If this was about the preservation of life, or about the return of peace, 11,000 lives, nearly a third of them children, would have been enough blood to balance it out. But that wasn’t enough for the world. And no amount will be enough for the world because those lives never mattered to the world in the first place. This is about the imperial, colonialist core maintaining its control over land, politics, money, ideas, and people, not just in Palestine, but around the world. It’s a show of force.

It is a near repeat of the situation we saw after 2001, where the violence of a few people was used to justify the repression and maiming and displacement and deaths of millions of people. That, too, was not about justice or security, whatever western agents or leaders told themselves, and still tell themselves to this day. It was about using human suffering to leverage power. It was about working angles at the expense of other human beings, same as most wars.

But colonial, imperial power has a poor record in history. It always ends the same. People can only internalize so much, and you reach a practical point of diminishing returns where military violence creates more consequences than solutions. You can call people roaches, or you can market well and simply think of them that way, but nature tells us that the roaches persist when more charismatic fauna falter. It’s their place and you’re in it without their consent. Rhetoric won’t change that.