I ask you, Westerner: By what violence did you come to breathe clean air? And how many more dead must be buried for you to stop living undisturbed?
There are no innocents in empire. There are only those who benefit and those who are crushed. The Western public, with its liberal smiles and humanitarian slogans, is not an onlooker to genocide. It is the audience for it. And it is the sponsor.
Palestine is broken under your fuel. Jenin is raided with your silence. Rafah is erased with your money. Across the ocean, migrant bodies are shackled and disappeared under your laws. These are not different worlds. They are different names for the same machinery — a machinery you call civilization.
Every child in a cage — whether shivering beneath a drone-struck roof in Gaza or sleeping in an ICE detention cell under fluorescent lights — is there because you made it possible. Not you alone, but you as citizen, you as taxpayer, you as spectator.
You are not distant from these crimes. You are the reason they are sustainable.
Palestine: The Mirror That Burns the Mask
Why should you care about Palestine?
Because this is not a conflict. It is not “complicated.” It is not ancient. These are lies told to soothe you — lies fed to you like anesthesia.
Palestine is not a headline. It is a crucifixion. Daily.
To be born Palestinian in this world is to be born condemned. Gaza, yes — where the sky opens and children vanish in flame. But also the West Bank — where olive trees are incinerated, where a boy walks to school and never comes home because a soldier decided he could, where men wake to rifles in their faces, and families are erased house by house by house.
This is not a war. It is annihilation.
This is genocide.
And it is carried out with your weapons, your aid, your blindfold.
To not care is to accept that human life is negotiable. That some children are expendable. That they may be starved, shot, caged — and your world will keep spinning.
But this is not about them alone. This is about what it does to you.
Every time you ignore the murder of a child, something in you dies too. Every time you rationalize, equivocate, or scroll past, your spirit contracts. And soon, you find you are incapable of outrage. You become a man who yawns at mass graves. You become a woman who hosts brunch while bodies are bulldozed. You become the dream subject of the empire: calm, informed, and ethically extinct.
You must care because genocide is the greatest crime a people can commit — and silence is how it survives.
Do not say you care while doing nothing, because in the machinery of oppression, feeling without action is not care, it is consent. In the eyes of the child under rubble or the man in chains, your inaction is indistinguishable from allegiance.
The War on the Undocumented: A Moral Rubicon
And why must you care about the undocumented? About the man deported after 25 years. About the mother seized while dropping her children at school. About the girl found alone on a courtroom bench, her parents vanished behind barbed wire?
Not because it might happen to you — but because it already happens to them.
And to be human is to stand in the face of that violence and say: No.
To stand for the undocumented is not an act of charity. It is an act of justice.
You do not need to know their language to know their worth. You do not need to understand their struggle to know they bleed. Their lives are not lesser because they cross borders instead of being born behind them. Their pain is not optional. Their humanity is not up for debate.
And let us say it plainly: they are not here by accident.
They flee because empire chased them. Because the West looted their lands, shattered their governments, and then installed smiling executioners in their place.
Pinochet in Chile. The Shah in Iran. The Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua. Mobutu in Congo. One by one, each regime handpicked or propped up to serve Western capital, to drain the veins of the people and pump the blood back to foreign banks.
They fled because the U.S. and Europe trained their military juntas, funded their death squads, armed their landlords, and baptized their oppression as “development.” They fled because the West installed comprador elites — polished, English-speaking, obedient — who ruled not to uplift their people but to discipline them, extract from them, and vanish them.
They fled because every time a nation rose — for land, for bread, for dignity — the West sent bullets instead of aid, coups instead of solidarity, IMF shackles instead of healing.
And now, when the refugee appears — barefoot and blistered, carrying the ashes of the world you made — you cage him.
The colonizer burns your house, then calls you a criminal when you knock on his door.
To cross the border is not a crime. It is a return — a haunting. A displaced people knocking at the gates of their plunderer.
To not care is to confess that morality, for you, is conditional — a luxury of proximity. And that is not morality at all.
You must care because to watch people hunted like animals, separated from their children, deported into death — and feel nothing — is to declare your own soul unoccupied.
There is no calculus that justifies indifference. Not law. Not order. Not “security.” The only thing revealed in your silence is your passive allegiance to domination.
So choose.
Because what you permit here, you permit anywhere. Not out of fear for yourself — but because to tolerate this is to renounce your claim to justice, and to side, irrevocably, with the executioner.
The Shared System: Colonial Logic Reborn
These are not two crises. They are one.
Palestinians and undocumented immigrants are targets because they disprove the story the West tells itself — the lie that this world is governed by fairness.
They are punished for surviving the empire that tore their homelands apart — punished for daring to live, to speak, to exist without apology.
They are erased by the same language:
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“They are violent.”
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“They are illegal.”
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“They are ungrateful.”
Once that language is accepted, violence becomes policy.
In the West Bank, a settler shoots a child and the press wonders if it was justified.
At the border, a mother is torn from her infant and the government explains it was “procedure.”
Do not ask why this happens. Ask why you were trained not to care.
Both Palestine and the undocumented show you the truth: that this world was built to protect power, not people — and that your silence is the most valuable currency of all.
Your Silence is the Crime
To not care is not neutrality.
It is participation.
Do not speak of justice if the screams of the dying leave you unmoved. Genocide is now. Deportation is now. Families are being destroyed now — and if you feel nothing, then what you call a 'conscience' is merely a life-giving illusion, self-constructed in the dark recesses of your ego for the purpose of repressing that nagging inner-voice of cognitive dissonance that long ago made you feel at least a shred of shame about your inaction and cravenness.
A child’s life was never meant to accommodate your comfort. If comfort is what you chose, then let the record show: when it was time to stand, you adjusted your seat.
And when history speaks — and it will — it will not ask what you felt. It will ask what you allowed.
Fanon taught us that colonialism does not only destroy the colonized. It deforms the colonizer. It hollows him out. It makes her small, petty, banal. It teaches the bystander to flinch at discomfort rather than injustice.
Care — not for strategy, not for safety, but because this is the Rubicon: the point of no return, when silence is no longer abstention but allegiance. Cross it, and you are not a bystander. You are the civilian accomplice empire relies on — not to pull the trigger, but to steady the target.