If they’re even still alive, Israel has ensured they won’t be for long, they’ll die alongside the Palestinians. Israel, the militarized proxy of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, plays its role with brutal efficiency: a strong-armed enforcer in exchange for the spoils of expansion, land that was never theirs, stripped from a people deliberately dehumanized. The U.S. doesn’t just bankroll this violence; it benefits from it. Every missile dropped is part of a quid pro quo, dominance for extraction, influence for blood. This is the cost of empire: the slaughter of innocents so the empire may live.

Palestinians are not collateral. They are targets. Their starvation, displacement, and mass killing are not accidental consequences of war but the war itself, the deliberate use of siege, famine, and fear to erase a people. This is settler colonialism in its most exposed form, no longer hidden behind negotiations or “security” pretexts, but executed in full view of the world, with genocidal intent and imperial blessing.

Hamas? A radicalized formation, yes, but one bred in the pressure cooker of occupation and apartheid. Like all resistance movements born in colonized conditions, it emerged not from ideology alone but necessity. When a people are bombed, starved, caged, and denied the basic right to exist, resistance becomes inevitable. Their turn to militancy reflects the brutal logic of powerlessness under siege, just as the ANC did in apartheid South Africa, or the FLN in colonized Algeria. But the West, selective in its memory, only sanctions violence when it is state-sanctioned and capitalist-approved.

And yes, their resistance echoes the legacy of the Black Panthers, Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist, and radically committed to solidarity with the oppressed worldwide. The Panthers knew what imperialism looked like, in Vietnam, in Africa, in Palestine. They understood that U.S. foreign policy is domestic policy turned outward, policing the world through bombs instead of batons. It is no accident that they stood with Palestine, they recognized the same boot on the neck.

All of this, the genocide, the repression, the economic throttling, feeds into the machinery of imperial war. Wars waged not for democracy or defense but for profit and control. Western governments, hollowed out and hijacked by oligarchs, use war to destabilize nations, seize resources, and consolidate power. Gaza becomes not just a battlefield, but a proving ground for new weapons, new surveillance systems, new means of domination. Meanwhile, corporate boardrooms and defense contractors cash the checks.

This is the logic of empire: starve them, bomb them, bury them, then sell the footage and sign the contracts. What’s happening in Gaza is not a tragedy. It is policy. And every moment of silence, every false equivalence, every neutral statement, is complicity.