Language of the Unheard

The inevitable consequences of selective humanity

You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper right now without being bombarded with the hagiographies of the the two low-level Israeli diplomats that were shot in D.C. last Wednesday. They were about to be engaged. They were “peace loving” people. They were young. They had dreams. The empire paints a picture of two people who they, by virtue of their status and political beliefs, have decided are allowed to be fully human. Politicians from Donald Trump to AOC rush to put out their statements of condemnation, to declare this to be a vile act of antisemitism, to make sure to never interrogate any root cause. That the shooter left behind a manifesto that explicitly names this as a political act is ignored, except where it can be weaponized to implicate the entire movement for Palestine. “Random”, “senseless”, “act of hate”, are the words inscribed on the act with the intent to conceal the ceaseless political violence that contextualizes it.

You will see no such mourning for any of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian victims killed by Israel since 2023. You will never get to know about their hopes, their dreams, their lovers, their mothers and fathers. You will not see their best photos on the front page of the New York Times. They will remain nameless, faceless statistics. Bodies in unmarked graves. “Casualties of war”. Their deaths will be barely remarked upon, and if they are, they will be mentioned in the passive tense, no perpetrators named. They have not been granted humanity by the empire, so they don’t count. Quite literally. Even in death, their numbers are questioned, diminished, disregarded, a preamble of “Hamas-run” added to any mention of the staggering tally to sow a seed of doubt lest you question what all of this carnage is for. The hierarchy of lives in this world made plain for anyone who is willing to see it.

For nearly two years we have begged for the killing to stop. Our rulers have responded with surveillance and beatings and deportations, jailings and character assassinations. The centers of power have made it clear: we don’t care what you want, you have no influence on us. While the media puts out tens of thousands neurotic articles about the paranoiac fantasies of Jewish American Zionists and their feelings of unsafety, the safety of Palestinians in Palestine, of Muslims in America, of their allies and advocates, is erased entirely. Were American politicians to issue condemnations for every two Palestinians killed in Gaza, they would have racked up over 50,000 statements by now. But that isn’t something that is expected of them. Those lives are expendable, invisible, valueless.

The asymmetry is stark. We watch the unending parade of mutilated child corpses fill our timelines while the media focuses their ire on spray paint on a Brooklyn restaurant or chants outside a synagogue selling stolen land. We do all the right things; we march, we call our representatives, we vote uncommitted, and yet the killing never stops. Our government, the perpetrators, completely immune to our pleas, round us up, tar and feather us, brand us bigots. We are forced to do nothing but watch. Total impunity for the butchers and their supporters, people who keep the wheels of the death machine rolling along, begins to make a person feel mad. All the “right ways” of petitioning your government for a change in policy have been exhausted. The peaceful revolution has not accounted for much. Has not yet saved a single life. Every door to stopping the slaughter has been slammed in the faces of the only sane ones among us — those of us who have been made to feel crazy for believing in the sanctity of human life.

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The act of Elias Rodriguez is the inevitable consequence of a system that sees mass death as the cost of doing business. A system that quantifies the value of life in the annual budget and refuses to acknowledge your protests or hear your pleas. While the victims in this case were just low level functionaries, they, too, believed in the hierarchy of lives that this system thrives on. The central conceit of Zionism is, of course, the conceit of empire itself — that one’s life can only exist at the expense of someone else. This machine runs on blood, and couldn’t run at all without the countless cogs like Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim who were more than happy to pay the price of their personal fulfillment with the bodies of people they will never know. This act of random violence only shocks the conscience of those who otherwise have none because it shatters the feeling of elite impunity that those at the top of this hierarchy have enjoyed. It brings the war, for a brief moment, home. While it isn’t up to me to say if someone deserves to die for their banal participation in the crime of crimes, Yaron Lischinsky himself certainly had no problem being the arbiter of who deserves to live and who does not. Far from a neutral party, he justified the forced starvation and endless bombing of Gaza and continued to work for a genocidal government nearly two years after it began its campaign of total Palestinian erasure.

To believe that one can advocate for mass killing, be a willing cog of the death machine, and still enjoy the right to safety is the highest form of hubris. It is the hypocrisy of empire laid bare. It is the declaration that some lives have value, others have none, and that you are only entitled to personhood by the grace of empire. Those of us who reject this are the only ones who have not forfeited our humanity wholesale. There is no moral claim to the notion that the violence at that embassy is in any way worse or even equivalent to the violence in Gaza. That is only something you can think if you believe some lives are inherently worth more than others, and that state sanctioned violence is imbued with a sort of legitimacy that random, desperate acts done in defense of the humanity of the forgotten are not.

The true tragedy in all of this is that this act won’t change anything. It is hard to conceive of anything that would grind this slaughter to a halt. Our government and our system does not rely on our consent. We do not have any mass organizations capable of forcing its hand. It feels impossible to reconcile our powerlessness in the face of the mother of all crimes with our forced complicity in it. Random, desperate acts like that at the embassy feel almost inevitable when every possible channel to make change has been foreclosed. A system built on mass graves, that sacrifices lives for profit, whether by spreadsheet or by bomb, cannot feign surprise when a small fraction of that violence blows back. The violence may have been sharply felt by those it rarely touches that day at the embassy, but for many of us, it is everpresent. We see it in the mundanity of losing your health insurance when you lose your job, in the man left to freeze to death in the Minnesota winter because he doesn’t have a home, in the infant ripped from her mother’s arms because of her immigrant status, in the child who is denied a school lunch because her parents can’t pay. The hierarchy of lives is on bare display for anyone willing to look. We are told again and again, our whole lives, “you mean nothing to us, you don’t matter at all”. A system that runs on violence, that disposes of lives at will, cannot hold claim to moral outrage when the violence it perpetually begets bears fruit. A society where all lives are held sacred has nothing to fear, one that looks the other way will have to look over its shoulder, too.

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