62-48: The Noose Was Voted In
Stop debating the rope and start dismantling the machine that ties it.
2:00 AM Gaza, April 1st | Shelling continues while they call it a ceasefire.
The blue light of the phone stains the ceiling in the dark, and I type a sentence about the news only to delete it before the period.
I scroll past images and statements that dissolve before I finish reading them, each one bleeding into the next until the distinction between atrocity and outrage collapses into noise. I can’t fit the truth inside a paragraph, so I delete the sentence because finishing it means choosing which atrocity to center when there are too many to choose from. Most of this year feels like being held underwater while someone argues about the weather.
I remember when a crime looked like a crime without a vote to decide if the blood was justified, when the killing did not need permission to be a killing.
Now they hold a vote. Sixty two yes. Forty eight no. As if the number of hands changes the noose, as if a law makes the killing less of a killing. The Zionist Occupation voted to make execution by hanging the default “punishment” for Palestinians, and they call it deterrence while we call it what it is: genocide. They do not need a law to drop a bomb, they have done that without voting, without permission, without hesitation, but they need a law to make themselves look like they are not murderers. They need the vote so they can point to it and say: this is order, this is civilization.
The law does not apply to settlers who burn our fields and homes or snipers who shoot our children in the head and chest. It applies to us, only us. A committee decided the blood was justified before the trial even begins.
We are being deliberately distracted from something catastrophic, surrounded by smoke and mirrors while we spend time discussing how horrific it is, how cruel, how savage. But what if it wasn’t a law? What if they had already raped Palestinian hostages until their bodies broke, what if they had already trained dogs to attack infants? And what if this all already happened? Do we think calling it a law makes it less of a killing, do we believe that naming the system changes the system, that speaking about it to people who already know stops the machinery from turning?
Do you condemn Hamas. Does Israel deserve to exist. These are not questions but a legitimacy outfit tailored for a monster, a costume sewn from the language of international law and human rights so the world can point and say: see, they are trying to be civilized. They borrow phrases and words to make themselves look legal, wrapping genocide in the language of deterrence and security, and the question is not about violence but about legitimacy. Everyone knows this. Everyone pretends not to.
More than 9,300 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, and that number is larger than some towns. Many of them are women and children, people whose deaths are reported due to torture, starvation, and deliberate medical neglect. And we sit here debating whether the noose is legal, whether the method matters when the outcome is the same, whether the system’s approval makes the killing something other than what it is.
I beg you to not debate. Do not even get angry in a way that consumes you and the victim. Rage instead. Rage will burn the perpetrator while anger will burn you both. Let them have a taste of their own poison. There is no medicine for inhumanity.
The system behind this theater is clear because the debate serves the filthy billionaires who robbed you of this petty life, and they need the monster to look legitimate so they can have their way while weapons arrive on schedule and we watch the world argue about the weather. Rage or perish.
The cursor blinks again in the dark room, and I do not delete the sentence this time. The screen stays on because I made my choice.
Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter!
You’re so right to point away from the rope and towards the machine.
That machine is built on captured political systems that turn alignment into war, captured legal systems that block accountability, captured media and platforms that control perception, and captured academia that produces the legitimacy it needs to function.
That capturing is driven by interlocking blocs. Israel, which requires persistent and permanent dispossession, displacement and genocide to secure a Jewish majority for its state and the state’s expansion. The defence industry, which depends on continuous conflict and arms supply. Financial institutions, which depend on war financing, debt and reconstruction cycles. Energy companies, which depend on control of resources, routes and pricing. Big Tech, which profits from the provision of surveillance, targeting and control over information.