I Have Never Condemned the Caged

You confuse the bloodied with the blade. You mistake the scream for the strike.

Note to readers: This piece refuses the framing of polite genocide. It will not apologize for choosing the side of the shackled, the starved, the bombed, and the unbowed. If that discomforts you, ask yourself why genocide spoken plainly feels more violent than genocide enacted silently.

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They ask us to condemn resistance
while sipping cocktails beside the architects of annihilation.
They toast to "peace,"
—but only after the last rocket has been fired,
the last refugee has starved,
the last child has been erased from every census, every cradle.

Then, when we do not kneel—
when we dare to say no,
when we refuse to play the part of the obedient colonial subject,
when we choose not to condemn the fire that devours shackles—
they call us radical.

Let them.

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
— Frantz Fanon

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I have never condemned Hamas.
I condemn those who demanded silence in the shadow of occupation.
I condemn the missiles labeled "mercy,"
the sieges framed as "security,"
the starvation protocols disguised as diplomacy.

I condemn the sniper with a soldier’s patience,
not the child who learned to crawl while drones stalked the sky.
I condemn the state that buries the sick under rubble,
then dares to call it defense.

No liberation begins in a vacuum.
No resistance rises without a funeral first whispered into dust.
There is always a grave dug first—
and it is never the empire's.

---

I have never condemned Hezbollah.
I condemn the maps redrawn in boardrooms,
by men who have never tasted smoke,
trading borders like poker chips—
each line a leash, each checkpoint a bruise on history.

Hezbollah was not born from celebration.
It was birthed in bombed-out living rooms,
in treaties broken by empires too bored to keep their word.

You call them extremists
because you have never buried your brother under American steel.
You have never watched your mother wail into a silence
thickened by the West’s endless debates
on whether your people deserve breath.

I do not glorify flags.
But I know this:
those who resist are not the ones who built the cage.
And if you haven’t stood barefoot in the ruins of “surgical strikes,”
you don’t get to moralize about how the ashes learn to rearrange themselves.

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I have never condemned Iran.
I condemn the parliaments of puppetry,
the mirages of democracy erected by oil-soaked hands.

I condemn Israel.
Britain.
The United States.
Saudi Arabia.

—The cold axis of exploitation,
where blood is currency, and gas is gospel.

They fear Iran not for perfection,
but because it remembers.
Because it resists.
Because it does not fetch or kneel.
Because it remembers the Shah.
Because it knows imperialism when it wears a tailored suit
and whispers through foreign aid.

This was never about nuclear weapons.
It’s about who gets to speak.
And who must bleed in silence.

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’
There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
— Arundhati Roy

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You want my condemnation?
You’ll get it.

But not for the ones digging with bare hands
to recover their kin from the rubble.
Not for families passing notes of goodbye
because they know what genocide sounds like when it knocks at 3 a.m.

I will not condemn the occupied
for refusing to die politely.
I will not dress up ethnic cleansing in “complexity.”
I will not lull your conscience while you pay for mass graves.

---

I condemn Zionism.
Wholly.
Without stutter.
Without shame.

Zionism is not Judaism.
It is the industrialization of grief
to justify the annihilation of another people.

It is a bulldozer where a house once stood.
It is a rubber bullet in a child’s eye.
It is white phosphorus over Gaza
lighting the sky like a liar’s revelation.

Zionism is apartheid with a press release.
A genocide with a livestream.
A lie that dares call itself sacred.

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I have never condemned those who fight for breath.
I condemn those who turned olive trees into targets,
who outlawed flags, books, even bread.

I condemn those who bomb bakeries and schools,
then blame the corpses for being in the way.
I condemn the ones who wield victimhood as a weapon
while crushing entire lineages beneath their boots.

The ones who cry “antisemitism”
not out of concern for Jewish safety,
but to protect the empire that wraps itself in a Star of David
and strikes.

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Resistance is not pretty.
It is not curated for social feeds.
It is not lit with soft filters or choreographed apologies.
It is born in barbed wire and whispered lullabies,
in mothers who bleed their songs into the night
as the bombs return like seasons.

What you call terror,
I call aftermath.
What you call radical,
I call reflex.
What you call inexcusable,
I call inevitable.

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You confuse the bloodied with the blade.
You mistake the scream for the strike.
You paint the gasping as violent
while the state suffocates entire generations
and calls it order.

This is empire’s cruelty—
it demands its victims perform dignity
while being dismembered.

It kills,
and then grieves itself.
It writes eulogies for its own bullets.

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And you—
diplomatic, sanitized, detached—
ask the slaughtered to be soft.

You demand moral purity from the ones who’ve had everything stolen—
while you toast the thieves.
You ask for calm while the bombs are still falling.
You say “both sides”
when one side sleeps beneath domes,
and the other beneath drones.

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I have never condemned those who set fire to their chains.
I condemn the prison guards.
The news anchors who blur the line between massacre and “misstep.”
The academics who call genocide a “conflict.”
The fake neutrality that buys occupation a few more years.

You do not get to call it “complicated”
just because your hands are dirty too.

You do not get to cry for “hostages”
and never for the abducted.

You do not get to humanize the settler
and dehumanize the soil he stole.

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Palestinians are not metaphors.
They are not savages.
They are not perfect victims.

They are people—
starving, haunted, maimed—
who still write their names in the sand
before the tide of bombs returns.

Who still hold each other in the dark.
Who still love.
Who still resist.

And I—
I will never condemn that kind of strength.
I will never condemn that kind of survival.
I will condemn only the systems
that ever tried to erase it.

“… to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
— James Baldwin

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I was not born to echo empire.
I was not raised to mourn the bruised ego of the oppressor
while the oppressed bury their children in plastic bags.

I will not apologize
for refusing to sing at genocide’s reception.

If that makes me unpalatable—
to your conferences,
your classrooms,
your sanitized panels—

Good.

My voice was never meant for comfort.
It was meant to name.

Loudly.
Unrepentantly.
Until the silence breaks.

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This essay was written during the 20th month of Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza. Over 140,000 Palestinians have been killed directly and over 500,000 indirectly, with the world watching and waiting. I will not temper truth for those complicit in erasure. This piece is not for the powerful. It is for the silenced. For the resisting. For the not-yet-dead.