It is also important to note that, here on the home front, here in the U.S., what we think of as our government is now a collection of un-elected clerks, cops, soldiers, and spies, who, regardless of administration or political affiliation, determine our futures, and the future of the world, based largely on ideologies divorced from both reality and morality, and in many cases largely for self interest. What Trump would call the “swamp.” What I’d call the revolving door of the security state.

These are not heroic people being sent from the U.S. to whisper in the ears of Middle Eastern leaders and security counterparts, working tirelessly to resolve a crisis. They are working with the Israelis to facilitate their genocide of the Palestinian people, and to mitigate the consequences for Israel’s actions arising from the region and the wider world.

This is not about hostages or saving civilians or upholding international law, for them. It is about maintaining a hegemonic strategic status quo that benefits the Israeli regime and U.S. interests, and not necessarily those of the U.S. or Israeli people. These people are just as guilty of genocide as those dropping the bombs, or ordering the bombs to be dropped, or those depriving millions of people of the basic necessities of life.

If you let these kinds of people, these dinosaurs of twentieth-century thinking, set the course of the world’s future, you will see the same mistakes made in the twenty-first. What is happening does not serve democracy, it does not serve lasting security for anyone, and it does not serve justice. Before any stable diplomatic path forward, those who have committed atrocities, on all sides, must be held to account and Israel’s campaign of violent ethnic cleansing must stop.