Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXI: "wordbombs"
row upon row
of nearly empty seats
beneath harsh lights
the war criminal's wordbombs
echo back from walls to strike him
Democracy Now, September 16, 2026:
“The Elimination Project”: Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Life in West Bank: B’Tselem" (Israeli human rights group)
A major new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem titled “The Elimination Project” accuses Israel of “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank.”
B’Tselem Executive Director ,Yuli Novak: Israel is dismantling the basic conditions needed for collective Palestinian existence in the West Bank. Our new report “The Elimination Project” shows how this mechanism works and how over the past three years, it has become more lethal, violent and explicit. Come with us to the West Bank to see for yourself. The Elimination Project in the West Bank operates through five domains of action that work together and reinforce each other: killing, violence, intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover. These are all parts of a system with one aim: to ensure Jewish supremacy and eliminate the Palestinian collective.
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCLXXX: "wall of fire"
In four minutes, a farmhouse in the West Bank village enveloped in a wall of fire.
blood-stained olive leaves
cinder through the smoky air
laughter greets laughter
On
July 28, 2025, Israeli human rights groups already published their reports on Israel's genocidal war on Gaza:
The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem:
And Physicians for Human Rights, Israel:
The first casualty, when war comes, is TRUTH.
-- Hiram Johnson (1866-1945), a Progressive Republican senator in California)
smoky rubble
a bullet-riddled helmet
marked PRESS
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CL: "first casualty of war"
man
nailed to a wooden cross
in
a
press
vest
2026 Haiku Canada Members’ Anthology
There's a sweeping denial in the response to the film "NAZA" (a Hebrew acronym for "collateral damage") released by the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson's Unit – that a strike resulting in 200 civilian casualties was never either "approved or carried out" in the Gaza Strip, and that "no credible claim has been made that a strike on any military objective caused a comparable number of casualties....
Until now, it has generally been claimed in Israel's public conversation that civilian casualties of more than 100 were never approved. Now, the ceiling has shifted to 200. Less than 25 years ago, the country was in an uproar over 14 people, most of them children, being killed in the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, then-head of Hamas' military wing. But since then, we've grown accustomed to that "slight bump on the wing," as a former air force commander once said when asked what he felt when he launched an airstrike on a residential area.
Who decided that it was acceptable to kill 200 women, children and elderly people in order to kill a wanted man? Is killing a Hamas truck driver worth 20 children? And who are we kidding? In the Israel of 2026, is there even any suitable public debate over these decisions?
And what has happened in practice? In the assassination of Ibrahim Biari in Jabalya in late October 2023, at least 126 civilians, including 68 children, were killed, according to the organization Airwars, while another 280 were wounded. In other words, a single attack caused more than 400 civilian casualties. And according to testimony from soldiers that Breaking the Silence collected and cross-checked, the collateral damage approved for that attack was 300.
Around a month later, the assassination of Wissam Farhat, commander of Hamas' Shujaiyeh Brigade, erased an entire residential complex, killing at least 300 civilians, according to Airwars. At least 118 civilians, including 48 children, were killed in Gaza City's al-Taj Tower in October 2023. And in his book "6:29," Haaretz's Amos Harel described an attack in March 2025 that killed around 400 Palestinians, most of them civilians....
...But the problem is even worse than that. In my research into the "chosen blindness" of AI systems, two characteristics came up over and over: They can generate an almost unlimited number of targets, and there's no way to reconstruct their "judgment." One can question an officer about why he marked a particular man as a target, but it's impossible to ask an algorithm.
Moreover, the Washington Post reported that at the start of the war, the criterion for verification was lowered from two sources to one, and that sometimes, an attack was carried out without verifying the system's recommendation at all....
This is the first war in which AI was used on such a large scale to select targets. The machine shattered the human bottleneck that limited how many targets it's possible to locate and approve at the very moment when Israel was marinating in pain and anger, with a deeper desire for revenge than ever before. And that is the context that the IDF's response prefers not to touch.
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCVIII: "smoky clouds"
where tents were
a tornado-twist
of smoky clouds
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCIX: "attack drone"
in smoky twilight
a mule-drawn flatboard wagon
with wounded Gazans ...
an attack drone flying past
silences everything below
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCXI: "beach party and booms"
Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran—and the largely ignored devastation in Gaza—a question lurks: What is the country becoming?
Tel Aviv's beach party
the faint boom, boom, boom
from Gaza
When we go to the beach, you can hear the booms from Gaza. When you eat a lollipop or an ice cream, you hear things being blown up... Not only is reality horrible, you also don’t know what the real story is.
Etgar Keret, Israeli writer and Tel Aviv liberal
What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.
-- Ehud Olmert, former Israeli Prime Minister.
... the war in Gaza has produced a people “who have lost everything and feel only humiliation and abandonment—and despise hypocritical Western moralism. This will feed future militants, and how they behave will be shaped by old grievances and new technologies—which Israel masters today, but they could master, too.” In the familiar pattern, today’s resolution is tomorrow’s tinderbox.
-- Malley Agha, who was once a peace negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Haaretz, July 31:
The Victim Identity Israel Built Over Generations Now Fuels Its Denial of Genocide in Gaza
Genocide does not require a single, explicit directive; rather, it's the result of a process in which rhetoric, policy, political discourse, collective dehumanization and repeated patterns of action converge into mass acts of destruction.
But the saddest chapter in Israel's increasing tendency to deny the genocide in Gaza is reserved for Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. The historians who work there and devote days on end to investigating the events of the Holocaust are choosing to silence their mouths and pens when it comes to the horrors of Gaza. In light of the flood of statements at the beginning of the war by Israeli politicians calling for mass killings there, a group of local scholars turned to Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan and requested that the institution publish a public condemnation of the declarations, specifically those calling for genocide. But in January 2024 Dayan replied to Prof. Amos Goldberg, who initiated the move: "The six million Jews who were murdered in the Shoah are entitled to an institution that deals with them and with them alone. Therefore, Yad Vashem doesn't deal with genocide as such but only with its interface with the Shoah… Our area of activity is the Shoah, and only the Shoah."
The comments written by the Yad Vashem chairman are unsettling not only because of his silence, but also because his words are wrapped in a cloak of ostensible institutional integrity, while turning an arrogant back to the sense of historic responsibility that is supposed to inform the memorialization of the Holocaust. "Six million Jews are entitled to an institution that deals with them alone," writes Dayan – suggesting an exclusivity of the memory of murdered Jews as an excuse for hardheartedness, for closing one's eyes and maintaining silence in the face of ongoing war crimes and tens of thousands of slaughtered and starved people. All part of the terrible crime being perpetrated by the descendants of another genocide, the Shoah, among others.
Wasn't the murder of six million Jews also enabled due to many around the world washing away responsibility? Yad Vashem's entrenchment in the claim that their expertise are limited to the Holocaust is an act of moral bankruptcy, of disavowal of responsibility based on institutional convenience and the ideological adoption of a governmental policy responsible for horrific war crimes. It is a dire betrayal of the values of liberty, justice and the sanctity of human life, which the memory of the Holocaust is supposed to teach us.
For the past three generations Israel has been constructing an identity of victimhood, ranging from acts perpetrated during the Holocaust to those of Hamas on October 7. It denies its own crimes and is therefore living in a permanently distorted reality. Any attempt to speak about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians is seen as a threat not only to the image of the nation but to its very survival. The defensive narrative has become foundational to Israel's national identity, and any criticism of this narrative is met with the kind of institutional and public violence we are witnessing today.
To conclude today’s Special Feature post, I would like to share the following poem, written in response to the video clip
Dreams of Palestinian Children, in which children, playfully jostling one another, crowd around the camera and call out their dreams.
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXV: "jagged crescent and sky"
Dust settles as the night folds the playground into shadow.
each classroom window
its jagged crescent
jagged Gazan sky
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXVI: "one-minute silence and fireballs"
in Tel Aviv
traffic blocked on the highway
for one-minute silence ...
forty miles away, fireballs
burst open in morning air
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXVII: "waiting for water, or nothing"
this day like others
before the transient light
on the horizon ...
lines of Gazan children
waiting for water, or nothing
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXVIII: "bombed-out houses
and mounds of rubble"
a one-armed boy
stares out the tent window
at something ...
yet still bombed-out houses
and mounds of rubble
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXIX: "glint of a Tavor"
West Bank teen limping ahead of his shadow glint of a Tavor
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXX: "witnessing"
roaring attack drones
drown out midnight screams --
surrounded by fire
a Gazan girl in red
witnessing her mother ...
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXXI: "Gazan camp"
Gazan camp
a paper crane blown over
bodies on bodies
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCXXII: "fireball-lit sky"
fireball-lit sky
yesterday's bodies mingled
with today's
