How many dead children do I see before breakfast? I can’t eat. How many voices do I hear screaming? I can’t speak. How many families are completely obliterated? I can’t be. I can’t imagine all of these horrors and more, and yet I must imagine because they’re real. The genocidal violence that Israel and America is unleashing on Palestine is being broadcast around the world, and it is the most brutal terrorism the world has ever seen. If this isn’t terror, what is? It’s terrifying.

The terror is that the violence is so ordinary, they’re just openly targeting civilians in the places we’re supposed to feel safe. And it makes a mockery of the world around me. I took the kids to a play area today and though, ‘this is a place Israel would be bombing.’ I watch a movie where a man went to a hospital, and thought the same thing. Everything normal, everything safe, everything sacred, that’s what they attack with high explosives. If this isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is. It’s just pure evil, and the loss of life, the loss of limbs, that’s not even the worst of it. Empire doesn’t just take your life, they lie about your death, and make your family fight for that too.

I’ve had family killed by the state and I know what it’s like to be murdered by the powerful. Their power extends through words and media and laws, and they use it to take away your death too. They blame you for your own killing, they blame your people, they spread every lie and innuendo. They put you in the ground, and then they drag your name through the dirt too. The Palestinians know this better than anybody. When Israel murdered the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, they lied about it, then sent goons to assault her pallbearers. At the funeral. That’s how evil these people are, and now they’ve gone absolutely wild with genocidal fury. They’re killing, lying, and denying in the thousands, a thousand atrocities every day, only a few of which we even know. But the ones we know cut to the bone, because they murder such ordinary people. It could easily be me or you. We can easily imagine it so. And so their terrorism really hits home.

Now, when my children ask me for a glass of water, I think about the fathers that cannot answer such a simple plea from a child. And my heart breaks for them, across the world. When my children are hungry, I think of the families standing in line for hours for a crust of bread, only to get bombed. And my heart breaks all over again. When I tuck my children into bed, I think of the children buried under bombs, dying slowly over hours, and/or never waking up again at all. This is what Israel attacks, most openly, the most humble, human, moments of living among Palestinians. They make no attempt to target the brave resistance, genocide is all they want.

And you don’t have to take my word for it, just listen to Israelis themselves. As the former header of the occupation National Security Council, Giora Eiland, recently wrote:

The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers. And no, this is not about cruelty for cruelty’s sake, since we don’t support the suffering of the other side as a goal but as a means.

And their sitting Finance Minister says he agrees with every word. Genocidal intent aside, just look at what they’re doing.They say they want to openly ‘clear’ Gaza and stop Palestinians from resisting ever again, which is exactly what they’re doing. They’re targeting hospitals and journalists and schools and women and children. They want to drive the entire population out. And the world gets driven mad, watching. A genocide in real time, with western mass media inciting mass murder, and western arms carrying it out.

I feel such an impotent rage. Why doesn’t someone do something? And yet the ‘international community’ we unconsciously appeal to is precisely the ones doing the killing. That false name hides the same old colonial powers, masquerading as world police and human rights experts now. They spent decades claiming they were friends, and allies, and sending expensive NGOs and consultants to advise us on how not to be poor, indebting us for the privilege of being lectured. Now the mask is off and we see them as they are, and always were. Genocidal colonizers and liars. Hypocritical murderers and thieves. We should have killed them the moment they set foot off the boats, and we are fools for still believing them. About anything at all.

Meanwhile the resistance are the people they told us to hate as terrorists — Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, all reflexive bad words to western audience, without knowing anything about them at all. What the world sees is that these are the only people actually defending Palestine. The only ones behaving rationally, and not randomly slaughtering civilians.Meanwhile the imperial armies are acting like absolute terrorists, targeting hospitals, mosques, and schools, like everything they told us to fear. They were the terror all along.

From Canada to Australia, South America to Africa, everywhere they colonized they killed and spread fear. The only difference in Palestine is that mass and social media spread the fear across the whole world in an instant. This is a historical atrocity being witnessed in the moment. Palestine is the electronic epicenter of the extinction level event colonialism has always been, to all creatures great and small.

In Palestine, this process reaches a paroxysm, a violent outburst of most brutal genocide, industrial bombs hurled at human bodies and leaving a barren land, and all televised and recorded and hurtled around the world at light speed. So that everybody see, and feels it in their bones. And we get the message loud and clear, even if we don’t like it. This is what happens if you dare scratch Empire. They’ll bury your children alive, they’ll kill your elders and your disabled first, they’ll unleash such mechanical hell that it will obliterate anyone that breathes. They’ll make the very Earth bleed. This is what Empire wants us to see, by flexing their power on the powerless. But Empire is dying. And resistance is everywhere now. The whole damn climate is rebelling with the violent phenomenon they call ‘climate change’. Why wouldn’t people also rise up?

The Palestinians began their rebellion with the Al Aqsa Flood, and they are continuing by methodically targeting Israeli military targets. Hezbollah is helping them in the north, with support from Iran. The brave people of Yemen have also joined the call, along with resistance forces in Iraq.Basically the poorest people in the Arab world, while rich despots play with their football teams and play along. The scary Muslims we’ve been told to hate are the only ones actually doing something, but polite liberals condemn them. Fuck that shit. I’m with the rebels. These people are putting their bodies on the line to fight the most evil Empire in human history. More power to them. Mashallah.

The people they told us were terrorists are terrific, and the armies they told us were civilized are pure barbarians. The people that brought ‘civilization’ were never civilized. The people that fought ‘terrorism’ were the terror all along. If what they’re doing in Israel isn’t terrorism, what is? If anything needs to be defeated, it’s this and them.T hese cowards want to show their power by terrorizing the powerless, and making the whole world watch. Indeed, the word martyr, or shaheed, also means witness. While tens of thousand of Palestinians, with an average age of five, are being made martyrs, billions of people are being made witnesses to it all. And we won’t forgive, nor forget. A righteous rebellion is rising, from the sparks of Al Aqsa. May it drown the whole White Empire in a flood.