West bank

Don’t Thank The Voters—Thank The Corpses: Gaza’s Unpaid Political Tab

by damagecollateral
Careful or you’ll end up being worse than the Democratic establishment shills you ran against

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.

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 Real Litmus Test Isn’t Refusing AIPAC Money—It’s What You Do After

by damagecollateral

Let’s give credit where it’s due: refusing AIPAC money in today’s Democratic Party takes a certain kind of nerve. It’s not nothing. It’s walking into a room full of people holding cash and saying, “No thanks, I’ll take the death threats instead.” That takes spine, and spine is in short supply on Capitol Hill.

But here’s the difference between those who just want to stop the genocide so they can go back to feeling comfortable with the world and those who want lasting peace and an actual end to the conflict that is at the heart of global unrest: refusing the money is the bare minimum. It’s the opening move, not the final exam. And if we treat it like the finish line, we’re setting ourselves up for the same old disappointment.

Because even politicians who refuse to take AIPAC money, call for ending weapons and money to Israel, call for ending settler violence, and/or call for implementing the two-state solution while still believing in Israel’s co-called right to exist as a Jewish state are still Zionists, and the problem with lesser Zionists is that, when push comes to shove, they are just as capable of mega macabre acts as the overt ones. Look at Joe Biden. We chose him over Trump because Trump was openly Netanyahu’s real estate agent—moving the embassy, gifting the Golan, treating the West Bank like a timeshare. And what did we get? A holocaust. Not hyperbole. An actual, documented genocide, live-streamed to our phones. Kamala would have been more polite about it, but the outcome? Gaza depopulated by now, just with more sympathetic press releases.

The same goes for the Amy Klobuchars, Cory Bookers, and Hakeem Jeffrieses of the world. They’ll stand for a photo with Netanyahu—war criminal, architect of slaughter—and call it diplomacy. They’ll vote for arms packages and call it “supporting our ally.” They don’t view themselves as radically evil as they are, they view themselves as normal. You see, to them, accepting Israel’s founding and existence is normal, and that’s why we can’t have people like them.

So when a politician steps up and says, “I won’t take AIPAC money,” that’s worth noting. It’s a break from the consensus. It’s costly. It invites primary challenges, smear campaigns, and the full weight of a lobbying apparatus that treats Palestine like a PR problem.

But it’s not enough. Not even close.

Here’s what separates the real thing from the performance:

1. BDS isn’t optional. If you’re not willing to support boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel and the companies that prop up its occupation, you’re not serious about ending apartheid. The Palestinian civil society call in 2005 wasn’t a suggestion—it was a strategy. Ignoring it is ignoring the people you claim to stand with.

2. The right of return for all Palestinians into all of historic Palestine isn’t negotiable. UN Resolution 194 wasn’t a footnote. Palestinians didn’t leave because they wanted to—they were driven out, dispossessed, and replaced. They still live in refugee camps, generations later, while their old homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and the hundreds of Palestinian villages now engulfed in “Israel” are occupied by people who had no connection to the land. They were traded generational poverty for their generational wealth. Any politician who sidesteps this is normalizing theft and ethnic cleansing.

3. Two states is dead. Long live equality. The two-state solution isn’t a solution anymore—it’s a rhetorical coffin. Settlements have carved up the West Bank past the point of viability. What we have is one state, and it’s an apartheid state. The only moral path forward is full equality for everyone between the river and the sea—whether through one state, a federation, or something we haven’t imagined yet. Every Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza deserves the same rights as any Jew in 1948 Palestine, and every diaspora Palestinian deserves the same right to go back to historic Palestine and gain citizenship that Jews around the world can gain.

This isn’t about purity-testing the people who are actually trying. It’s about keeping the goalposts where they belong. The politicians who refuse AIPAC money deserve our respect—and our scrutiny. Because if they stop at “I said no to the check,” they’re still selling us short.

The system doesn’t need tweaks. It needs dismantling. And that starts with demanding more from the people who claim to be on the right side—not less.

So no, don’t attack the ones who’ve taken the courageous step. Praise them. Then hand them a list of what comes next. Because without these demands, we’re not building peace—we’re just trading one set of enablers for another, and the bodies keep piling up.

And that’s the grift we’ve all been sold.

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.