cause” have been sitting on their hands—or worse, actively colluding—while Israel methodically carves up what’s left of Palestine. The Abraham Accords weren’t peace deals; they were permission slips. Normalization gave Israel diplomatic cover to accelerate settlements, expand annexation, and tighten the siege on Gaza, all while Arab leaders pocketed American weapons deals and Saudi investment promises.

Egypt keeps the Rafah crossing locked tighter than a bank vault, charging desperate Gazans up to $10,000 to escape while Israeli tourists cross into Sinai freely—and Egyptian police brutally cracked down on the Global March to Gaza in June 2025, detaining and deporting peaceful international activists who tried to deliver aid. Egypt’s partnership with Israel in the blockade goes back to 2007, making it a co-architect of Gaza’s open-air prison.

Jordan quietly coordinates security with Israel in the West Bank, suppressing Palestinian militancy on behalf of the occupation. The Palestinian Authority itself—yes, technically Arab—has become a subcontractor for Israeli apartheid, arresting its own people in Jenin while Israel’s military demolishes homes and expands settlements around them.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia dangles normalization for a U.S. nuclear deal, with Trump making it conditional on joining the Abraham Accords—Palestinian statehood be damned. Even after Israel bombed Doha in September 2025, the Arab League’s response was a tepid press release.

These governments watch the ethnic cleansing unfold, issue a few anodyne statements about “concern,” and then go back to counting their petrodollars. They know that a real Palestinian state with actual sovereignty would threaten their own autocratic thrones. So they do nothing. They enable everything. And when the history of this catastrophe is written, their names will be etched right alongside the architects of the occupation—not as victims, but as accessories.

But now these Western and Arab governments are caught between two options:

Option 1: Force Israel to grant equal rights and end the Jewish-majority state. Which means facing the wrath of Zionist billionaires and the entire U.S.-Israel political machine, not to mention the possibility that Israel, cornered and desperate, might just “take the world down with it” using the weapons of mass destruction they definitely have.

Option 2: Sit back. Let Israel push as many Palestinians out as they can. Then, when the remaining Palestinian minority is small enough, Israel can grant them “equal rights” in a state that’s still 80% Jewish, and the international community can pat themselves on the back for “solving” the problem.

Which option do you think they’re choosing?

The Clock is Ticking

This is the shell game we’re watching. Palestinians aren’t leaving because they want to. They’re leaving because Israel is making sure they have no future there. The displacement is structural, embedded in legal, political, and spatial systems—not isolated events. The genocidal dimension isn’t always direct mass killings; it unfolds through “long-term structural mechanisms aimed at erasing Indigenous identity, cultural autonomy, and political agency” .

But here’s the thing about a shell game: you have to keep watching the cups.

The goal for Palestinian rights activists has to be exactly the opposite of what Israel wants. We need to keep calling for equal rights for all Palestinians, including refugees, and never stop the pressure until it’s achieved. More importantly, the political candidates we choose must publicly express this demand during their campaigns. Because the moment the international community stops calling for justice and settles for “please be nice to the Palestinians,” the demographic clock keeps ticking, and Israel wins.

And if our political class isn’t cooperating, we must reclaim our power to circumvent politicians and punish Israel directly through boycotts and sanctions with the stated goal being an end to Zionist ideology and a return to a fully inclusive, equal rights state of historic Palestine.

Palestinians have been paying the ultimate price for decades because the international community stopped demanding justice and started begging for mercy. Those days are over.

What was done in South Africa can be done in Palestine . The apartheid regime fell not because the international community asked nicely, but because they demanded equality. That’s the lesson. And if we forget it, we’re complicit in the scheme.

The Needle and the Knife: On Israel’s Slow-Motion Heist

by damagecollateral
Trying to stop Israel means losing. We need to reverse it.

Let’s dispense with the linguistic gymnastics right now. When we talk about “settlers” terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank, we are playing a game of semantic peekaboo that helps no one but the perpetrators. There is no difference between the state of Israel and the armed yahoos with M16s stealing olive groves, except in the minds of those who desperately need to see one. If you are armed by Israel, protected by the IDF, handed illegally expropriated land by the state, and shielded by the military while you kick families out of their ancestral homes, you are not a fringe actor. You are the Israeli government in a hoodie. It doesn’t take a geopolitical genius to figure that one out.

But here is where our collective brain short-circuits. The global response—heck, even the response from many Palestinians—suffers from a terminal case of the “Just Stops.” You know the refrain: Israel just needs to stop. Stop stealing. Stop bombing. Staahp. As if this is a toddler swatting a sibling, and a firm “No” will sort it all out. Look at towns like Mesafir Yatta. The villagers there don’t dream of justice anymore; they dream of a pause. They just want the settlers to quit trying to nick their homes today.

As if quitting now would end anything. As if Israel ever gives up land without taking two miles first, giving back one amid global applause, and keeping the other forever. Then rinse. Then repeat. And we—the international press, the U.N., the armies of armchair activists—fall for it every darned time, celebrating like we won the Super Bowl because we managed to “stop” the bulldozer this week, and thinking that taking anything back from Israel is completely out of reach.

Here is the uncomfortable reality: Israel’s entire existence, from the jump, has been expansionist. It’s not a land-grab; it’s a land-drip. They move as slowly as they must, or as fast as opportunity permits. They are in it for the long haul. Slow growth doesn’t bother them—they have the patience of geological formations. But slow doesn’t mean benign. It just means they’re playing chess while we’re playing whack-a-mole.

Why hasn’t the world given Israel the response it deserves? Because we are conditioned to react to the knife. The dramatic lunge. The clear and present danger. But what if the assailant isn’t charging with a machete, but is sneaking up with a syringe? One prick at a time. A lull, a ceasefire, a few breaks to let the wound heal—and then another prick. Same amount of blood at the end of the hour, just fewer screams along the way.

That’s the Zionist project in a nutshell. A few big incursions, yes—the ’48 and ’67 wars, the Gaza Holocaust—but mostly it’s a thousand small cuts. A village here. A nuclear scientist in Iran there. A new zoning law in Jerusalem that just happens to evict another extended family. A sliver of a neighborhood, then another sliver. Israel takes, and when the international outcry gets too loud, it graciously gives back part of what it stole, so you feel like you won something just by forcing them to return the change. Meanwhile, they’re pocketing the whole bill.

For decades, they got away with this because they moved at a glacial pace. Slow enough to bore the news cycle. Slow enough to earn a bemused nod from the West and a lazy blink from Arab leaders, who praised Israel for being “peaceful” while it was picking pockets, simply because it wasn’t doing it with a sledgehammer.

Then came the Gaza Holocaust. That was the needle finally hitting the bone. It exposed the brutality underneath the bureaucratic sprawl. It ripped the curtain open on the decades-long project. Suddenly, everyone could see the playbook. No more blindness.

But here’s our new problem: our expectation. The bar we set for our own activism. We still just want them to stop. That is the wrong paradigm.

You don’t deal with a mobster who has been shaking down the neighborhood for fifty years by asking him to pretty-please stop collecting protection money. You don’t just tell the arsonist to put out the fire and call it a day. You go after the crook. You make him pay back every cent. You make him rebuild the houses he burned. You punish him for the terror he inflicted. A criminal state is no different from a street thug; it just has better PR.

If we cannot afford to do more than “stop” Israel, we are still losing. Not fighting back, not clawing back what was taken, is a form of defeat. Because that is precisely Israel’s playbook: Take until stopped. Give back a crumb. Wait. Take again.

Palestinians firing back at settler incursions? Commendable. But if they’re not taking back what was stolen before the last incursion, if all they’re hoping for is to keep what they have now and not take back what they had before, it’s still a loss. If the world manages to halt the genocide in Gaza—and that’s a big “if”—but Israel isn’t forced to give back the buffer zones, isn’t forced to rebuild every clinic and school, and isn’t compelled to compensate every family for every injury, that’s a loss. If we don’t force a return to the lands inside of Israel proper, we are just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking moral ship.

The only way this isn’t a defeat is if we flip the script entirely. If we work in reverse to Israel’s playbook. Because accepting the status quo, even a paused one, isn’t peace. It’s just a resting period before the next needle prick. And I, for one, am tired of being the patient.

The Settler-Colonialism Two-Step: Khanna’s Dance With Zionism

by damagecollateral

Look, I’ll give credit where it’s due. When Ro Khanna calls Gaza a genocide—which he did, co-sponsoring Rashida Tlaib’s resolution in 2025 that officially recognized Israel’s actions as genocidal—he’s saying something real 1. When he went to the West Bank and got blockaded by armed settlers with American-made M4s, he did what every congressperson should do: see the occupation through Palestinian eyes, not the usual wine-and-dine tour where they kiss the Western Wall and come home to write a glowing op-ed 2.

Khanna’s team got surrounded by masked men with rifles. The IDF statement disputes the details—they say troops “dispersed the Israeli civilians” while Khanna says the soldiers sided with the settlers 3. But here’s the thing: even the IDF’s version admits armed settlers blocked a sitting congressman, kicked tires, cursed at them, laughed at them, and the army had to clear the road 3. That’s a horror show, and Khanna was right to call it out.

But here’s where the sincerity check bounces off the wall.

After over a hundred years of Palestinian dispossession—from the Nakba in 1948 to the systematic destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages—the time for incremental politics is OVER. 4 Khanna wants credit for being “the good one.” The progressive who says the right things but stops short of the finish line.

The BDS Problem

Let’s talk about the big one. Khanna has never supported BDS 5. In fact, he told the Jewish News of Northern California that he’s “unequivocally, since Day 1, condemned ‘globalize the intifada'” and voted to condemn “from the river to the sea” 6.

If you’re not calling for BDS in 2026, you’re a complete fraud. Sorry, not sorry. Any state that does what Israel’s been doing for decades would be sanctioned, and BDS is the only nonviolent tool Palestinians have asked the world to use. It’s the actual, Palestinian-led movement for justice. Khanna opposing it while calling himself a progressive is like saying you support civil rights but you’re against sit-ins.

The Zionism Two-Step

This is where it gets genuinely absurd. Khanna told J. Weekly in October 2025 that he supports Zionism—”self-determination for the Jewish people” and the “right for Israel to exist” 7. He said it’s antisemitic to oppose a Jewish state. Meanwhile, he’s co-sponsoring genocide resolutions and calling for Palestinian statehood 1.

Being pro-Palestine while insisting on the right of a colony built on stealing their land to exist is an oxymoron. It doesn’t fool anyone anymore.

The Two-State Nonsense

If you still advocate for the two-state solution in 2026, please stop talking about Palestine. Your base has moved on. The two-state solution has been a coffin for Palestinian rights for decades. It’s what they wheel out when they want to sound reasonable while the settlements expand—and by the way, the IDF’s own numbers show 700,000 Jews living in settlements illegal under international law 8.

Khanna says he supports a two-state solution but not “Greater Israel” 7. What does that mean in practice? It means more negotiations, more incrementalism, more Palestinian suffering while everyone waits for a “viable state” that’s been made geographically impossible by settlement blocs.

If you’re not calling for the right of all Palestinians to return to all of historic Palestine, for the right of all Palestinians to have full equality with all Israelis, you’re just another Joe Biden with a brown face.

The Politics of Convenience

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: being pro-Palestine is now politically smart for Democrats. It’s not political uranium like it used to be; it’s a political treasure trove. The base has shifted. Polls show 58% of Democrats think the U.S. is “too supportive” of Israel 9. Khanna is eyeing a 2028 presidential run 10. Of course he’s going to climb on the backs of Palestinians to get to higher office.

TrackAIPAC endorsed him after he signed their PEACE Pledge 11. Cute. But what does that actually mean? The group even admitted they only gave him a label saying “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record” 11. Compare that to AOC, who has a green card and a positive label. Khanna is halfway there, but he won’t take the full step.

The Bottom Line

I appreciate Khanna’s words. I appreciate that he went to the West Bank and saw the reality. But words and trips don’t mean a damn thing if you’re not willing to call for complete and actual justice for Palestinians.

That means supporting BDS. That means rejecting Zionism as a settler-colonial project. That means calling for the right of return. That means scrapping the two-state fantasy.

If you’re not there, you’re not going to stop Palestinian suffering. You’re just another politician using their pain to get a promotion. And the Palestinians have had enough of that.

Sources & References

1. Khanna co-sponsored H.Res. 789 (2025) recognizing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. Congress.gov

2. Khanna describes West Bank trip in +972 Magazine interview, July 2026: “This is what every member should see.”

3. IDF statement to The Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2026: “IDF forces arrived, dispersed the Israeli civilians, and allowed the vehicles to continue on their way.” Khanna’s account via CNN: “Settlers detained us; the IDF sided with them.” Jerusalem Post

4. UNRWA data on Palestinian refugees: ~5.9 million registered refugees (2025). Nakba & ongoing dispossession documented by B’Tselem and Al-Haq.

5. Khanna statement to Jewish News of Northern California, June 2025: “I’ve never supported BDS.” J. Weekly

6. Khanna voted in favor of H.Res. 765 (2025) condemning the phrase “from the river to the sea.” Congress.gov

7. Khanna interview with J. Weekly, October 2025: “I support Zionism — self-determination for the Jewish people.” J. Weekly

8. Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (2025) reports 700,000+ settlers in West Bank. International Court of Justice (2024) advisory opinion: settlements illegal under international law.

9. Pew Research Center (June 2026): “58% of Democrats say U.S. is too supportive of Israel.”

10.Politico (March 2026): “Khanna is actively building infrastructure for a potential 2028 presidential run.”

11. TrackAIPAC PEACE Pledge & Khanna endorsement, July 2026. Label: “We encourage this representative to continue improving their legislative record.” TrackAIPAC

All URLs accessed July 2026. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

The Performance of Regret: How Liberals Will Mourn Palestine the Way They Mourn the Natives: When It’s Far Too Late

by damagecollateral
Oh regret. Sweet, sweet regret

So PBS, in its annual ritual of self-flagellation-by-parenthesis, decided to slip a little historical footnote into the Fourth of July programming. You know the one: “By the way, those democratic ideals you’re celebrating? Yeah, the Iroquois kind of had that whole federalism thing going first.” And sure, fine. Credit where it’s due. Historical accuracy isn’t the enemy here.

But here’s what’s really going on, and it’s the kind of thing that would make a lesser journalist’s head spin. PBS—and by extension the entire liberal establishment—isn’t actually sorry about what happened to the Natives. They’re not sorry in any way that costs anything. They’re sorry the way a man who ran over your dog is sorry—while he’s already backing over the cat.

Because here’s the logic they want you to swallow: We regret the genocide. We would have stopped it. We would have lived as equals. We would never have forced them into shrinking enclaves, destroyed their buffalo, burned their crops. But—and this is the crucial part—it’s too late now. What’s done is done. Tragic. Anyway, pass the potato salad.

This is the liberal get-out-of-jail-free card. You can express unlimited remorse for the past as long as you don’t have to do a single thing in the present. It’s a theology of convenient grief—a sort of moral insurance policy that costs exactly nothing and yields maximum self-congratulation.

But what if there were a situation, unfolding right this very minute, funded by your tax dollars, shielded by your diplomatic might, where exactly the same thing is happening? What if there was a native population being systematically stripped of land, crammed into walled enclaves, denied the right to return to homes that are now occupied by people who showed up seventy-eight years ago with guns and a divine deed? What if—and stay with me here—what if the United States could, at this very moment, prove that it actually learned something? That it wasn’t just blowing historical smoke up its own rear end?

That situation is called Palestine.

And the silence from the very people who weep into their handkerchiefs over Wounded Knee is deafening.

If the regret were real, you would see a single demand: right of return. Full citizenship. Equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea. You would see sanctions. You would see the aid spigot—the billions of dollars we’ve funneled to Israel every year since Truman was in office—turned completely off. You would see Americans finally acknowledging that we created this monster, we armed it, we gave it diplomatic cover at the UN, we could have stopped the Nakbah in 1948 but actively chose not to, and we have continued to choose not to every single day since.

But that would require admitting something. That would require admitting that the “two-state solution” isn’t a solution at all—it’s a permanent normalization of land theft, a way to make Palestinian statelessness official policy while everyone shakes hands and smiles for the cameras.

So instead, we get the waiting game.

Here’s the plan, as best I can tell: We wait. We keep our heads down. We let Israel do what it’s doing—shrinking Palestinian existence, walling them in, reducing them to an ever-smaller fraction of what they had, clandestinely trickle-expelling them to other countries. We let the refugee camps fester for another generation or two hoping their host countries would eventually throw their hands up and just give them citizenship. We let the ethnic cleansing run its course until there’s barely anything left to argue about.

And then—then—when it’s all over, when the Palestinians have been reduced to a historical footnote of their own, when there’s nothing left but museum exhibits and the occasional PBS documentary—that’s when we’ll weep. That’s when we’ll gather our Palestinian flag handkerchiefs and mourn. That’s when we’ll say, “We should have done something. We should have given them the right to return. We should have treated them like South Africans and ended apartheid.”

And then we’ll add the magic words: “But it’s too late now. What’s done is done.“

It’s a beautiful, airtight system of perpetual moral absolution. You get to feel terrible about history while actively funding the next chapter of it. You get to hold the shovel and cry about the hole at the same time. And when the hole is deep enough, you can cover it over, plant a flag, and give a speech about how you would have done things differently if only you’d been in charge.

That’s the game. That’s always been the game. And if you think for one second that the establishment liberals are actually serious about breaking it, I’ve got a federally funded documentary on Native American contributions to democracy that I’d like to sell you.

The New York Times’ Recurring Gift of Poisoned Honey: How a Genocide Apologist Machine Pretends to Have a Conscience

by damagecollateral

You probably heard the buzz. The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom, decided to let Nicholas Kristof—its resident paternalistic center-left tourist—wander into the opinion pages this week to write about the sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

And look, full disclosure: the piece is, in its raw content, damning. Kristof documents a horrifying pattern of abuse that deserves condemnation. But if you think this is a turning point for the Gray Lady, you haven’t been paying attention for the last two years. This isn’t journalism. It’s a restoration project. It’s the Times trying to sandblast the blood off its own hands while charging you for a subscription.

The Gore S’more

Here is the Collateral Damage Rule of Mainstream Genocide Coverage: They will tell you the truth, but only if they can wrap it in two layers of bullshit.

Kristof does this masterfully. He spends paragraphs documenting systematic rape—including the dog allegations, which we now understand are medically plausible and supported by multiple survivor testimonies. But then, like a priest hedging his bets before a mob boss, he bookends the whole thing with the Times’ favorite Zio-lore: the “Hamas rape” narrative of October 7th.

Let’s be clear-eyed about this. The Times published a series of free-of-evidence “reports”—framed as news, not opinion—that claimed to document systematic sexual violence by Hamas. When Israel is the accused? It’s an opinion column. When Palestinians are the accused? It’s front-page news. As the group Writers Against the War on Gaza noted, the Times has spent this entire war acting as a “mouthpiece for American imperialism,” advising its own reporters to avoid words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”

Months ago, a group of surgeons who volunteered in Gaza gave horrifying testimony. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an American surgeon, told the press—and later the courts—that he and the rest of the group witnessed a clear pattern of Palestinian children presenting to the ER with sniper shots to the head.

Where was that published? If you said “the opinion section” or ignored entirely, give yourself a cigar. The Times didn’t treat that as a news flash. Because the narrative didn’t have a “both sides” hook.

But this Kristof piece? It’s designed to do two things:

  1. Restore credibility with the anti-war left.
  2. Whitewash the paper’s history of aiding and abetting ethnic cleansing.

The Times is still facing a lawsuit from Israel over this very piece, which they’ve labeled a “blood libel.” And while I have zero sympathy for Bibi Netanyahu’s legal intimidation tactics—the lawsuit is likely a sham to stifle speech—the dance is instructive. The Times gets to play the martyr for press freedom while also laundering propaganda.

The Boycott We Actually Need

Here is the hardest truth for the anti-imperialist crowd to swallow: Sharing this article as a “win” for Palestine makes you look like an opportunist.

You cannot spend six months screaming “Boycott the Times!” only to turn around and post a gift link to Kristof because he finally said something you liked. That is the definition of being played. The Times is counting on you to do that. They want the clicks. They want to show advertisers that even their critics can’t look away.

As the saying goes, the Times published a piece that confirms the Times has been lying to you for a year, and they want a medal for it.

The only correct response is to amplify independent journalists—the ones who have been reporting on this torture for months without the “opinion” label—while calling for a boycott of the imperialist mouthpiece.

A world without the New York Times as the gatekeeper of war crimes is a world less dangerous. I really, truly, from the bottom of my heart, hope the lawsuit or simple bankruptcy brings it to its knees. It can’t happen soon enough.

How to deal with Bondi (not the pedophile protector one)

by damagecollateral
They’ll scream at us, and we’ll scream back louder than ever

(This article applies whether the Bondi Beach attack was a psy-op or not)

Let’s be clear about what happened yesterday at Bondi Beach. It was a massacre, a gruesome spectacle of violence that the media will feast on for days. But if you think this was some unforeseeable tragedy, a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky, you haven’t been paying attention. You’ve been swallowing the official narrative like a free lunch.

Just as the October 7th attack was the grim, predictable outcome of decades of Israeli sadism, ethnic cleansing, and a supremacist ideology that views non-Jews as subhuman, the attack at Bondi was inevitable. It was baked into the cake. You can’t stomp on a people’s face for 75 years, bomb their children into oblivion, starve them, and humiliate them on a daily basis without expecting some of that rage to eventually blow back in horrific, unpredictable ways. And make no mistake, there will be more, and Zionists are praying hard, if not orchestrating, for it. This is not an anomaly; it is the new normal, the logical consequence of a policy of endless, unpunished aggression.

And the response? It’s a script we know by heart. The Israeli propaganda machine, already greased and ready to go, will kick into high gear. Its proxies in Western media and politics will wail about a “new wave of terror,” using the bloodshed to justify their own brutality and paint anyone who dares to question the official narrative as a sympathizer. They will weaponize this tragedy just as they have weaponized every other, to deflect from the genocide they are actively perpetrating.

The last thing any of us should do right now is fall for this. The last thing we should do is let this event distract us, or worse, make us shrink. That is precisely what the Zionists want. They want you to look at the bloody sand in Australia and forget the bloody rubble in Gaza. They want you to be so overwhelmed by their pain that you no longer have the energy to fight for justice for their victims.

So what do we do? We use Bondi to double down. We get louder.

This is the moment to up the ante on exposing Israeli atrocities, both the current live-streamed genocide and the historical record of dispossession and terror that founded the state. We must constantly, relentlessly remind everyone that attacks like Bondi are not the cause of the problem, but a symptom. The focus must shift from the pathetic, predictable chorus of “what a terrible event” to the cold, hard truth: “We told you this would happen if you didn’t change your ways.” This is not about condoning violence; it’s about explaining its origins. It’s about stating, unequivocally, that the blood of these victims is also on the hands of the politicians and ideologues who created the conditions for this to happen.

And we must hammer home the point that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. This is not a nuance; it is the central battlefield. We need to weave this message into every march, every talk, every social media post. Zionism is a political ideology, a violent, colonial project, and it is no more synonymous with Judaism than fascism is with Italianism. To equate the two is a deliberate, cynical smear tactic designed to shut down all debate.

Furthermore, and just as importantly, we must turn this moment into an opportunity for real talk about value. Ten people die at Bondi, and the world stops. Governments issue solemn statements, flags fly at half-mast, and the media dedicates 24/7 coverage. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are systematically exterminated in Gaza, a genocide funded and armed by the West, and it’s a “complex conflict.” It’s a “tragedy” with “two sides.” To give these ten lives more weight, more outrage, more political capital than the tens of thousands of lives snuffed out by Israeli bombs when they are literally a blip in the totality of carnage is not just biased; it is an act of profound, seething racism. It is the clearest demonstration imaginable of whose life the world deems valuable and whose it deems disposable.

So no, this is not the time to be intimidated. It is not the time to cower in fear of government crackdowns or online mobs. We don’t need to defend ourselves or apologize for what we stand for. The truth is a defense in itself. We already have the majority of the public on our side of the fundamental question: the slaughter in Gaza must stop. Our job is to connect that sentiment to its root cause.

Slowing down now will send the wrong message to Zionists. It will teach them that crimes like Bondi work. It will incentivize them to work with the MI6 and all the other happy-to-oblige intel agencies to commit more. That’s why doubling down on the pro-Palestine message is necessary to prevent future crimes, to save lives!

This is the time to scream from the rooftops how utterly racist it is that the death of a handful of Westerners warrants global action while the industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians earns a shrug. This is the time to declare, loudly and without apology, that the only path to peace, for Palestinians and for Jews alike, is for the West to finally pull the plug on the rotten, corrupt, and murderous Zionist project. And it is the time to say the one thing they desperately don’t want you to believe: No Jew will ever be truly safe so long as the ideology of Zionism, which conflates Jewish identity with a violent, colonial state, continues to exist. Their project is a death trap, and this is not the time to stop saying so.

So to summarize, our messaging should include the following points:

1- Spare us the crying and focus on the root of the problem. If you won’t, we will.

2- Anyone who’s calling for a dramatic uptick in suppression of pro-Palestine speech while not calling for stopping weapons and intelligence assistance to Israel is not only pro-fascist, but is deeply, brazenly hateful and supremacist toward Arabs, Muslims, and especially Palestinians.

3- In order to prevent future attacks like Bondi and save lives, it is ever more prudent to work on ending Zionism now.

4- Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism and never was. Thousands of Jews, holocaust scholars, and holocaust survivors agree.

The Punchline That Stopped Being Funny

by damagecollateral

Or: How I Learned to Stop Laughing and See the Abyss

One can be evil and colorful at the same time

There’s a moment in every con when the mark realizes he’s been had. Mine came late—embarrassingly late. I’d been riding the Trump rollercoaster for years, white-knuckling it through loop-de-loops of outrage and absurdity, telling myself it was all part of some grand American farce. The joke was on the liberals, the establishment, the whole rotten system. Trump was the whoopee cushion at the funeral of American decorum, and I was too busy laughing to notice the corpse was real.

I’ll own it: I fell for it. Not the MAGA hat stuff—I never voted for the guy—but something maybe worse. I fell for the idea that Trump was amusing. That his chaos was a kind of performance art. That beneath the carnival barker shtick was just another corrupt politician, no better or worse than the rest, just louder and more honest about it.

I was wrong.

The scales didn’t fall all at once. They peeled away in layers, like old paint on a toxic building. First came the AI videos mocking Palestinians during what can only be described as a genocide he was actively facilitating. Dark, sure, but Trump had always trafficked in dark humor, right? Then the double-cross: promising to end the siege in exchange for a dual-citizen hostage, the kind of transactional cruelty that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush. I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s nasty, but he’s still shaking things up, still saying things others won’t…”

The voice of the con artist’s best friend: the rationalization.

Then Jeffrey Epstein entered the picture—yes, that Epstein. In a private email that surfaced, the late pedophile and professional blackmailer wrote something that stopped me cold: “I have met some very bad people… none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body.”

Now, you might ask: why would I take moral guidance from Jeffrey Epstein? Fair question. But here’s the thing about monsters—they recognize their own. When a man who trafficked children for the world’s elite says someone else is worse than anyone he’s ever met, you have to at least consider the possibility that he’s not exaggerating.

That’s when I started going back through the highlight reel, except this time I wasn’t watching for the laugh lines. I was looking at where everything landed. And I had to do something I’d resisted for years: I had to open my heart to darkness. Not the metaphorical darkness of “politics I disagree with,” but the actual thing—the possibility that some people are so profoundly deformed at their core that most of us literally can’t see it. Our imaginations won’t let us. It’s too outside the normal range of human behavior.

The final nail came with Gaza. After brokering what he called a “ceasefire,” Trump executed an about-face so brazen it would have made Machiavelli nauseous. His administration strong-armed the UN Security Council into accepting a plan that essentially outsourced the genocide, giving the Israelis a breather while other nations coordinated with them to finish ethnically cleansing Gaza—or at least demilitarize it, which amounts to the same thing for a people resisting occupation after surviving what may be the holocaust of our time.

That’s when I finally saw him clearly. And I didn’t like what I saw. Not one bit.

I can already hear the chorus: “Really? Now you see it? What about ICE? The racism? The pardons for war criminals? The corruption? The election interference? The degradation of basic decency? The tariffs that destroyed farmers? The cuts to veterans’ benefits, SNAP, Medicare?”

The list is long, and it’s a valid indictment—of Trump, but also of me. Yes, I saw all of that. But not like I do now. Not with the clarity that comes from accepting what I’d been avoiding: that this isn’t just another corrupt politician. This is something else.

I think Trump knows it too. There was a moment recently when he said he doesn’t think he’ll make it to heaven. It was delivered with his usual glibness, but I heard something underneath it—a kind of acknowledgment. The presidency didn’t create his malice; it unleashed it. It gave him the power to reach his full dark potential, potential he’d had all along. The office served as both amplifier and indictment.

Here’s what I’ve learned, late though the lesson comes: Trump’s greatest trick isn’t the lies or the bluster or the norm-breaking. It’s the way he keeps you from believing he’s as bad as he actually is. The sheer scale of it, the constant motion, the circus atmosphere—it’s all camouflage. We keep looking for the punchline because we can’t accept that the joke is on us, and it isn’t funny.

So stop being distracted by the antics. Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. Stop telling yourself it’s all part of some complex strategy or that he’s “just playing politics.” That’s the con. You’re the mark. Believe he’s a deeply bad person and start seeing his actions in that light. Not because it’s politically convenient, but because it’s true.

The rollercoaster is still running. The question is whether you’re going to keep riding it, or finally get off and look at what it’s built on.

I got off. Late, yes. Too late, probably. But I got off.

The ground is steadier here, if lonelier. And from here, you can see the whole machine for what it is: not a ride at all, but a wreck in slow motion, with Trump’s grinning face painted on the front car as it hurtles toward something none of us should want to see.

The Mirror We Refuse to Look Into

by damagecollateral

Remember him? Of course you don’t.

There’s a ritual that plays out every time Israel does something particularly barbaric in Gaza. American officials furrow their brows. Cable news hosts purse their lips. Someone always says it: “We would never do that.”

Really?

Netanyahu has been saying something for months that nobody wants to hear. He keeps pointing out that Israel is doing exactly what America has done, over and over again. Biden himself reportedly confirmed that Netanyahu told him privately he’s doing the same thing America did in Vietnam—and much less than what we did in World War II.

The man’s a monster, sure. But on this point? He’s not wrong.

The Afghan Preview

Let’s talk about Afghanistan, shall we? The war Americans have already memory-holed, the one that’s been sanded down into a vague story about withdrawal chaos and not much else.

After 2001, we dropped an untold number of 5,000-pound bunker busters and 15,000-pound “daisy cutter” bombs in round-the-clock bombing campaigns. Cluster bombs—weapons that scatter smaller bomblets across wide areas, many of which fail to detonate and later kill children—were dropped indiscriminately. We hit UN agencies. We destroyed a Red Cross warehouse in Kabul, wiping out humanitarian supplies.

And here’s where it gets truly American: despite ongoing communication between the Red Cross and U.S. forces, we bombed the same Red Cross compound again on October 26, 2001. We destroyed supplies meant for 50,000 Afghans. Twice. With coordination channels open.

Within the first year alone, we displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans. Estimates put civilian deaths at 3,000 to 4,000 in that first year, with an additional 19,800 refugees dying from hunger, disease, and cold during displacement. That’s not even counting the combatants, or the twenty years that followed.

We dropped thousands of cluster bombs. We used depleted uranium munitions. We systematically destroyed infrastructure: bridges, water supplies, roads, communication systems, power plants, electrical facilities. Hospital and clinic power supplies were knocked out, forcing medical facilities onto diesel generators—assuming they could get diesel. Then we started targeting privately owned fuel trucks, turning even diesel into a luxury item.

Picture the hospitals: no supplies, surgeries performed without anesthetic, staff fleeing, facilities crammed beyond capacity. We started with 500-pound bombs, then upgraded to 2,000-pounders as the war dragged on.

Wedding bombings. School bombings. Funeral bombings. These aren’t anomalies—they’re patterns.

Iraq: A Million Souls for a Lie

Then there’s Iraq, where we killed a million people based on fabricated intelligence about weapons that didn’t exist. Check the Wikileaks cables if you want the unvarnished version. A million human souls. For a lie.

What more needs to be said?

The Dangerous Comfort of “We’d Never Do That”

This is why the “we would never do that” rhetoric isn’t just wrong—it’s dangerous. It obscures the fact that we have done it, many times. It absolves us of guilt and deprives our victims of their right to accountability. It turns our war crimes into unfortunate aberrations rather than standard operating procedure.

This isn’t an attempt to reduce Israel’s guilt. The scale of destruction in Gaza—the amount of explosives dropped per square meter, per human being—is staggering even by the debased standards of modern warfare. What’s happening there is a holocaust, and no amount of historical context changes that.

But we need to emphasize our own guilt. We need to reckon with the fact that America set the precedent for what’s happening in Palestine. We normalized the bunker busters in civilian areas. We normalized the “double tap” strikes. We normalized the destruction of hospitals and the killing of aid workers and the targeting of infrastructure that keeps millions of people alive. We did all of this, and we did it in wars that most Americans have already forgotten.

Sunlight as Disinfectant

This is the case for exposure. Every single war needs to be shown the way Gaza has been shown—live-streamed, documented, impossible to ignore. No more wars fought in the shadows. No more sanitized Pentagon briefings where “precision strikes” and “minimal collateral damage” obscure piles of dead children.

The Gaza holocaust is terrible, but it’s also clarifying. For once, the world can’t look away. The documentation is too thorough, too immediate, too overwhelming. This should be the standard for every conflict, not the exception.

Whether we like it or not, we set this precedent. We wrote this playbook. Israel is just running the same plays we’ve been running for decades, with one key difference: this time, the cameras are rolling and the internet is watching.

The question isn’t whether Israel is committing war crimes. It obviously is. The question is whether we’re finally ready to admit that we’ve been committing them too, all along, in our name, with our tax dollars, under the flag we salute.

Netanyahu is holding up a mirror. We just don’t like what we see in it.

The UN’s Gaza Gift-Wrap: A Genocide Gets a Makeover

by damagecollateral
Guess who’s baaack!

On Monday, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2803, a document so brazenly contemptuous of basic political reality that it deserves some kind of award for institutional chutzpah. The resolution concerns Gaza, or what’s left of it after two-plus years of systematic annihilation. But if you’re expecting anything resembling justice, self-determination, or even a coherent plan for Palestinian statehood, you’ve come to the wrong place.

The centerpiece of 2803 is demilitarization—Gaza must be stripped of weapons before anything else can happen. Not peace. Not statehood. Not even a timeline for Israeli withdrawal. Just disarmament, made a precondition for rebuilding and, more grotesquely, for allowing “essentials” to enter. Food, medicine, water—the stuff human beings need to survive—are now leverage points in a grand disarmament scheme. It’s disaster capitalism meets hostage negotiation, with the UN playing the role of complicit middleman.

What’s most striking about the resolution is what it doesn’t say. There’s no mention of Palestinian self-determination beyond vague, aspirational language. No specific steps. No deadlines. No pressure—none whatsoever—on Israel to ever leave Gaza. The word “Palestinian” might as well be a typo. The resolution treats Palestine and Palestinians as atmospheric details, background noise in a story about “regional stability” and “security arrangements.” It’s erasure by paperwork.

So what is this really about? Simple: outsourcing the genocide.

For over two years, Israel has been doing the dirty work alone—bombing hospitals, leveling neighborhoods, targeting aid workers, and killing tens of thousands of civilians. It’s exhausting, expensive, and bad for troop morale. Turns out that constant deployments in a grinding counter-insurgency operation aren’t great for an army composed largely of conscripts who’d rather be back in Tel Aviv drinking overpriced coffee. So here comes the UN, riding to the rescue with a plan that doesn’t end the occupation—it just rebrands it.

Under 2803, international forces will be deployed to “assist” in demilitarization and security. These aren’t peacekeepers in the traditional sense. They’re mercenaries, contractors, guns-for-hire operating under the UN’s humanitarian halo. Their job? Coordinate with the Israeli military—the same Israeli military that’s been committing genocide—and essentially do the policing Israel can no longer afford to do itself. It’s a temp agency for occupation.

And who’s lining up to staff this new venture? The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organization already implicated in the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians who were simply trying to get food. They’re recruiting now, presumably looking for professionals with experience in “crowd control” and “security operations,” which is NGO-speak for people who know how to shoot civilians without generating too much paperwork.

This is the new model: the genocide continues, but now it’s multilateral. It’s got UN branding. It’s got “humanitarian” in the name. And best of all, it gives Israel exactly what it wants—control without cost, occupation without the burden of occupation, and a international stamp of approval on the whole sick enterprise.

Resolution 2803 isn’t a peace plan. It’s a business plan. It doesn’t create conditions for Palestinian freedom; it codifies their subjugation. And it doesn’t hold Israel accountable—it makes the international community complicit.

The resolution is, in short, criminal. Not in the metaphorical sense, but in the actual, war-crimes-tribunal sense. It denies Palestinians the right to resist occupation, strips them of agency, and transforms their suffering into a logistical problem to be managed by well-paid contractors.

The UN Security Council just turned genocide into a public-private partnership. And they expect us to call it progress.

The Great Credulity Shift: How Israel Lost the Information War

by damagecollateral

A funny thing happened on the way to another mass grave

The Israelis just dumped another load of Palestinian bodies into Gaza—bodies bearing what I can hear Western media outlets delicately calling “signs of mistreatment,” which in non-euphemistic English means torture marks and bullet holes in the back of the head. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Why do Israelis publicize their crimes like this, you ask? To scare Palestinians and neighboring Arabs. As for the risk of upsetting Western audiences, well, Israelis think they simply won’t believe it.

That’s right. For decades, Israel has operated on a simple principle: commit atrocities so outlandish that Western audiences literally can’t process them. Evacuating entire cities like Yaffa and Haifa? Poisoning water supplies with typhus in Akko and Lyddia? It sounds like the fever dream of a conspiracy theorist, especially when it’s being reported by brown people with accents who pray five times a day. Surely it must be more complicated than simple ethnic cleansing, right? There must be context we’re missing. Both sides, you know.

This was the formula, and it was bulletproof. The sheer audacity of the crimes, combined with good old-fashioned Western racism and the assumption that Palestinians were inherently unreliable narrators, created a perfect shield. The reports were too crazy to believe, and the reporters were too foreign to trust. And our Zionist-controlled, government-subservient media is right there to discredit Palestinians at every turn.

But something broke.

The Gaza genocide—let’s be honest and call it what South Africa called it at The Hague—changed the equation. Seventeen months of high-definition horror, posted in real-time by Palestinians themselves, fundamentally altered the credibility calculation in the Western mind. People started believing Palestinians. Worse, from Israel’s perspective, they started going back through the archive, re-evaluating decades of Palestinian testimony with fresh eyes. The Nakba? Maybe that actually happened the way they said it did. Deir Yassin? Jenin? The prisoner abuse? All of it suddenly crackling with an electric charge of plausibility it never had before.

Even better: the credibility transfer went both ways. The same audiences who stopped reflexively doubting Palestinians started reflexively doubting Israelis. Why exactly should we assume Mustafa Barghouti is biased but take Mark Levin at face value? Why are Palestinian casualty figures “claims” while Israeli statements are just… reported? Why does the Muslim guy in the keffiyeh need three sources while the IDF spokesman with the better PowerPoint gets printed verbatim?

The Israelis don’t seem to understand this shift has happened. They’re still playing by the old rules, broadcasting their brutality to intimidate Arabs while assuming Westerners won’t believe the reports anyway. They’re advertising their crimes on the assumption that the audience will remain incredulous.

This is why you see the increasingly frantic attempts to keep this old paradigm alive. “Pallywood!” they shriek, trying to paint Palestinians as Hollywood-level fabulists. The starvation reports are exaggerated! The genocide numbers are inflated! It’s all fake! The desperation is obvious: they’re trying to claw back the credibility gap, to restore the comfortable old arrangement where Israelis were presumed truthful and Palestinians presumed lying.

It’s not going to work, and here’s why: Palestinians got good at this. Decades of having every single claim scrutinized, picked apart, and dismissed made them into obsessive documentarians. They know they’ll be doubted, so they film everything, source everything, archive everything. The result is that their reporting has become ironclad in ways that make the IDF’s increasingly preposterous explanations—she was shot by Hamas, the hospital bombed itself, the aid workers were terrorists, the journalists were combatants—sound like the propaganda they are.

Meanwhile, independent media outlets have proliferated, places willing to apply the same skepticism to both sides. These outlets aren’t bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson’s heirs or dependent on access to Israeli officials, which means they can ask uncomfortable questions. And audiences, particularly younger ones, trust them more than the legacy outlets with their suspiciously shiny production values and their weird reluctance to use the word “killing” when Israelis are doing it.

The “antisemitism” card isn’t working anymore either. People have figured out it’s a mute button, a way to end conversations rather than have them. The spell is broken.

It must be a strange relief for Palestinians, finally being believed after howling into the void for a century. But the mainstream media? They’re going to keep playing the old hits, keep soft-pedaling Israeli crimes and interrogating Palestinian testimony, because they’re locked into the worldview of their donors and their access-based business model. They’re too compromised to adapt, which means they’ll be left behind, still insisting we can’t really know what happened while everyone else watches the videos.

The great credulity shift is complete. The Israelis are still acting like it’s 1982. The world has moved on.

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