Congress Is Moving a Pentagon Office to Tel Aviv

Eman Mohammed

I just landed in Dublin from Turkey. The sky is blue, the air is warm, and my phone is a disaster zone of PDFs, stamped forms, and bureaucratic dead ends. I am untangling the exile of my family, as some remain steadfast in Gaza, others fled to Egypt, the rest are in Turkey. No names, no precise locations, yaani no hitlist for the occupation.

When you watch your cousins and their babies slaughtered, you stop caring about telling the world your full story. You are just drowning in endless grief. Posting a smiling group photo of what we used to be won’t save us. There is no “before” to return to. My thoughts are interrupted by the customs officer. He smiles and says, “Welcome home.” I whisper, “If only.” I lost my home the day Israel reduced it to rubble in Gaza while my neighbors were still inside. The day I watched soldiers burn the remains of my children’s pink baby room and desecrate my grandmother’s grave.

But I still care, I do. I try to make this exile “comfortable.” So I buy a couch, sign a lease, and hunt for pre-loved clothes. We are a family of mostly women, unapologetic divas. My aunt was the kind of woman who custom-sewed all our school uniforms because the store-bought fabric wasn’t good enough for us. She used to iron her linen shirts until the creases could cut glass. My mom snuck through countless military curfews to buy a new gown she would never wear in public, just because the joy of it was worth the risk. Now, standing in the duty-free shop at Dublin airport, I stare at a rack of clothes I don’t recognize, wondering if either one of them has a blanket for the cold nights, or water when the heat and the grief break them.

My mom and aunt would have laughed out loud if anyone predicted I’d play the “head of household” role. But my family has decided to accept I am their parental figure now. Their Mukhtar. I secretly despise it. I am the kind of mother who only agreed to have children after striking an ironclad pact with God for guaranteed access to daycare. I always needed their help, and it doesn’t comfort me that now they need mine.

I want to move mountains, but I crumble daily. Nothing delivers our liberation from the Zionist state fast enough to spare me from seeing one more baby with limbs cut off, or fully intact but lifeless. Liberation is an odd word to hear when you realize it’s only the beginning.

Today, I needed to laugh. I couldn’t, until I read the details of the bill intended to move part of the Pentagon into occupied, historical Palestine. Israel wants more human shields, and now they are borrowing American bodies. I laughed, not because I’m shocked by the audacity of the Zionist settlers who want others to fight their genocidal wars, but because I know the U.S. will actually do it.

And if you think they just want our tax money, look at what happened today. Armed Israeli settlers literally kidnapped U.S. Congressman Ro Khanna in the occupied West Bank. They surrounded his van, held him for over an hour, and pointed U.S.-made rifles at him. They treat the U.S. government like an unprotected branch office. But here is the ultimate absurdity, when the Pentagon actually moves to Tel Aviv, who will protect the American soldiers from the settlers? Washington is paying the occupation to protect its own military from the very terrorists it funds and arms.

I am arguing with officials over a visa stamp so my cousin’s child can start school after three years of horrors. Meanwhile, Washington is passing the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026. Buried inside it, pushed by Republican Representative Zach Nunn, is an amendment to establish a Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) office in Israel within 180 days. This legally fuses the U.S. military’s procurement arm with the Israeli occupation Ministry of “Defense.” Washington already hands over $3.8 billion in baseline military aid every single year, not counting the billions in emergency bombs dropped on Gaza. But this amendment goes further. It routes American taxpayer dollars directly to the AI and munitions used to ethnically cleanse us. They hope to bore us with bureaucracy while being the brain feeding the machine. The U.S. funds the algorithms that calculate the exact structural damage needed to collapse a building on a family, deciding how many tons of explosives are required to ensure a baby’s limbs are severed. They call the industrialization of our amputation “innovation.”

While I fight for a piece of paper, the occupation just declared 465.4 dunams around Sinjil and Luban a-Sharqiya in the occupied West Bank as “state land.” They stole it for the Haroeh outpost, using paperwork to do the work of bulldozers to cement a permanent apartheid. In occupied East Jerusalem, they deployed heavy machinery to demolish Greek Orthodox Patriarchate property, hiding behind the absurdity of “gardening orders.”

Somewhere, you are reading this from your living room, scrolling past our erasure between ads for shoes and morning coffee. You’re looking for a nice pair of boots for autumn, feeling that familiar, heavy frustration at the UN’s inaction and the endless, looping videos of our grief. It is easy to feel helpless when you are watching from a safe distance. But my family of divas is still trying to figure out how to replace a lifetime of wardrobe with whatever fits in a single handbag. The Pentagon is moving closer to the rubble, the settlers are kidnapping congressmen, and the paperwork for my cousin’s residency just got denied again. The sky outside my window in Dublin is still blue, and the world keeps turning.

How many pairs of shoes do you need to buy before you notice the ground beneath you is ours?

I am tired. I want my daycare, my village, and my home. But for now, I will keep untangling the papers, and I will keep naming the crimes.