No Seriously, We All Need to Shut Up and Talk About Gaza Already

By T‑Paine

I remember 9/11 in the same way I remember most of the second grade: sweat shops.

See, when you're in second grade, like most Americans, you're actually just an untapped resource. After the dust of 9/11 settled; after our parents watched it on TV while we were just out of view, after the countless kids pulled out of school, after George told the firemen he could “hear them;” in our little upper-middle class Ohio school our teachers got together and came up with a plan.

There were hundreds of families of victims and first responders who needed funds for the cleanup, for medical expenses, for the journey that was now the rest of their lives. We started making and selling flagpins to offset this cost. A flagpin consisted of several safety pins with red, white, and blue beads strung strategically to look like a US flag. We spent all school day making these, foregoing math, english, or social studies- because apparently patriotism was the new curriculum.

I didn't know it yet, of course, but we were being primed. That national grief, that American bloodlust, that fear dressed up as pride: we branded vengeance. We slapped a label on revenge and called it a dish best served for $9.99. We were told that the only acceptable response to violence was bigger, louder, stupider violence.

The day I woke up and saw the headlines for October 7th I had the same feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not from what I was seeing unfold, but knowing the brand. Knowing the PR stunt the military industrial complex would pull and how Israel now played on the same league as us, and our football team always has the comeback story: bigger, louder, stupider: another reason to retaliate against Arabs, another reason to invade and cleanse the strip, another great exciting excuse to flatten Gaza.

I remember watching the bombing runs starting during Afghanistan, it was live on Fox News like watching New Years Eve. Watching the livestream of the genocide in Gaza this time around is an entirely different experience, it's no longer the glitz of American media presenting it like the ball drop, now it's just another snuff film on LiveLeak.

The thing is, neither of these days happened in a vacuum, despite what we love telling ourselves. They weren't just isolated instances of hatred, they weren't a group of crazies lashing out at an enemy they can't fight, they weren't people who simply “hated our freedom.” Both were born from decades of US imperialism and our violent geopolitical game gone wrong. The US spent the majority of the Cold War propping up dictators, funding religious extremists, and turning entire regions into chessboards. And the one square we keep sacrificing over and over? Palestine.

The very brief history lesson they won't teach you about Israel

To understand how we got here, we have to go back further. Before the American empire took the baton, the British were the ones redrawing maps and fueling fires. After World War I, the Ottoman Empire was carved up and Palestine landed in Britain’s lap as a "mandate,” a polite way of saying occupation.

Around this same time, Zionism (the movement for a Jewish homeland) was gaining traction, especially in Europe, where centuries of antisemitism had made Jewish safety a fantasy. The British, ever pragmatic in their imperial arrogance, issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, promising support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Without ever asking the Palestinians who already lived there.

Zionism wasn’t born out of some ancient biblical entitlement. It was born out of European antisemitism. Pogroms, ghettos, expulsions- Jewish people were pushed out of society, and then told they’d never belong. So a project was born: not to coexist, but to escape. Europe exported its "Jewish problem" to the Middle East, and in doing so, created a new problem it wouldn’t have to look at.

Rightfully so, Palestinian resistance began almost as soon as the British boots hit the ground and Zionist settlements started displacing Palestinian farmers. The people who lived on that land (Muslim, Christian, and even some Jewish Palestinians) weren’t radical terrorists, they were natives resisting colonialism, plain and simple. The same way Indians resisted the Raj, or Kenyans resisted the British in Mau Mau. This wasn’t some ancient religious feud. It was a very modern one: a population watching their land get chopped up, sold off, and renamed in languages they didn’t speak.

Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Palestinian protests were met with crackdowns by British troops: martial law, arrests, executions. The 1936–1939 Arab Revolt is maybe the most telling example: a mass uprising by Palestinians, not just against Zionist immigration, but against British occupation. They launched a general strike that lasted six months, one of the longest in history, and demanded national independence. The British crushed it with full imperial fury, killing thousands, demolishing villages, and setting up systems that would later be used, almost copy-paste, by the Israeli military: collective punishment, administrative detention, night raids.

And then, in Germany, Hitler was elected chancellor and the “Jewish Question” was out in the forefront. Six million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime. That number is burned into every history book, every museum wall, every guilt-ridden Western psyche. But what’s often missing is this: most of the world didn’t want to help them before it got that bad.

The US turned away Jewish refugees. Britain had quotas on Jewish immigration into Palestine. And the rise of Zionism wasn’t originally a European project of sympathy. It was a European project of removal. Antisemitism didn’t vanish after the Holocaust, it mutated. From “Jews don’t belong here” to “Jews should have their own place… over there.”

And so, after WWII, the Western powers saw an opportunity. Palestine, still under British mandate, became the staging ground. Not because it made the most historical or geographical sense, but because it was politically convenient. Europe got to offload its “Jewish Question,” and Britain got to clean its hands of a mess it helped make.

By 1947, the United Nations, under pressure from the West, approved a partition plan. It gave over half the land to the Jewish minority, who made up less than a third of the population. No Palestinian voices were consulted. No vote was given. Just a line on a map.

Then came 1948. The Nakba. The catastrophe. Zionist militias began forcibly expelling Palestinians from their towns and villages: sometimes by leaflet, sometimes by massacre. Over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out. Entire communities erased.

Now, you probably learned about the Trail of Tears in the same sanitized, passive voice they use for every crime we commit. “The Cherokee were relocated.” “Many died along the way.” Like it was a natural disaster, not a state decision.

But the Trail of Tears wasn’t a migration. It was a forced death march, a logistical nightmare of malnourishment, disease, and betrayal, done in the name of “civilization.” It was settler colonialism, rubber-stamped by the U.S. government and carried out by soldiers with guns.

The Nakba was the same story, different continent. Over 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias and later the new Israeli state. Entire villages were erased. Olive groves and family farms destroyed. Refugees marched east into Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, and unlike the Cherokee, they didn’t get reservations. They got refugee camps with tin roofs, UN rations, and barbed wire.

Both cases were called “necessary.” Both were branded as steps toward “progress” or “stability.” But progress for who? Stability for who? Because for the people who lived there, it was a beginning, not an end, to generations of suffering, displacement, and resistance.

And while Holocaust survivors sought safety in this new state, it came at the cost of another people’s displacement. One tragedy laid atop another. A people escaping genocide, unknowingly becoming part of another one.

Like Everything Currently Going Wrong, it Starts With The Cold War

The Cold War wasn't really a war of ideologies like they'd tell you, the US and the Soviet Union were fighting, primarily, over resources- especially oil. As the 50s ended, Eisenhower had just built the highways, our society shifted to car culture- and like all technologies, Russia had to compete. To fuel these burgeoning commuter economies (no pun intended) we needed lots and lots of oil, and it needed to stay cheap. The middle east, rich with oil fields, immediately became a point of interest to both super powers.

We didn’t invent foreign coups, but we perfected them. In 1953, Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh committed the ultimate sin: he tried to nationalize Iranian oil. That meant British Petroleum would lose profits, and that simply wouldn’t do. So Britain called its younger, more impulsive cousin, and the CIA stepped in with Operation Ajax. Mossadegh was ousted, and the Shah (an obedient monarch loyal to Western interests) was installed. He’d go on to rule with brutal authoritarianism, fueled by US money and weapons.

The Iranians never forgot it. The revolution of 1979, and the anti-American rage that boiled with it, didn’t come from nowhere. It was blowback. It was cause and effect. It was imperialism disguised as strategy. It was our first Middle Eastern regime change, and we were hooked: not on democracy, but on oil profits and control.

This was the blueprint, and we ran it again and again. In Iraq, we gave Saddam Hussein weapons and intel when he fought Iran. In Egypt, we funded Mubarak’s police state for decades. In Saudi Arabia, we backed one of the most repressive regimes on earth, all for the sake of oil. We weren’t spreading democracy. We were installing firewalls: dictators who would silence their own people before they'd let oil prices rise or let socialism spread. These regimes cracked down hard, and every crackdown bred resentment. That resentment didn’t vanish, it metastasized. Osama Bin Laden, our national Bond villain, didn’t fall out of the sky. He was a product of this long history: a Saudi citizen radicalized by the American military presence, shaped by the proxy wars we funded, and trained, ironically, in Afghanistan during a US-backed jihad against the Soviets.

Meanwhile, Israel became our golden child, the favored regional strongman, a fortress of Western power in an Arab-majority region. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel showed it could fight and win decisively. Washington took notice. Aid flowed in, weapons deals accelerated, and a new dynamic formed: one where American interests aligned with permanent Palestinian displacement. For the US, Israel wasn’t just an ally; it was an investment. A dependable foothold. A convenient shield. The Palestinian people, crushed under occupation and blockade, were never really part of the story we told ourselves. Their resistance was painted as terrorism, their grief as extremism.

By the time we entered the 1990s and 2000s, the pattern was deeply entrenched: we armed dictators, destabilized democracies, ignored atrocities, and then acted shocked when chaos broke out. We called it the War on Terror, but what we really did was pour gasoline on a fire we’d helped start. Every drone strike, every raid, every civilian body blurred into the next, each one a new recruitment poster for the groups we claimed to fight. The truth is, terrorism was never the disease. It was the symptom. The disease was colonialism in a business suit. The disease was empire.

Osama Bin Laden didn’t wake up one day and decide to hate freedom. That’s the cartoon version we were sold, the Saturday morning special. In reality, Bin Laden’s worldview was shaped by decades of imperial entanglements. He watched the US military set up permanent bases in Saudi Arabia (home to Islam’s holiest sites) after the Gulf War, and he saw that as desecration. He witnessed the West’s unwavering support for Israel, no matter how many bombs dropped on Gaza or bullets found Palestinian children. In his infamous 1996 Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, he made his reasoning brutally clear. He didn't just mention American bases or sanctions against Iraq—he directly invoked Palestine.

Bin Laden framed the US as the enabler of Palestinian oppression. He called out the billions in aid, the diplomatic shielding of Israeli war crimes, the way American politicians genuflected before AIPAC while ignoring the bulldozers flattening refugee homes in the West Bank. In his eyes, America wasn’t just guilty by association, it was the architect behind the suffering. To him, 9/11 wasn’t just retaliation for Saudi occupation or Iraq’s misery; it was vengeance for every Palestinian denied a home, a life, a future. He took the logic of empire, violence in the name of national security, and flipped it back on its origin. He believed that if America could justify collateral damage, so could he.

That’s the part that always gets lost in the sanitized version of history: 9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was a grotesque act, sure, but it was also blowback. Not excusable, but explainable. And buried inside its rationale was a reality we still refuse to face: that the fate of Palestine was never incidental. It was always part of the story.

Even The “Modern” Conflict is Three Decades Old

The truth was becoming harder to ignore, even for Americans. In 2003, just two years after the smoke had cleared from Ground Zero, an American college student named Rachel Corrie stood in front of a Palestinian home in Gaza, hoping to stop its demolition by the Israeli military. She wore a bright orange vest. She held a megaphone. She was crushed to death by a Caterpillar bulldozer made in America, paid for with American aid, and operated with the same logic that flattened so many others before her. She was 23.

Her story was briefly a headline, but it didn’t last. There was no presidential address. No national mourning. No flags at half-mast. The death of a white American girl, someone who looked like our sisters, our classmates, ourselves, still wasn’t enough to break the spell. If Rachel had died in Kabul, maybe we’d have called her a hero. But she died in Gaza, and that made her suspect. She died with the wrong people.

Rachel Corrie was a flashpoint, a reminder that the consequences of empire don’t just stay overseas. They ripple outward, pull people in, chew them up. Her death wasn’t just a tragedy—it was a mirror. But most of us looked away.

That same year, the War on Terror found its next stage. March 2003: the U.S. invaded Iraq under the pretense of weapons of mass destruction. Rachel Corrie was still warm in the ground when the bombs started falling. American media spun it as liberation, a chance to finish what Bush Sr. had started. But behind the justifications was the same engine that always drives empire: oil, control, and the need for a spectacle.

We were told Iraq had something to do with 9/11. That Saddam Hussein was another Hitler. That Iraqis would greet us with flowers. But the truth was uglier, and more familiar: another Arab nation, flattened for profit. Another people, demonized to make their deaths palatable. Another lie, swallowed whole by a grieving, angry country too drunk on vengeance to ask questions.

And the War on Terror didn’t stop with Iraq. It metastasized. Into drone strikes in Yemen, secret prisons in Eastern Europe, torture chambers in Guantanamo, civilian massacres in Afghanistan. It became a forever war, an open checkbook for military contractors and oil companies, signed in blood and rubber-stamped with patriotic slogans. All while the same script played out over and over again: we strike, they retaliate, and every act of resistance is sold to us as senseless terrorism.

While the world’s cameras followed the stars-and-stripes carnage across Baghdad and Kabul, Israel took full advantage of the blind spot. With the U.S. busy bulldozing two entire nations, Israel bulldozed the West Bank. Literally.

The Second Intifada, which began in 2000, reached a fever pitch during the early 2000s. Suicide bombings were answered with airstrikes. Stone-throwers were answered with tanks. And with America now fully entrenched in its own war on "terror," Israel rebranded the Palestinian resistance the same way: not a people reacting to decades of displacement, but simply “terrorists who hated freedom.” It worked. They framed the entire Palestinian cause, from peaceful protestors to armed groups, as no different than al-Qaeda. And America, still bloodthirsty and grieving, bought it wholesale.

In 2002, Israel began constructing the so-called "separation barrier:" 400 miles of concrete wall and fencing that snakes through the West Bank, carving up Palestinian land under the pretext of security. Meanwhile, the IDF continued incursions into refugee camps, leveling homes, arresting children, targeting journalists, all while American aid (our tax dollars), $3 billion a year, kept the machine well-oiled.

The Bush administration called Israel "our most important ally in the Middle East," and echoed their talking points almost verbatim. This wasn’t accidental. Israeli officials openly bragged about teaching the US how to fight terror. They exchanged tactics, surveillance tech, even interrogation methods. In turn, Israel enjoyed near-total impunity, protected by US vetoes at the UN, and funded by American taxpayers who barely knew the names of the villages being erased.

And if Iraq was a laboratory for US imperialism, Palestine was the blueprint. Checkpoints, surveillance drones, home demolitions, black sites; the same tools of control America tested overseas were already daily life in Gaza and the West Bank.

By the time the 2010s rolled around, the world had changed, but not for Gaza. The rest of us were scrolling, streaming, and spiraling, but Gaza was still trapped in a 140-square-mile open-air prison, blockaded by land, sea, and air. Unemployment hit 50%. Electricity ran for maybe four hours a day. Clean water was basically mythological. Every few years, a new operation, a new code name, a new wave of Israeli airstrikes would kill hundreds, often children. And every time, Western media would yawn, turn the blame back on Palestinians, and scroll past.

And yet the resistance never stopped. Because what other option did they have? As the world normalized the occupation, as Israeli settlers marched deeper into the West Bank, as cameras turned away and American aid kept flowing, something was quietly building.

This wasn’t peace. This wasn’t stability. It was a powder keg, packed tight over decades, waiting for a spark.

Oct 7th Wasn't Israel's 9/11, It Was Just False Flag Number We Lost Count

October 7th wasn’t the beginning. It was the scream after a century of suffocation. America responded like it always does: with amnesia and appetite. Within hours, we were back in 2001: shocked, outraged, ready to flatten someone, anyone. Politicians tripped over themselves to stand with Israel. Billions in aid were pledged without a second thought. Protesters calling for ceasefire were branded terrorists. University students were blacklisted. Celebrities were told to shut up or lose their careers.

It didn’t matter that Israel had kept Gaza under siege for 16 years. It didn’t matter that this was a military superpower backed by the US slaughtering civilians trapped in an open-air prison. We were never taught to ask why violence happens. We were taught to choose sides. And we always pick the one with the bigger bombs.

There’s no excusing the killing of civilians. But there’s also no excusing the context being erased. Just like 9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum, neither did October 7. Both were horrors born of long, deliberate histories: of occupation, of empire, of people pushed past the point of despair. And in both cases, we were told to look away from the roots and stare only at the fire.

AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, didn’t need to pivot much. They’d been playing this game for decades: flood the campaign coffers, bend the knee. They’re one of the most powerful lobbying groups in D.C., and they don’t waste money on maybe-politicians. They back winners, and then they own them.

After October 7, their machine went into overdrive. Letters were drafted. Votes were whipped. Ceasefire was smeared as surrender. And the few politicians who dared to call for de-escalation were immediately punished. Ads went up. Opponents were funded. Careers were threatened. It didn’t matter if you were Jewish or Arab or neither: if you criticized Israel, you were now on the wrong side of "civilization."

They used the rise in antisemitism (real, horrifying antisemitism, like swastikas and Nazi salutes) to blur the lines. Protesters chanting “Free Palestine” were lumped in with the ones spray-painting synagogues. Students with keffiyehs were treated like hate criminals. They made no effort to separate a genocidal ideology from a liberation movement because conflating the two was the point.

AIPAC and its allies built a political firewall using trauma as mortar. If you questioned the bombs, you were enabling the next Holocaust. If you mourned Palestinian dead, you must secretly celebrate Israeli ones. They knew exactly what they were doing: exploiting justified fear to justify unjustified war.

And in the background of all this moral theater, another truth sat, quietly known but rarely spoken aloud: Israel helped Hamas rise.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, when the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) was gaining traction on the world stage- recognized by the UN, building diplomatic capital- Israel saw something dangerous: a unified, secular, increasingly moderate Palestinian front. So they backed its religious rival. Quietly, deliberately, Israel helped fund and tolerate Hamas in Gaza, thinking a fragmented resistance would be easier to control than a legitimate statehood movement. Divide and conquer. Destabilize and delay.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

Just like the US helped arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan, just like we sold Saddam the gas he used on the Kurds, we kept thinking we could play puppetmaster with fundamentalism. But eventually the strings get cut. Eventually, the thing you empowered turns its gaze back toward you.

After October 7, the tragedy was weaponized overnight. Not to seek peace. Not to ask why things were this way. But to justify vengeance. Again. Bigger. Louder. Stupider. The cycle was already in motion, AIPAC made sure the talking points were loaded, the networks were ready, the military was greenlit. Just like 9/11, the dead became props. Just like 2001, the grief was real, and the response was performative violence. And just like before, we were told the only path forward was to flatten the map.

No More

We were just kids making flagpins, but that was the first time I learned how grief could be shaped. Not processed, not healed: shaped. Branded. It felt like helping. It looked like community. But really, we were just participating in the first step of a machine that runs on sentiment and spits out missiles. That’s the cruelty of it: the way a symbol of mourning becomes a badge of obedience.

October 7 felt like watching that lesson repeat itself in real time. The same rhythms. The same headlines. The same moral pressure to not ask questions. The same weaponization of pain. And the same playbook: bomb, occupy, deny. Wave the flag. Pick a side. Shut your mouth.

But this was never just about two days, not 9/11, not October 7. This was never just about planes or paragliders or rockets. This was a decades-long choreography of empire: oil, fear, arms deals, propaganda, and silence. Always silence, the kind they count on to keep the gears turning.

We lost a year of second grade in 2001. Not just to the beads and pins, but to the silence that replaced our questions. We stopped learning how to solve problems and started learning how to follow orders. We weren’t taught the history that led to the towers falling, we were taught how to pledge allegiance harder. They didn’t explain the world, they shrank it down to good guys and bad guys, us and them. And by the time we were old enough to start asking why, most of us had already forgotten that anything had been lost at all.

So no, this didn’t begin with Hamas. It didn’t begin with 9/11. It didn’t begin with Rachel Corrie or Osama bin Laden or bulldozers or flagpins. It began with a world that decided some people’s grief matters more than others’. A world that taught us violence is not only justified, but virtuous, as long as it’s ours.

And I don’t know if there’s a clean way out of that. But I know it starts by refusing to make flagpins for anyone’s empire ever again.