I’ve been thinking about all of this all day and watching the back and forth and listening to everyone’s messaging. And I keep coming around to the fact that at the start of this, after the initial Hamas attack, everyone was on Israel’s side. Some with historical or moral qualification, but on Israel’s side. Sympathetic to their situation at the time. And then Israel’s go-to was ‘let’s bomb and starve children about it.’ Now the machinery of global politics is working toward stopping an Israeli massacre of Palestinian civilians, rather than leveraging against the initial heinous act. It will go down in history as one of the greatest self-owns in statecraft, because they assumed that the United States would cover the bill, as it always has, but that wasn’t enough this time because the world has had enough. For me, it underscores the point that settler colonialism, as a system, is never content with coexistence. It will only accept absolute dominion over that which it claims ownership. It values dominance and control and expansion first, and life only when convenient in service to those concerns. Every action, every line of messaging is done in service to that paradigm. It also reminds us that just because people smile pretty and act the way that we do, just because we seem culturally homogeneous, that does not mean that they are not, themselves, extremists.