In the Name of October Seventh

In the name of the 1200 Israelis who died on October 7 and the right of Israel to defend herself, and of the holy spirit that lords over the Holy Land, we are expected to nod solemnly, amen.

In the name of the father, and the sun, which rises every morning and blankets the streets of Gaza with its warmth, while the rubble which blocks out those rays leaves the dead unwarm and undisturbed, for now, and the holy shit this cannot still be happening.

In the name of the 42,000 Palestinians which must always come after the name of Israel, which must always be appended to our ritualistic re-telling of October 7, in the names of the dead who are known and the hundreds of thousands of dead who are not yet known.

In the name of the primordial incantation of the man most responsible. The one who can turn the tap off tomorrow, but who won’t. Does he know what day it is? What the face of a clock looks like? He crosses himself and asks Father Leo to forgive his sins. Which he does, as long as he recites a decade of the Rosary.

St Porphyrius (pray for us). Holy Family (pray for us). St. Joseph of Delaware (pray for us). St. Jude (pray for us).

In the name of Christian Zionism, which keeps its hands clean by keeping them clasped in prayer that Israel will be victorious. The quiet force behind ensuring that criticism of Israel be considered antisemitism. The quiet force of politics that actually just wants the rapture to come and for a New Jerusalem to be built, where the Jews will finally come to believe in Christ.

We pray that price of oil goes up. We pray for the largest US military staging area outside of United States territory. We pray to keep the spoils of war. We pray for the profits made when a child is blown into 244 little pieces, pieces that her father imagines every night trying to pick up and put back together so that he can hold his girl whole one last time.

The profits made when the death toll goes up, when the hospital reaches five times its capacity. When St. Joseph discusses bombing Iranian oil fields.

In the name of The Profits, and of the land and of manifest destiny. We clasp our hands in prayer and beg to someone to make all of this stop. Perhaps violent intercession is all we can think of to hope for. Of Netenyahu hanging upside down. Of average Israelis storming the Knesset and forcing the government out. Of Iran destroying every Israeli runway that has the capacity to receive more weapons.

We clasp the hands of our comrades and our friends. We thread our fingers in between the fingers of our children and thank God that by a stroke of cosmic luck, we were not born there. By a stroke of cosmic luck, we were born somewhere that keeps its hands clean and quietly encourages the violence to continue. The luck of living on the side of the perpetrator.

A mother prays Fajr clutching her children in bed; she cannot bear to leave them. The children twitch to the sound of the bombs falling around them. If we are lucky, we will die together in this bed and no one will be left behind. Perhaps there is time to again repeat, for the last time, Ashadu an la ilaha illa Allah, wa ashadu anna muhammadan rasul ullah —

42,000. 200,000. 400,000. 2 million displacements. Civil infrastructure annhialated. The hubris of the leadership of America’s Chosen People. Hubris that fuels genocide.

And in his delusion, a mind that has already been prepped to make the final journey from this world unto the next, a man repeats aloud, over and over, his favourite hymn,

You need not fear the terror of the night
Nor the arrow that flies by day
Though thousands fall about you, near you it shall not come

Forgetting that he himself is that terror of the night.