So here we are. The air is thick with victory Yeahs and self-congratulatory back-slaps. We’ve got candidates—actual, breathing candidates—winning elections by screaming into the void about billionaires, about bombs, about the whole rotting carcass of the imperial project. They’re getting in on a platform of “eat the rich” and “stop the slaughter,” and lo and behold, it’s working! The political class is having a collective aneurysm. The donor class is clutching its pearls. And the rest of us? Oh, we’re soaking every minute of it.
And surely, it’s a moment. The kind you write bad poetry about. The kind that makes you think, just for a second, that the machine might actually be grinding to a halt.
But let’s not get one thing twisted: none of this—not a single darn inch of it—happened without Gaza.
Oh, I know the list of suspects. COVID, the great unmasker of institutional incompetence. Inflation, that quiet thief. Trump, the human wrecking ball. ICE, the agency with a heart of ice and a budget of blood. Health insurance premiums that make you choose between your house and your heartbeat. AI, the shiny new boot poised to stomp on the last rung of the economic ladder. All of it true. All of it fuel.
But it’s Gaza that lit the match. It’s Gaza that took the vague, diffuse hum of working-class grievance and turned it into a howl. Before the bombs started falling in earnest, we had murmurs. We had op-eds. We had progressive think-pieces about “systemic rot” and “foreign policy blowback.” But it was all abstract—a bad dream you can’t quite remember.
Then came the live feed. The rubble. The children. The unspeakable, day-after-day-until-you-go-numb horror of it. And suddenly, the rot wasn’t theoretical. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a live, unblinking camera pointed at the moral sewer of Western foreign policy, and for once, people couldn’t look away. Gaza didn’t just crack our skulls; it pried them open. It made our brains porous enough to absorb what we’d spent a lifetime filtering out: that Israel and our own governments aren’t just flawed—they’re fiendishly, arrestingly evil.
And here’s the part that’s going to make the new saviors of the world uncomfortable:
You, the fresh-faced insurgent, the anti-war, anti-billionaire phenom, sitting pretty in your new office, staring at the mahogany, feeling the weight of the chair… That’s the same you who needs to understand, in your bones, that you didn’t get there on mere vibes. You didn’t get there just on policy papers. You got there on the dead bodies of Palestinians. You climbed that ladder rung by rung over the crushed bones of Gaza. You, whether you like it or not, are a child of fortune, the nepo baby of Gaza’s misfortune, and your mandate is written in blood.
So act like it.
Don’t give me the usual D.C. two-step. Don’t roll out the tired, creaky talking points about a “two-state solution” like it’s 1993 and we’re all still naive enough to believe in unicorns. Don’t talk about a Palestine if you’re picturing anything less than River-to-Sea. Don’t you dare stand there with a straight face and talk about holding Israel accountable while you’re still polishing the brass on the Zionist project’s doorknob.
Palestinians handed you the shredded, smoking remains of their toddlers in Gaza—little plastic bags of flesh and bone, delivered by rescue workers who’d given up crying—and you have the gall to stand at a podium and call a two-state solution a victory? A “ceasefire”? Give me a break. You don’t get to return 100 percent of the concentration camp and call it a day. You don’t get to hand back the rubble and the sewage and the sniper towers and pat yourself on the back for statesmanship. Give them back Yaffa—the city they didn’t leave, but were thrown from while British tanks watched and Zionist terror militias drew up maps. Give them back the orange groves, the limestone courtyards, the front doors they still dream about at night. They have the keys. Not symbolic keys. Actual keys. Rusted, bent, inherited, clutched into the fists of grandmothers who still recite the address in their sleep.
And while you’re at it, spare us the diplomatic hand-wringing over “Israel’s right to exist”—as if that has anything to do with anything. As if the refugee in Jenin, or the woman in Shatila, or the kid in Zarqa who’s never seen the sea, is supposed to nod along while you lecture them about realpolitik. They’ve spent fifty, sixty, seventy years rotting in squalor on our dime—U.S. tax dollars, gentlemen, the same ones that fund F-16s and “Iron Dome” interceptors—and you want to offer them autonomy? A statelet? A strip of land with no water, no ports, and Israeli checkpoints every 400 meters? No. Give them back Al Jaleel. Give them back Safad. Give them back Lidd and Haifa. That’s where they’re from. That’s where their great-grandfathers are buried. That’s where the deeds are filed, in Ottoman Turkish and British Mandate English, still legal, still valid, still gathering dust in vaults while the world plays dumb.
Give them the full, unvarnished reverence they are owed—not for their suffering, which we’ve commodified into NGO grants and UNRWA acronyms, but for what we’ve done to them. We’re not talking about a band-aid. We’re not talking about a “roadmap” or a “confidence-building measure” or some State Department communiqué that uses the word “viability” twelve times without ever mentioning justice. We’re talking about historic Palestine—every inch, every stone, every gnarled olive tree that’s been uprooted for another settlement driveway. Give it back. All of it. To the people we’ve spent decades treating like extras in our own grubby, oil-soaked, arms-dealing geopolitical drama—props to be moved, budgets to be cut, casualties to be “regretted” in press briefings.
Give it back to whom it belongs. To the people we have so profoundly, so relentlessly, so enthusiastically wronged for so long that we’ve lost the moral vocabulary to even describe it. And yes—Jews can stay. Of course they can stay. As full equals, with full rights, in a single state where your religion doesn’t determine your ZIP code or your water allotment. But if that prospect terrifies them—if the thought of becoming a minority in their own mythologized homeland sends them into conniptions—then too freaking bad. You don’t get to demand safety for yourself by making everyone else unsafe. You don’t get to call that peace. You don’t get to call that resolution. You don’t get to call that anything but what it is: a continuation, by other means, of the same old theft.
Anything less is a betrayal. And I don’t use that word lightly.
If you get into that office and start humming the old tune, you’ve turned yourself from a promising hero to worse than a Randy Fine. You’ve betrayed the mothers who handed you their children’s souls on a live broadcast. You’ve failed the fathers who dug through rubble with their bare hands while you practiced your acceptance speech. You’ve reneged. You’ve sold them out—again.
Because if you think this moment is a victory, you’re only half-right. It’s a debt. And it’s due.
Collateral Damage 