Israel has the right to kill your children
I am neither a lawyer, nor an historian.
I mostly write poems.
But poets, like lawyers and historians, use language to reveal what has been hidden. Where they rely on evidence and precedent, we rely on the strange machinery of metaphor and defamiliarisation – shocking the known into a new perspective, a new clarity. We bear witness not only to facts, but to a truth more compelling. A truth that bears the emotional weight of the world. We do not show you the world as it is, but as it has been made to seem. We take what you thought you knew and return it, raw.
Let me be clear.
When I say Israel has the right to kill your children, I do not mean this in the way medieval bigots accused Jews of using Christian blood in ritual—those lies of the blood libel that fed pogrom and massacre. An accusation in the face of Israel’s atrocities so often weaponised, now rendered almost meaningless in its use as deflection.
Nor do I mean Israel has the right to kill only Palestinian children – a right repeatedly enacted and repeatedly justified under a spurious mythology of pre-emption; a right bestowed by deity, destroy the Amalek branch and root, destroy even their animals, burn the trees, salt the earth, all pose an as yet unseen, unrealised threat.
When Israel says, they are little snakes, we must kill them in the womb, the West’s leaders dismiss it as no more than rhetoric, when it is bald faced, defiant admission. Israel has the right to kill Palestinian children – history, policy, and 76+ years of brutal impunity confirms that it does.
No. The right of Israel to kill your children is not based in Judaic or Christian mythology; the mythology is the mask – it is not based in Pilate’s acquiescent hands, or Christ’s crucifixion, or Shylock’s pound of flesh.
No.
Israel has the right to kill your children
because our governments have given it that right.
Not in myth.
Not in scripture.
Not in the walls of the ghetto, or the shadow of the Holocaust.
But in law.
In silence.
In clamour.
In precedent.
In the language of customary international law – that dry legal terrain where repetition becomes permission, and permission becomes power.
I.
Custom as Doctrine
In international law, a norm becomes customary when two things occur:
- General and Consistent Practice
- Opinio Juris – a belief that the practice is legally acceptable or required.
For decades, Israel has bombed homes, schools, refugee camps, UN shelters, hospitals, churches, and mosques. It has killed children – Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian and American – and nothing has been done. There are no sanctions. No trials. No red lines. Western leaders offer shrugs and subsidies, and lank, wet hands.
They do this not once, not twice, but over and over.
Each unpunished atrocity is not a failure. It is a precedent.
This is what lawyers call state practice.
When nations consistently fail to condemn or act, when they reward the perpetrators, when they arm them and give them trade deals, and billions in aid that inevitably circles back, when they stand beside them on podiums—this is law, lobbied, bought and payed for. This is opinio juris.
It is the acceptance of mss slaughter as a legitimate right of state power.
That’s how custom is made. That’s how rights are born.
II.
The Manufacturing of Impunity
A right is not just what you are allowed to do.
It is what no one stops you from doing.
It is the space made by silence, paved with excuses.
What we are witnessing is not war.
It is the manufacture of impunity.
The way it works is deceptively simple;
Israel bombs a hospital.
They deny bombing the hospital.
The mass media in outrage at the suggestion unquestioningly repeats that denial, and in the process of memory formation, the idea that Israel would never bomb a hospital becomes the dominant idea.
Israel then goes on to bomb another hospital, and another, and another, and a school, a university, a refugee camp, a café, and on and on, justifying it militarily on the flimsiest of manufactured evidence.
Psychological studies show that the first facts that are laid down become the dominant facts; first impressions become our truths. That even when those facts are called into question, we tend to integrate that corrective knowledge into our understanding without it supplanting the original impression. In this process, the media facilitates both the negative reality – Israel did not bomb a hospital – and the corrective reality – they were justified in bombing the hospital – is manufactured.
When impunity is manufactured, truth is, for the most part, moot.
Western media repeats the dialectic of impunity ad nauseum.
In the dissonance created, we are left, confused, exhausted, unable to reconcile what we see with what we are told.
Psychologists and propagandists and advertising men know this ploy: the first lie heard is the one that sticks.
Noel Chomsky in his time argued the media manufacturers consent, under the flawed principle that power devolves from and operates with the consent of the public. 600 days of slaughter in the face of widespread opposition demonstrates that reason is a fallacy.
Corrective truths enter the mind as confrontations, as destabilisations, demanding combat.
Doubt is sown. Memory is blurred.
Meanwhile, given impunity, the atrocities accelerate.
In this way, a nation’s actions become mythologised not by its history, not by its learning, not by its spirit or its sense of community, but by its PR strategies—sacralised not by service and sacrifice, but by glamour and think tanks.
This is how genocide becomes plausible.
This is how Israel and their Western collaborators manufacture the impunity that gives them the right to kill your children.
III.
Complicity as Contract
The West has long surrendered its claim to moral leadership.
According to the UN’s Articles on State Responsibility (2001), a state that knowingly enables another to commit international crimes shares responsibility. Western governments are not neutral. They are collaborators. They fund, arm, defend, profit from and politically shield Israeli policy – even when it violates every tenet of human rights law.
They vote down ceasefires.
They delay investigations.
They silence critics and criminalise solidarity.
They turn protest into antisemitism and genocide into defence.
What is this if not complicity?
What is this if not a new Treaty of Tordesillas—dividing the world, not between Spain and Portugal, but between those whose children may live and those whose children may be slaughtered for profit, strategy, or racial ideology?
In Tasmania in 1835 the British invaders put a bounty on the defiant Tasmanian First Nations peoples that resisted occupation, land theft, murder and destruction . Settlers brought them to the point of extinction. In Gaza mercenary corporations receive bonuses for the destruction of homes, of schools, of mosques. Privately run camps concentrate and target the desperate and starving. The economics of genocide have evolved to one of enterprise and entrepreneurs, where any opposition to the genocidal neoliberal order is an assault on freedom itself.
Israel has the economic right to kill your children.
IV.
The Cost of the Utopia
Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote of a utopia built on the suffering of one child—The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
Those who walked away from this brave new world that has such TV screens in it, refused to be complicit in even that ritualised measure of acceptable loss.
We do not walk away.
We build free trade deals over uncounted masses of Palestinian bodies.
We livestream the incineration and the amputation, the slaughter and the starvation. The rags amongst the rubble.
We praise democracy while children are buried alive beneath it.
This is not the ghost of the victims of Holocaust, with their solemn warning, but the spectre, the revenant of its perpetrators, with their unbridled threat.
Rome never died. This is the shadow of brute and ravening Empire.
Historian A.R. Moxon wrote:
“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi Party not because they hated Jews, but out of patriotism, anxiety, religion, politics, convenience, or ignorance. That word is ‘Nazi.’ Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”
So too with our leaders.
Their excuses – strategic interests, shared values, security cooperation, economic success – do not absolve them.
They are evil.
Their media is evil.
The systems that protect them are evil.
They have bound themselves to the blood and breath of every child turned to rags and ash. Today, far in distant Palestine. Tomorrow – wherever they deem necessary – closer than you dare imagine. Home.
Where Israel has the right to kill your children.
The genocide will be televised.
You will be required to disbelieve the evidence of your own eyes.
You will be required to abrogate the remnants of your humanity.
You will be left only with a sound—
a static, a tearing,
like paper being ripped and fed into a microphone,
echoed a thousandfold
by men in suits and women in pearls
telling you:
Israel has the right.
To kill your children.
Your politicians, your media, your corporations gave it to them
Those who have provided material, political, rhetorical, or financial support
for mass killing and occupation.
Those who sat on their hands as children died.
Those who should face the Hague.
We know your names.
Israel has the right to kill your children.
