guilty

when this war finally ends—and it will, like all wars, in exhaustion rather than victory—memorials will go up, tribunals will gavel down verdicts, and the usual suspects will gather at the most grotesque of western pageants: the victory of amnesia. our tearful politicians, peddlers of endless war and performative grief, will plant their solemn wreaths, mourn the mass graves of civilians, and bow their heads in the lord’s prayer—quietly whispering “forgive us our sins”—as if their signatures weren’t etched on every bomb.

the war’s victims, those who still have their limbs and their sanity, will spend their lives battling nightmares and the daily reminders of what they’ve lost—the sight of an empty chair at the dinner table, the echo of a child’s laughter silenced too soon—often by bunker bombs that would vaporize even a dinosaur. their days will be haunted by the bitter pull toward vengeance, a darkness they must resist even as the world forgets their grief. traumatized orphans will grow into fractured adults, carrying with them memories of bombed-out classrooms and lullabies sung in shelters. their broken futures will echo with questions: why did the world allow their parents to die like that—in their homes where they slept, in their schools where they hid, in their hospitals where they fought to live? what crime had they committed, other than breathing under the wrong sky? survivors will sift through the rubble of a land stripped bare, searching for treasures long denied from the civilized masters of that shining city on a hill: hope, liberty, and justice for all.

but let’s not kid ourselves. they knew. every prime minister, every president, every so-called diplomat—each one knew. the complicit reclined in their parliamentary chambers, leisurely scrolling tiktok and twitter feeds of dismembered children with all the detached curiosity of roman senators tallying the scores of nero’s gladiator games. when israelis were gunned down in their homes, and palestinians were blown apart in theirs, they issued ahistorical statements about the “complexity” of the situation. translation: forget 1948, my child, keep your eyes on october 7th, and for heaven's sake—don't spoil the performance by bringing up the nakba or those long-ago decades of occupation. why disrupt the lucrative cleansing of another indigenous people? a genocide? of course it is, but you have amazon prime, your sports, and every flavor of ice cream your heart desires. be grateful for your comforts, and pick your protests wisely—after all, the war dogs are fed, the donors are pleased, and power, that most addictive of narcotics, flows as freely as palestinian blood.

instead of ending the israeli occupation, they deepened it. instead of condemning the israeli apartheid, they defended it. instead of stopping the israeli slaughter of palestinians—funded by the united states and executed by the idf—they fueled it with every sanction, every veto, every sham of a peace talk, and every arms deal brimming with the world’s deadliest weapons. and when the obvious solution—two states, two peoples—stood within reach, they turned away, winking to their lobbyist overlords, lying to their voters, choosing the self-serving status quo over liberty and justice for all.

and so they delivered their masterclass in moral corruption, our so-called democratic representatives, dancing shamelessly to their donors' tune while pretending to hear the people's voice. these paragons of manifest destiny betrayed their voters, their conscience, and that quaint document called the constitution, wrapping mass murder in the silken rhetoric of self-defense and laundering their guilt in the holy waters of diplomatic immunity. the arithmetic, as they say in washington's better circles, is rather awkward: over a thousand israeli civilians died on october 7th; fifty thousand palestinians, mostly women and children, have perished since. nevermind those hundreds of thousands of indigenous palestinians dispossessed, tortured, or killed since 1948. yet behind those numbers are lives—parents who will never hold their children again, empty classrooms where laughter once echoed, homes reduced to ashes and silence. these figures are not statistics; they are stories, erased with indifference and buried beneath rhetoric. but don't trouble our representatives with such inconvenient figures or tales of our shared humanity—they're far too busy rebranding israeli occupation as democracy and palestinian resistance as terrorism.

is it any wonder that the sacred lands run crimson with civilian blood while the west, ever the champion of moral hypocrisy, dusts off its exquisite orwellian machinery to explain why some victims deserve more sympathy than others? how telling that our moral calculus always seems to favor those with the better-armed lobby. the world sees clearly what our elected performers refuse to admit: an illegal israeli occupation on one side, an occupied palestinian people fighting for liberation on the other. but admitting this would spoil the show, wouldn't it? and so the united states and its allies continue their theatrical defense of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, proving once again that empire, like tragedy, repeats itself—first as policy, then as farce. but the land of palestine, scarred by generations of war, refuses to play its assigned role in this carnival of forgetting. courageous journalists, billions in solidarity, and the earth itself bear witness as nearly two million civilians endure bombs, famine, and the cruelest methods of collective punishment. these perpetrators will one day fade from the headlines, but their names are already carved into history's ledger of shame—a grim indictment of our civilized barbarism. even now, they strut and fret upon their borrowed stage, deaf to history's constant lesson: power is temporary, man mortal, justice eternal.

let them remember: empires rise and fall—rome, the ottomans, the mongols, europe’s colonial masters—all convinced of their eternity. they were wrong. history dismantles oppression, buries tyrants, and moves on. apartheid crumbled in south africa. afghans sent the russians packing. and the once all-powerful occupiers fled algeria, vietnam, and iraq—broken, defeated, humiliated. yet the people endured, and the land remained. palestine, scarred but unyielding, follows the same path—enduring the massacres, the destruction, the relentless dehumanization—but history has already chosen its victor. palestine will rise, joining the proud nations that fought, bled, and triumphed for their dignity, freedom, and independence. and when the war finally ends, and historians scribble the verdicts, they will ask: who was guilty? the answer will surprise no one.

o’ solemn children of tomorrow's jury, bearers of the final gavel, have ye reached a verdict? yes, your honor. we, the gentle and the lowly, descendants of abraham, shepherds of liberty and justice for all, voices of the persecuted and the dead, find our elders and their co-conspirators guilty: guilty of waging crimes against humanity, guilty of inflicting cruel and collective punishment, guilty of carrying out ethnic cleansing with genocidal intent, guilty of desecrating life against a poor, occupied, stateless, and defenseless population. we, all of god's children, bear witness outside the hague as their names join the ledger of history’s darkest pages—the camps of the holocaust, the killing fields of cambodia, the ashes of rwanda, the graves of bosnia, the silent screams of darfur. they now stand among the butchers of tokyo and nuremberg, their place in infamy duly and shamefully cemented. and if justice has any poetry left, these architects of atrocity will live just long enough to hear their victims curse their names from a sovereign land called palestine—and to watch their whitewashed memoirs, hollow legacies, and vainglorious statues shatter against the granite of truth. guilty. guilty. guilty.

—jk montane
(THE DIARY OF EDDY MOOD)