Yahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer of Palestinian background. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including most recently On the Contrary (2025), a study of the lives and literature of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. Lababidi’s acclaimed collection, Palestine Wail, is available from Daraja Press.
I imagine a terrible scene: A parent standing outside a school after a strike, waiting for names to be read. Reports arrive broken and uncertain, numbers shifting with every update. A crowd gathers in suspended time, with phones glowing in restless hands and hope reduced to a pause before a name is spoken. War begins for the public with news and statements justifying action — for someone else it begins with the suspenseful terror of information about their loved ones.
American and Israeli strikes on Iran, followed by Iranian retaliation across the region, arrived wrapped in familiar lies: security, prevention and imminent threats. Such words are repeated so often as to reflect ritual. Language pressed into service to justify escalation that many of us were promised would never come again. Listening to this rhetoric is both sickening and exhausting. The script has survived too many administrations to still pretend innocence.
I remember the months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: The certainty on television, insistence that hesitation meant weakness and pressure to accept urgency over doubt permeated the airwaves. Later, when those supposed justifications unraveled, the tone shifted. Officials in Washington softened their language while the innocent hundreds of thousands murdered remained where they had fallen. That memory sits behind every new claim of necessity today, as it should.
To claim liberation while schoolgirls are buried beneath concrete is a contradiction history will remember.
- Yahia Lababidi
What exhausts me today is the speed with which promises dissolve. United States President Donald Trump built political capital on condemning endless wars, rightfully mocking his predecessors for dragging America into Middle East conflicts. Yet the same horrific pattern has reemerged, with the United States drawn into confrontation with Iran — amid peace negotiations — acting in lockstep with Israel's priorities. The strikes came in the middle of peace negotiations, making the timing impossible to ignore.
The cynical explanation is not that diplomacy failed, but that it was beginning to succeed. Yet the rhetoric shifts overnight. Citizens are expected to forget yesterday's promises in order to accept today's escalation.
Reports that around 150 Iranian schoolgirls were killed in a likely Israeli or U.S. strike on a primary school in Iran cut through whatever defenses remained. While the precise number of dead may continue to shift depending on who is counting, the children's presence does not. There is a bitter irony in hearing language about liberating Iranian women while reports describe a girls' school reduced to rubble, surrounded by screaming families asking a simple question: "Why?"
To claim liberation while schoolgirls are buried beneath concrete is a contradiction history will remember. I find myself imagining how Americans would respond if the geography were reversed: if Iran killed American schoolgirls in the United States, describing the crime as a necessary loss in the name of some strategic operation supposedly backed by moral clarity. Empathy still follows borders, while grief does not.
By early estimates, more than 500 Iranians had been killed since the strikes began — many of them civilians. Official language helps make such things bearable for those far away.
"Precision strike." "Collateral damage." "Proportionate response."
These are words designed to sound measured and rational. Precision suggests control where none truly exists. "Collateral" belittles lives into secondary details. "Proportion" implies that suffering can be balanced, weighed and measures. Such vocabulary shields decision-makers from the full moral weight of what they authorize and gives permission to those willing to look the other way.
The United States continues to provide diplomatic and military backing, leaving many to wonder whether Washington is pursuing its own strategy or simply enabling Israel's expanding agenda.
- Yahia Lababidi
Lebanon enters the headlines again with Israeli strikes in the south, widening an already burning region. This, clearly, is part of a larger and stated pattern: Israel fighting on multiple fronts while warning of existential threats that seem to justify perpetual expansion of conflict, all in the name of realizing the nightmare of a Greater Israel. For Lebanon, each new strike risks reopening old wars, pulling fragile communities back into instability. The danger is the steady normalization of regional escalation — a slow march toward a broader mess much harder to contain.
Behind much of this stands Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader whose political survival has become inseparable from perpetual crisis. Israel now finds itself engaged in simultaneous wars and confrontations across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and now Iran, spilling innocent blood across borders. The United States continues to provide diplomatic and military backing, leaving many to wonder whether Washington is pursuing its own strategy or simply enabling Israel's expanding agenda.
Both nations chose escalation at a moment when de-escalation was still possible and desirable. The result is civilian death on a scale that cannot be hidden behind official language. The price is paid by civilians from Gaza to southern Lebanon to Iranian cities, leaving innocent people with no control over the dark calculations made above them.
Palestine carries another layer of grief, one that feels immediate and unending. Call it genocide, mass murder or at least bloody apartheid. At minimum, call it a crime against humanity. Yet, the world watches, recoils and looks away. Repetition dulls outrage. Israel closing aid flows was long ago old news in this region. The suffering does not lessen — only the attention given to it.
The hardest realization is noticing this change inside oneself. I catch my thumb scrolling past a headline that would once have stopped me cold. An image flashes by and I keep moving. That moment frightens me. War becomes habit as we are desensitized. The mind learns to survive constant exposure. Others will debate deterrence, alliances and strategic outcomes. What stays with me is something closer to shame: how easily political language pardons hypocrisy and brutality, how quickly escalation becomes routine and how citizens are asked to live alongside permanent crisis as though it were normal life.
The sin of bombing a Muslim country during Ramadan weighs heavy on me. Ramadan is the Islamic holy month. Muslims are not supposed to start wars and are expected to pause ongoing ones. This timing carries uncoincidental contempt for Islam and Muslims that should not be missed, and yet it is almost completely absent from reporting and public discourse.
I return to the imagined parent outside the school. Someone waiting. Someone listening for a name that will either spare them or undo them. Behind every statement from officials, there is a life carrying the full weight of decisions made far away.
I cannot end with reassurance. What remains is anger at the ease with which power justifies itself. Fatigue at watching the same patterns repeat under new slogans and the fear of how quickly even horror can become familiar increasingly define our world.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
