I woke up this morning to find an email from one of my best friends in Palestine, someone who lives in a small village in the South Hebron Hills. I’ve excerpted it below, deleting personal names, and omitting place names and other particulars, and corrected the grammar of one sentence for clarity. It’s in English, but I’ve provided a tl; dr translation just after the block quote. The word “football” refers throughout to soccer.

You remember I told you about my son [name deleted], he just turned 10 this week. Football is his biggest passion, football is his whole world. Whenever he sees his friends playing in the street, nothing can stop him from joining in, no matter what.

Two days ago, things seemed quiet in our village. There were no soldiers in the neighborhood, so the kids played football near our house. Suddenly, we heard live gunfire. It was terrifying. My wife, [name deleted], started screaming and crying before she even knew where the shots were coming from or where [son] was. A mother’s instinct.

A bullet hit [my son]. By God’s mercy, it entered his thigh and exited without damaging the bone. He was in so much pain, but we were lucky it wasn’t worse. [We] rushed to take him to the hospital as fast as we could. When we arrived, soldiers were already there. Surprisingly, one of the soldiers was actually angry at the sniper who had fired at the children. He was shouting at him and occasionally pushing him, saying things like, why did you do that? they are just kids, they are just playing. Then I started telling him, “Imagine this was your son. Would you accept seeing your child like this?”

I can’t describe what it felt like to see [my son]  bleeding, to witness [my wife] crying helplessly. We are grateful that [my son]  is still alive and that he will recover, but this pain will stay with us forever.

Let me translate that into summary form. It says: My 10-year-old son was playing soccer in the streets of our town. Two days ago, soldiers from a regime that attacked, conquered, settled, and have occupied us since 1967–and have surrounded and besieged our town for the last two years–came to my immediate neighborhood. They decided to set an ambush for a bunch of kids playing in the street, then decided to shoot my pre-adolescent son for fun. The standard weapon issued to soldiers in this army is the American-made and American-issued M-16. Indeed, many of the soldiers in this army are themselves Americans; perhaps the shooter was. No one knows, and no one will. In any case, my son was shot through the leg with a live M-16 round, almost died, but didn’t. 

Undoubtedly, similar scenes will play out in villages throughout the West Bank, unreported and unacknowledged. Kids will die, but no one will hear about it, and few will care. The regime sending along the weapons will keep doing so, in violation of both domestic and international law, while flouting the moral knowledge that any morally competent adult ought to have. Then it will ascend its ever-present high horse and do a lot of yelling and screaming about “rising anti-Semitism,” and the dangers of “political violence,” and expect us to care. 

A regime that shoots children for fun has lost all legitimacy. So has the regime that arms and supports it. The excuses have run out. These regimes have no right to exist, and fully deserve to die. 

Two things prop both up. One is the undying, dogmatic belief in their own unearned civilizational superiority. The other is the dogmatic commitment to a relativist form of retrospective justification. This last is the Machiavellian idea that an act is justified by whether or not it successfully produces benefits for some favored group, regardless of how or why it’s performed. If Jews are inherently superior to Palestinians, and it would augment Jewish security to kill Palestinian children, then Palestinian children must be killed or maimed until the imperatives of Jewish security are satisfied. If the West is superior to the Orient, and the providential mission of the West requires conferring on Israel an indefinably large “qualitative security edge” over its Oriental neighbors, then the people of Palestine must be expelled, maimed, terrorized, starved, and exterminated until this happens–meaning forever, since it will never happen. 

This is the actual meaning of the civilization of which the West is so proud. From Rome on, the West has been a civilization built on the bones, blood, and ruins of presumptively lesser peoples. The carnage it’s produced over millennia is a direct function of the volitional moral blindness–the dogmatism, the evasions, the cowardice, and the perpetual excuse-making–to which it remains attached, motivated among other things by its investment in mission civilisatrice. For all of the empty, pathetic talk of “free speech” in the United States, the fact remains that I can’t show you video or photos of the scene I’ve described above, or give you place or personal names, or any other particulars. If I did, I would simply invite the Israeli military into the village and produce another shooting, maybe a massacre. I’m not about to risk that for a blog read by a handful of authentic readers plus a couple of thousand Chinese bots, not that I would for a larger audience. 

If I tell you that this regime needs to end, I’ll be accused of anti-Semitism, doxxed, maybe fired and blacklisted. Likewise if I tell you that it’s driven by an attachment to a specifically Jewish form of pathology, a theo-political conception of civilizational superiority baked into the foundational texts, not just of Zionism but of Judaism itself. It seems inconceivable that anyone could have read Exodus, Joshua, and/or Esther and miss this, but I guess many have. 

I could make the equivalent claim with impunity if we were discussing Islam–and have, for decades.* But Judaism, I know, is special, and so are The Jews. We mustn’t upset them. We musn’t demand scrutiny of their dogmas, or look too carefully at the history of carnage they’ve produced over the 5,000+ years of the providential mission on which they’ve been sent by the Judeo-Christian God. Well.  I’ve lived among the “Chosen People” of the West Bank and of Israel itself. I know who they are and what they are–what they’re made of, and what they’re capable of. It’s good enough that I know. I don’t need to persuade you. I don’t care what I’m accused of, either, or what happens if I am. I’ve been falsely accused of crimes since the age of seven, the age at which my first police detention and interrogation took place, for aggravated assault. I should be grateful, I suppose, that I wasn’t shot. In any case, defamation is nothing new to me. Falsehood wasn’t invented yesterday.

It’s telling that the U.S. Secretary of War has recently insisted that the perpetrators of the Wounded Knee Massacre keep the military awards they received for that massacre. There’s only one reason to reward the perpetrators of such a massacre. It’s to ensure that their heirs can repeat the performance, or to exonerate the ones that recently have.

American society, like Rome, was built on the bones, blood, and ruination of our “lessers.” Our leaders, like Hegseth, are here to seal the deal. In one way, they may succeed, but in another they’ll inevitably fail. Machiavelli argued that every regime renews itself by revisiting and re-enacting the crimes at its founding. That’s how our overlords–Israeli, American, and otherwise–will succeed. They will no doubt succeed at re-enacting the crimes that created both Israel, the United States, and “the West” itself. But they will never succeed at evading the fact that what once were crimes remain so. The victims, then as now, are here to look them in the eye and say: Our victimization is your indictment. Our destruction is your conviction before the only tribunal that matters, the tribunal of human conscience. We wil outlast you because justice will outlast you. We will go to our graves confident in the knowledge that we are its true heirs, and you are not.

*See, among many others, Irfan Khawaja, “Essentialism, Consistency, and Islam: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism,” Israel Affairs, online publication Sept 21, 2007, and “Orientalism, Racism, and Islam: Edward Said Between Race and Doctrine,” a work in progress presented at the California Roundtable on  Philosophy and Race in 2009, and posted here in 2017.

All three photos are of the Wounded Knee monument in Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. Photo credits: Irfan Khawaja.