They Kept Bombing Anyway

For Gaza, for every lost child, for every mother left holding only dust.

They told us that nonviolence was the highest form of protest. That peaceful resistance would win in the end. That the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, as if the universe were watching, as if the powerful had hearts to bend. But Stokely Carmichael said it clearly: “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience.” And we are watching the absence of conscience unfold in real time.

Millions of us are in the streets. It should be undeniable. London spilling over with bodies, voices, grief. New York pouring into avenues. Paris roaring in defiance. Cape Town, Jakarta, Amsterdam, Sydney. Cities I will never see, people I will never meet — all of us tethered by the horror of watching Gaza erased in front of us. We march. We carry names of dead children on cardboard. We tie keffiyehs around our necks like armour. We sing. We chant. We tell our governments: stop. And nothing happens.

Because genocide is not a mistake. It is not accidental. It is not the tragic consequence of war. It is the war. It is the strategy. It is the plan.

Nonviolence is a language meant for people who can hear. For people who can feel. For people who lose sleep when they see babies pulled from rubble. For people whose stomachs turn at the sight of mothers cradling what remains of their children. But this system — this machine of profit and power — does not hear us. It does not feel anything. It does not lose sleep. It calculates. It funds. It bombs. And it silences.

The truth is not that marches don’t matter. They do. But not because they will save Gaza. Not because they will suddenly awaken the men in suits with their private jets and blood-polished shoes. They matter because they save us. They keep us human in a world trying every day to turn us into obedient consumers, passive watchers, good citizens who keep scrolling. They remind us that we have a heart, even if those in power do not.

The streets are teaching us something older than democracy and more urgent than voting. That solidarity is not performative. That peace without justice is submission. That nonviolence without resistance is theatre. The world we want is not going to be given. It has to be built, defended, protected, by people who refuse to look away.

Millions of us are awake now. We are not few. We are not powerless. But we must stop asking for decency from people who have none left. We must stop hoping for conscience in the corridors of empire. We must turn toward each other. We must feed each other, shelter each other, defend each other. We must build the world after this one burns.

Gaza is burning. And it will shame history if all we did was march.