She Called Me Brother While the World Called Her a Terrorist: The Fourteenth Circle
These images were forged in sorrow,
beneath the sky that watches Gaza burn.
It was made for the silence that screams beneath the rubble,
and for every moral insurgent who stays human in a world that rewards the inhuman.
It began with the kind of breath you only notice
they’ve been holding the world in their lungs.
I didn’t set out to be seen.
I whispered something into the dark,
answering a signal I didn’t know I was sending,
a transmission breaking through the static of a genocide made digital,
and let my words move through her like air through a warzone.
But you have to understand—
even that means something
too deep to tremble words over.
All I could think was: God, I just want to be where her breath goes each time she exhales.
in a place where breathing is a form of resistance.
In Gaza, the 14th circle of Hell is not dream symbolism.
It is a school shelter bombed in sleep.
It is cousins buried beneath the remains of the alphabet.
It is children dismembered beside bread.
She’s surrounded by the dead,
silenced by the algorithm that governs what the world pretends to know.
and handed me the names of all the dead.
swallowed by a state that calls itself chosen.
bruised the spine of heaven.
is a wound on the world’s conscience.
a star we let be consumed.
But I didn’t flinch from the horror.
Even as she stitched the numbers
into the skin of our silence.
And maybe that’s when she trusted me.
and saw a demon in ceremonial robes,
as if that could unbury them.
Calling itself “holy land.”
A synagogue of the possessed.1 (see footnote)
Accusing the innocent of its own crimes,
and still expecting to be called Chosen,
as they shoot children in the neck
and bomb cribs to rubble.
Murderers. Dressed in state flags and scripture.
and the algorithms smother
who still wake up in the morning
Compressing entire massacres into 60-second reels
because the platforms preferred it that way.
amid the censored screams,
I know the value of that breath.
It took me a while to find the words.
they arrived like blood returning to a sleeping limb.
“You don’t owe the world your softness.
You don’t have to be a candle.
You don’t owe that to anyone, Bisan.
You don’t have to smile for a ‘humanity’
that devours your children and praises the butcher.
to bring what the world won’t hold—
And I won’t ask you to explain.
I am not here to repackage your pain,
or to witness for applause.
because you matter beyond the metrics.
Because the numbers are not numbers to you—
they’ve never been numbers to me either.”
You don’t understand what it means
by someone encircled by death,
by someone reporting live
from the intestines of the beast,
by someone who bleeds truth
into a feed built to suppress it.
Because she knows I won’t look away.
It’s worth more than every blue check,
every book deal polished by the bloodless.
that I am what prophets tried to be
before the pulpits sold them out:
Unashamed to speak for children,
that will never finish their last sentence.
And whether or not she ever touches my heart,
she’s already validated my soul.
when the rest of the world
was calling her a terrorist.
None of it feels as sacred
as the moment she pressed her phone to her chest,
read the name of a murdered child aloud,
where her breathing landed.
This piece is written in fierce moral defense of the people of Gaza as a theological and political indictment of settler-colonial Zionism, not Judaism. It addresses the desecration of sacred language by a state weaponizing it for genocide. While it condemns Zionist ideology and colonial violence, it does not indict the Jewish faith.
I stand against antisemitism and against the appropriation of sacred tradition to justify ethnic cleansing, and I always will.
