Are the US and Israel Breaking Up?

Inside the Toxic Collapse of a Colonial Marriage

Eman Mohammed

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21st June 2026, 12:00 PM Turkey | Gaza | Both baking under a blinding sun.

The line was clear today. My aunt’s voice did not crackle with static or emotion, just exhaustion. Her words were heavy with the daily math of survival, where every breath is measured and small comforts slip away. She was not speaking about the bombing. She was talking about lighters and the faint metallic click of a flame now turned into a luxury.

Before the genocide, you could buy two or three for one shekel. Now they cost twenty-five shekels, which is about eight dollars. A new class of war profiteers has risen in the shadow of the siege, including Palestinian merchants who saw our suffocation as a business opportunity. They hoard what little slips through the crossings to bleed the last coins from our pockets. Genocide is not only the missile that turns a building to dust. It is also a tax of twenty-five shekels on a simple spark.

Living through this relentless grinding makes the future feel unsafe. When I picture turning forty in two years, terror arrives first. The genocide escalated when I was thirty-five. I blinked, and now I am thirty-eight, the weight of those years pressing down like the dusty air after a strike. Very few in Gaza ever reach forty. As a child, I thought adults dying young was normal. I pictured the rare survivors as angels who had somehow slipped past the curse. I wish I could brush that off as a child’s imagination, but the evidence keeps piling up. They kill us in the thousands, leaving half of Gaza under eighteen. The majority of my friends are dead. My daughter was bombed at one year old. My aunt’s long-expected grandchild was buried with his mother. Death is deliberate, and the curse reveals itself as the work of the Zionist genocidal state.

Yet here I am in Ireland, blurting out my real age the moment bouncers ask for ID. “I am thirty-eight!” I announce, half proud, half panicked. It is a strange, bittersweet mercy that they assume I am young, but I worry it is just my height. The Zionist entity did not just steal our land and futures. It weaponized deprivation and hunger until our bodies carry the damage for decades. I get carded like a teenager while carrying the grief of three lifetimes. I look twenty-five, but the years count differently for people like me.

But the economic bleeding is only the surface. The real haunting lives in the faces that refuse to fade. Three of my friends especially stay with me. Soaad left behind two young children. Ayman was killed with his wife, their three children, and his brother. Alaa was murdered alongside her entire extended family. Every time I close my eyes, they appear vividly, and survivor guilt crashes over me like a cold wave. Israel killed them all while I remain here.

Living through this genocide from afar is its own hell, especially when your job is to report on it. I spend my days digging through court filings, cross-referencing death tolls, and turning my slaughtered relatives into digestible statistics. Then I sit in newsrooms listening to colleagues discuss my family with clinical detachment. They cannot see the faces behind the numbers. No matter how many images of babies with severed limbs flood the feeds, they do not see our children as their own.

A Palestinian baby losing their legs at two months old does not shatter the world into action. Our genocide is sustained by weapons deals, colonial land theft, Zionist ideology, and a bottomless apathy. Even those who offer solidarity give only a fragile grief, one TikTok cat video away from being forgotten. We chew on glass while they scroll past.

Yet this wall of indifference is finally cracking. The Zionist state is hemorrhaging support in the United States. Americans want accountability, not branding. In a panic, the Israeli government has poured resources into American PR campaigns to launder its image. But the effort is not stopping the shift. The boycott is working. Campus occupations, BDS campaigns, and grassroots defiance have pierced the armor of the settlers. They do this not because pressure magically stops bombs, but because it makes denial harder to sustain.

This shift matters. The US and Israel remain entangled, but their alignment is strained by competing priorities. It does not signal restraint, but it exposes the friction between two colonial projects. As a direct result of global boycotts and BDS campaigns, economic costs are rippling outward. The Zionist entity has lost over fifty-seven billion dollars. Tech giants are laying off thousands, shutting down research centers, and fleeing the apartheid state. The empire and its outpost bicker, but the violence rolls on without pause.

Watching them now feels like witnessing a toxic marriage unraveling. It is not a clean ending, just mutual accusations as shared interests fracture. They are two settler projects built on stolen land and sustained by elimination, turning on each other in public while our bodies pile up. The empire is starting to see its mirror image as a liability, and that fracture offers a rare opening.

For years I could not understand how people move on after losing a partner or child. The world demands resilience, but in the empire’s vocabulary, resilience means forgetting.

I lived in Gaza until I was twenty-seven. I know the suffocating grief that lingers like smoke. When my child was injured and I held their broken body, I knew having another was not in my future. I could never survive loving something so beautiful while being powerless to protect it. You do not simply move on from a child bleeding in your arms.

The American public is now tasting this same paralysis. They are waking to the horror of atrocities committed in their name and can no longer simply scroll past the images of our children. The BDS movement is their collective refusal to forget. This refusal carries material weight. The billions funneled to the Zionist war machine are stolen from their own communities. It is poisoned water on Indigenous land, underfunded schools, and crumbling infrastructure. By making it harder to finance the war machine, Americans strike at the engine of their own debt and inflation. It is not charity. It is self-defense.

My aunt hung up the phone, and the silence that followed carried the weight of survival. Stoves still need lighting and children still need feeding in a place the world has declared uninhabitable. But the consensus is fracturing. The American empire is bleeding from its foreign wars, and for the first time, large parts of the public are refusing to pay for the arson. Let the millions in propaganda spending choke them. We will keep striking our own sparks in the dark, waiting for the day the sky finally stops falling.