One hesitates to employ the word “tragedy” - too Greek, too ennobling, too suggestive of fate rather than choice. What we witness in Gaza is not tragedy but atrocity, meticulously planned and executed with the sort of bureaucratic precision that would have impressed Eichmann’s ghost. The latest UN commission finding that Israel is “deliberately targeting children in ongoing genocide against Palestinians” should shock no one who has been paying attention to the methodical dehumanization that precedes such horrors.
The Israelis, having learned all the wrong lessons from their own history, have constructed an open-air prison and now express surprise - surprise! - when the prisoners object to their confinement. The bombing of hospitals, the starvation of children, the casual slaughter of journalists and their families - these are not “regrettable casualties” but the deliberate application of overwhelming force against a defenseless civilian population. Recent reports confirm Israeli strikes killed at least nine people, including a child and a journalist from Al Jazeera, in the Gaza Strip, while women and children were among those killed in attacks on four residential buildings.
And for what? For the sin of being born Palestinian?
The Zionist project, which once claimed the mantle of liberation, now stands exposed as just another ethno-nationalist enterprise, bulldozing olive groves and international law with equal contempt. The irony that the victims of one genocide should construct the machinery for another would be almost literary in its cruelty were it not so drenched in actual blood. More than 67,000 Palestinians dead as we approach the two-year anniversary of this conflict - a number that staggers the imagination and shames any claim to moral superiority.
The theater of absurdity continues with the supposed ceasefire, which has proven anything but. According to reports, continued Israeli strikes in Gaza have killed roughly 900 Palestinians since the start of the ceasefire. One might ask precisely what “ceasefire” means in the language of the powerful - perhaps merely a brief intermission between atrocities? With all Israeli hostages now recovered from Gaza, there’s a push for the Israel-Hamas peace plan to move to phase-two, but this seems less a genuine pursuit of peace than a strategic repositioning while Israel consolidates its territorial gains.
The vulgarity of it all... The sheer, unrelenting vulgarity, is what offends most. We are asked to endorse slaughter in the name of civilization, to cheer as children are buried under rubble in the name of “self-defense,” to contemplate nuclear war in the name of nuclear non-proliferation. And we are expected to do so with a straight face, as if the contradictions were not screaming at us from every headline.
And then we turn to Iran, that great bogeyman of the American imagination, the nation that dares to exist outside the Washington consensus. The drumbeat for war with Tehran has been sounding for decades now, kept in rhythm by a bipartisan chorus of armchair generals and evangelical end-times enthusiasts who couldn’t locate the Strait of Hormuz on a map but are absolutely certain that Iranian women and children must be liberated via cruise missile. The latest headlines about “Strait of Hormuz evacuation plans” suggest the war machine is already revving its engines, preparing for another adventure in nation-building through demolition.
The same architects of catastrophe who brought you the Iraq disaster - those mendacious mediocrities who promised flowers and gratitude and delivered IEDs and sectarian slaughter - now itch for an encore. In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a major war on Iran, because apparently one catastrophic failure in the Middle East wasn’t sufficient to sate their appetite for destruction.
Iran, for all its theocratic grotesqueries and human rights abominations, has not invaded another country in centuries. The same cannot be said of its adversaries. Yet we are meant to believe that Tehran poses an existential threat, that the mullahs are uniquely irrational, uniquely suicidal, uniquely immune to the deterrent logic that has constrained every other nuclear power since 1945. The ongoing conflict over UN nuclear inspector access serves as merely the latest pretext for aggression, another manufactured crisis in a region already drowning in genuine ones.
It is, to borrow from Orwell, the propaganda of the victor dressed up as the anxiety of the victim. An empire pretending to be a fortress, demanding the right to annihilate any nation that refuses its dictates. The International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi speaks about nuclear concerns, while conveniently ignoring that the only nation to have actually used nuclear weapons in war continues to police the nuclear ambitions of others.
One requires not courage but merely literacy to see through the charade. The only question is whether one possesses the stomach to say so. The evidence mounts daily: Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posting a video in which he gloats over zip-tied Gaza flotilla detainees; the killing of Hamas commanders presented as progress while civilian death tolls mount; the somber commemoration of October 7 with hostages still in Gaza and Israel more isolated than ever.
This is not complicated. It is not nuanced. It is power doing what power does—protecting its interests, rationalizing its crimes, and demanding applause as it does so. The rest is merely commentary, and increasingly, that commentary is either complicit or irrelevant. What you'll find here is neither. I am done pretending that polite disagreement is moral courage in an age of institutional rot. This is a witness stand, and I'm here to testify against the powerful with the contempt they've earned. But testimony without a verdict is just screaming into the void. Here, we will also prosecute: proposing concrete solutions, building arguments, and demanding accountability, not just observing the crime.