Dragged Into The Abyss

October 7th shattered me. I’ve coped for 600+ days by imagining a vision to end it

I am exhausted.

Physically. Mentally. Spiritually. Emotionally. Intellectually.

Over 600 days of war, fueled by religious-nationalist fever, irredentism, paralysis, and international ineptitude—with no end in sight.

Six hundred days in the abyss, stuck in toxic comment threads and crashouts on cursed social media platforms.

October 7th broke me. The genocidal massacre of Jews that day pushed my fragile mind into a manic state. The 100-year war between the Children of Issac and the Children of Ishmael hijacked my nervous system, and I haven’t fully recovered since. The impulse to check the Times of Israel and Barak Ravid’s Twitter feed strikes me immediately upon my awaking.

Each. And. Every. Day.

In the years and months before, I could sense a reckoning coming for the Holy Land. It began with the return of Bibi Netanyahu and the formation of his hard-right government, mirroring the rise of hard-line nationalist politics that have taken over the Western world, in response to culture wars with the Islamic World. Talk of judicial overhaul then flickered in my news diet — The Economist briefings, a Lex Fridman podcast — quiet signals of deeper turmoil in the Holy Land. But I never would have predicted having my mind, body, and soul utterly shattered by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The subsequent destruction of the Gaza Strip has demanded my spiritual energy more than anything else in the world.

I physically cannot pick a side in this war. Even as far more Palestinians have died, I can’t ignore what Israel is — and what fears and traumas gave birth to it—a people under siege for centuries, yearning for a homeland, while still making immense contributions to the host nations that tolerated and oppressed them.

And I remember reading Article 7 of Hamas’s charter during a college course on the conflict: a genocidal doctrine embedded inside the leaders of a resistance movement that otherwise would have justice on its side. No amount of post-colonial theory can make me unsee that.

I live in the DMV, so I visited the Holocaust Museum four times in total after October 7th. That much, I owe to the Jewish people. I had to experience the culmination of the long arc of Jewish tragedy.

To internalize why Jews say “Never Again”.

And still, I cannot accept the planetary devastation of the Gaza Strip, or the continued oppression and erasure of the Palestinian people. I refuse to surrender to the logic of nihilistic violence.

I am not a natural-born fighter; I’m wired for reconciliation, to my detriment. But I also validate the necessity of resistance. To fight for what you believe is just. Any nation would resist being locked into a system of colonial erasure of its people. And any nation would have retaliated brutally after October 7th.

I’m a 30-something African-American with a busted attention span and a computer engineering degree that took me eight years to finish. But during that time, I took enough classes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jewish-Muslim relations to build an understanding of the conflict that sits outside of the national narratives.

I’ve been following Middle East conflicts for years. Because as a Black American, I carry a moral obligation to understand oppression, to sit with both peoples’ pain, and to speak what no one else in my community can or will.

I brought what little experience I had — and the unbearable dissonance of being torn between two sides — into a desperate attempt to stop the war. For 600 days, I argued with anyone who’d listen, risking my job, my sanity, and my health while caring for my dying grandmother. This vision nearly killed me. But I kept going.

At its heart: a rebuilt Gaza inspired by Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City, and a regional architecture—The Canaan Confederation—that takes David Ben-Gurion’s abandoned Arab Federation and resurrects it for a post-October 7th world.

I am David, son of David, grandson of Solomon. So I call my vision The Davidian Order. There is a Hebrew saying: “The Righteous Have Their Work Done by Others”. This is my attempt to do right by both the Israelis and Palestinians, who I firmly believe both have a righteous cause at the heart of their nationalisms.

This series of blogposts is my attempt to cut the Gordian knot of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No institution backed me. No think tank sponsored this. Every mistake, every naivety, every line of madness is mine alone.