For Rafah

200 Palestinian bodies were found in a mass grave, some with their hands tied behind their backs.

The call from students across the world is: stop this apocalypse.

They have been calling and calling and the men, in their wisdom, ignore and ignore.

Rather than stop, the men pray for violence, for police in riot gear, whose bullets and batons, aching to mete justice—which is another word, in such callous mouths, for the slake of genocide—these bloodthirsty men cower before a child with a sign and a heart beating freedom. The powerful men know only their addiction to power.

Rather than stop, they talk about risk, management, enterprise. They talk about the rules of protest and the law, as if law were not the name of the weight placed on bodies whose yearning for freedom is met with a bomb, and a bomb, and a bomb paid for by the law.

Rather than stop, they handcuff.

Rather than stop, they cling to the failed premise: this must be how it is because it is how it has been. They cling to the violence that they know, rather than abide by what the students are telling them. What the students, in their yearning, have known all along. That the bombs and the law and the order and the colonialism do not make them safe. Do not make them live a life that brightens those shadows history has reserved for the shadow-faced, shadow-lived.

In Rafah, we see the broken bodies and the rubble, and the students say stop. Stop. And all the men can see is how to name, in such times, a project that knows only law, only what echoes as dominion. Only what, in such times, has been the project of a law that does not see itself as law, but power, but vengeance.