One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

She is fog-colored when they find her, she believes she has ended. Like porters in service of some grotesque nobility, half a dozen men carry the stretcher out of something cavernous, something that used to be a home, and she, a girl of nine or ten, is whisked away. Sitting on the stretcher, dazed and bloodied, she looks off to the side. She appears to be searching. The men who carry the stretcher move with urgency, as if the doing of care, of gentleness, can undo what has happened to this girl, to this place, to the bodies yet to be dug from beneath the rubble. Someone nearby asks God for revenge. Perhaps God is here somewhere, also searching.

…

Language, too, forces the air from the lungs.

Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language—a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence. As though living was the aberration. And this language might protect the empire’s most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.

The girl on the stretcher believes she has ended. A man says to her: Inti zay el amar. You are like the moon. Again, translation fails. There is no English equivalent to the lineage of this phrase, a lineage that runs through generations of old movies and love songs and family gatherings. Listen to the sly setting joy and pleading, raw pleading that carries the words as this man tells the girl who lived when so many others died that she is beautiful beyond the bounds of this world.

رﻣﻘﻟا يز

Something has ended here. But something else begins. The dead dig wells in the living.

El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (pp. 5-6). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

We are seeing it, but they are telling us it is not there.

We are watching the ethnic cleansing, but they are calling it self-defense.

We are witnessing the dead babies on the destroyed and abandoned hospital beds, still connected to pipes that could offer them no more oxygen, nutrition, or care (where are your parents, babies? What has become of your siblings?). They are paddling a narrative of fictitious terrorist headquarters.

We know the maps – they are just a couple of clicks away – but they won’t talk about it.

We have scrolled more human agony and despair than we had ever imagined possible before the genocide. But they sanitize it – us – from existence.

Instead, they report a rise in antisemitism, the code word for more government bullying, censorship, and intimidation; for forced desensitization and dehumanization on a civilizational scale, in support of open genocide.

Everything is exposed. It is there. We’re looking at it. But they lie, deflect, and deny, eying us menacingly all the time, like a monster from a children’s book.

The broken man looking for his 4 children under the rubble is right there in our living room. We can see every pain-filled tear in his eyes and every horror-induced sweat bead running down his tormented temples in perfect detail, and sense how only the thinnest thread still connects him to the world of the living, (barely, barely)

But they are there, too, accompanied by police (uniforms only, no faces), and they forbid us to talk to him and to offer him our stupid, useless tears of shared humanity – the thing we once considered the crown jewel of our existence. The miserable least we can do, as we collapse inward, overtaken by the terrible sounds of the skies breaking: a father lost his 4 children here.

We must not see, hear, feel, smell, or – god and the community guidelines forbid – touch.

We are forcibly hospitalized and virtually tied to a bed in a Zionist insane asylum. That’s what’s happened to us.

Involuntarily Committed into the Zionist Asylum (for Being Normal) by Alon Mizrahi, substack Feb 24, 2025