The Genocide Won’t Stop in Gaza
How colonialism, capitalism, and the climate crisis have converged into a global system of violence—and what we must do about it
This is 18-month-old child is Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq. Photograph by Anadolu's Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-Arini.
Do you remember the first time you learned about the Holocaust?
I do.
I was eleven years old. We were reading Night by Elie Wiesel. Our English teacher was a daughter of Holocaust survivors. I remember sitting there in disbelief—flooded with rage. I couldn’t fathom how an entire population could sit by and watch while their neighbors were dragged from their homes, herded into cattle cars, and sent to their deaths. How could millions of people fall under such a spell? How could they do nothing as black smoke curled into the sky?
I remember thinking: If I had lived then, I would have fought. I would have died trying to stop it.
And yet—here we are.
Watching it happen again.
This time, in real-time. On every screen.
And none of us can claim ignorance.
Two million people in Gaza—half of them children—are being starved, bombed, shot in aid lines, and buried beneath rubble. And we’re watching. Some are protesting. Some are silent. But most of us are caught in the web of complicity, wrapped in the passive violence of complacency.
The question is no longer hypothetical.
Last month I wrote about thousands of people gathering in Cairo for the Global March to Gaza. Caravans of people from around the world came to march toward Rafah, to protest the genocide unfolding behind its gates. My wife and I considered joining them. We had just gotten married and were contemplating starting our honeymoon by standing for justice.
But we were warned. By our dreams and by our friends. Egyptian friends told us not to go, that we would never be let in. As protesters gathered in Gaza they were confronted by police, cursed by everyday people, had water bottles thrown at them. They were met not with solidarity—but with fear, silence, and shame. The Egyptian government, terrified of war with Israel, shut the gates. People wanted peace—but they also wanted to protect themselves. The logic of self-preservation won.
Fear is contagious. And the power that holds Gaza under siege stretches far beyond its borders—across oceans, across empires and across time.
This isn’t just a war. This is a mirror of the tiny black seed that has infected all of humanity.
What’s happening in Gaza reveals something much larger—something many of us have been unwilling to name.
The people of Palestine are not just victims of Israeli occupation. They are victims of a system—an ancient, insatiable system—that has operated under many names but shares the same logic:
Colonialism. Capitalism. Civilization.
It has may different names and many different facets, but it is the root driver behind the genocide we are witnessing today, behind the entire empire-backed Zionist experiment—and it is the driver of the destruction of the rainforest and collapse of our ecosystems.
It is the reason temperatures continue to rise despite national commitments to do otherwise. It is the reason governments won’t arrest Netanyahu as he flies over their countries, clearly guilty as a war criminal
The Three-Headed Beast
What we’re witnessing is not new. It’s the same system that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, that drove the conquest of the Americas, that scorched forests for rubber and oil, that starved India for profit, that now floods Silicon Valley with investment in AI while the Earth burns.
It is a system built on three pillars:
Colonialism — The logic of domination and dispossession
Capitalism — The worship of profit above life
Civilization — The destruction of nature for man-made systems
This system is not about race or religion. It is not about Jews or Muslims or Christians. It is a machine—and it feeds on life. It extracts. It exploits. And when life resists—it kills.
If we zoom out, the patterns become clear. The same countries funding the bombs over Gaza are also leading the arms race, the fossil fuel frenzy, and the AI boom. The same corporations profiting off war are the ones draining our aquifers and cutting down our forests. The same logic that justifies bombing a hospital in Rafah is the one that justifies drilling in the Amazon, evicting the unhoused, and caging migrants at the border.
This isn’t a glitch in the system. This is the system.
Genocide as Economic Growth
Here’s what few want to say out loud: There are enormous natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza. Billions of dollars’ worth. For over two decades, Israel has eyed that gas—and the people living over it—as an obstacle.
Since the war began, Israel’s GDP has surged by over 200%. As reported by Reuters in June 2023, the desire to tap Gaza’s gas fields has long been an unspoken motivation but is now coming into the limelight. As Francesca Albanese’s UN reports “Genocide as colonial erasure” and “Forever-Occupation, genocide, and profit” make clear, the primary drivers of this genocide are not security, but profit. This is not a war, this is a clear plan by an apartheid regime to exterminate a minority group of people.
Meanwhile, over the last four years the U.S. has poured over $2.4 trillion into defense spending—a 99% increase since 2020, according to the Quincy Institute. War is good for business. Death is profitable, but what about peace?
Weapons manufacturing is a massive multi-trillion dollar annual industry lead heavily by the United States with vested interests across every single person who owns stocks in the S&P500.
This is the system that we have designed. War drives the economic machine. Peace does not.
And Gaza is not the end. The West Bank is next, and who knows what will come after.
Surveillance, ICE, and the Expanding Kill List
The same Palantir surveillance technology used to bomb Gaza is now being used by ICE in the United States to detain, deport, and disappear immigrants—including legal residents. Families are torn apart in the name of “security.” Children are ripped from their homes under the guise of law.
This is how it always begins.
First they come for the enemy. Then for the outsider. Then for the dissenter. Then for you.
Today it’s Gaza. Tomorrow it’s the West Bank. Then Lebanon. Syria. Egypt.
No one is safe in a system that sees dissent as danger and difference as a threat.
Not even those that think they are safe behind the country lines of ‘white,’ ‘hardworking,’ and ‘christian’. As soon as you begin to stand up for your brothers and sisters who are suffering from oppression—you’ll be in the crossfires too—no matter who you are.
This Is Not About Hamas
Let’s be clear: The October 7th attacks were horrific. The murder and kidnapping of civilians is absolutely indefensible.
But what Israel is doing now is not self-defense. It is systematic extermination. Collective punishment is a war crime. Mass starvation is genocide.
You cannot bomb your way to peace. You cannot starve your way to justice. You cannot kill your way to safety. You cannot imprison your way to prosperity.
Violence does not end terrorism. Violence is terrorism.
Killing Saddam Hussein along with 1M Iraqis did not stabilize the Middle East, it became a hotbed for radical Islam. Murdering Ghadaffi did not bring democracy and peace to Libya, it cultivated anarchy. The war in Vietnam did not defeat communism, it slaughtered over 2M people.
And if we allow this logic to prevail—that some lives matter more than others, that some people deserve to die for the sake of “security”—then we are laying the tracks for our own destruction—whether through bullets or drones or starvation.
We are continuing to run headlong towards widespread planetary collapse. We have crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries—pushing earth into a dangerous high-risk zone beyond the point of no return.
The Spiritual Consequence
This is not just a political crisis. It is a spiritual one.
We have forgotten what it means to be human.
In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer:
“All flourishing is mutual.”
But we have built a civilization and our entire monetary system on the opposite belief: All flourishing is competitive.
We flourish at the expense of others. We grow by extraction. We thrive by conquest.
This is the root wound. This is Wetiko—the mind-virus of separation that turns us against each other and against the Earth itself.
What Now?
I say this not only as an appeal to those already committed to stand for justice in Palestine—but as a plea to those still unsure. Still holding on to the illusion that this is someone else’s problem. That this will pass.
It won’t.
If we do not stand now—loudly, collectively, sacrificially—we will not just be watching history repeat.
We will be living it.
And our grandchildren will ask us: What did you do when Gaza starved? When the empire cracked down? When the forests burned and all the fish washed up dead along the sea?
We are not powerless. We are powerful beyond measure—when we stand together, when we organize, when we grieve, when we refuse to normalize atrocity.
Let us not be the generation that watched genocide unfold on Instagram and did nothing. I wrote about 8 simple steps that anyone can do to help break the siege on Gaza. Do them.
Clang The Pots On July 24th at 8pm
Join us tomorrow night on July 24th at 8pm in a simple act of chilling solidarity. Gather with friends and family outside the buildings of your local government, or American and Israeli embassy.
Bring with you a single pot and a single large wooden spoon. Make the sound of starvation loud and clear. Clang the pots. No words required.
Let us be the ones who remembered. Who rose. Who said:
Enough.