You probably have not heard of Sam Abu Haikal. He was seven months old last Friday when Israeli soldiers fired on his family’s car near Hebron and a bullet passed through his face. You probably did not hear about the expansionism metastasizing through the West Bank, swallowing villages like Sinjil whole behind a five-meter fence, where settlers come and go as they please while the sons of Sinjil are forbidden to climb their own hilltop, or about the methods of torture Palestinians are subjected to in Israeli prisons and on their own farmland, men zip-tied and beaten in front of their children, Taybeh, the last entirely Christian village in Palestine, set ablaze by settlers while its ancient churches filled with smoke. In the last two years, settler violence has increased 130 percent. In the last few months, about 60% of Gaza has been de facto annexed behind the occupation’s yellow line. And all the while we in the West, an audience to the propaganda machine, are led to believe that the circus of Israeli violence has been confined, that what remains is self-defense against a terror state in Tehran as Israel tees America up for a ground invasion, even as it exacts the same genocidal methods against the people of South Lebanon, their hospitals destroyed, hundreds of thousands ordered from their homes, their land burned with white phosphorus. Whether you were paying attention or not, the mass media has expected you to forget. Gaza is still being starved. Palestinian land is a meal a rabid Israeli state cannot eat fast enough. Palestinians are still dying, and Israel is still murdering them.

This is the actual map of the war the headlines call the Iran war. Palestine is not a footnote in Israel’s war with Iran. Palestine is the war, and Iran is the subplot.

Since October, Israeli fire into Gaza has continued nearly every day, more than two thousand documented violations by spring, over 900 Palestinians killed, many of them children shot for approaching a yellow line that keeps approaching them. This past Saturday, while the cameras pointed at the sky over Tel Aviv waiting for Iranian missiles, an Israeli strike in Gaza City killed seven members of one family, a girl and her father among them. In December, demolition crews flattened residential blocks in eastern Gaza City with no battle anywhere near them. Children froze to death over the winter because the shelter that would have warmed them sat on the wrong side of a crossing Israel would not open. The buildings are still falling. The children are still dying. And we are expected to call this a “ceasefire”, the way we are expected to call expulsion “voluntary”.

This weekend Israel bombed a densely populated suburb of Beirut in violation of the agreement protecting the capital, Iran answered with missiles, Israel answered Iran, and through all of it the airports stayed open, the embassies stayed open, the negotiations stayed open, while Kerem Shalom and Rafah, the crossings through which food reaches the remanent of a people the colony has spent two and a half years starving, closed within hours. The same thing happened in February, when Israel sealed every crossing at the start of the Iran war and COGAT, the military unit that administers the siege, claimed enough food had already entered Gaza, while aid deliveries fell from 4,200 trucks a week to 590 and never came back. All of this hunger has been calibrated to stay just below the threshold where the world feels obligated to act, designed to herd Palestinians south and then out of Gaza altogether, in service of the plan Israel’s ministries had already named, a “Greater Israel”.

The Iran war feeds all of it. In mid-March, with the world’s attention fixed on Tehran, the Israeli army quietly sent aid organizations maps showing it had pushed eleven percent past the yellow line, from the 53 percent of Gaza the ceasefire granted it to 64. By late May, Netanyahu was telling a settler conference he fully controlled 60 percent and had ordered the army to take 70, while the crowd screamed for one hundred and he assured them Israel was going in order. Palestinians can no longer reach roughly two-thirds of their own territory, including nearly all of Gaza’s farmland, which lies east of the line, so the geography now enforces the starvation without a single truck count needing to be falsified. Beyond that, Israel targets farmers and kills fisherman, even the children at sea looking for a meal.

Every round with Iran supplies the pretext, a security closure, and the alibi, a bigger story. Iran is one more weapon in Israel’s arsenal against Palestinians, supplying the media coverage and the plausible deniability in a single package, because whenever a Palestinian is murdered now, Israel can answer that it is at war with Iran, that the dead were working with Iran, the affiliation conjured after the bullet, as if affiliation were an excuse to snipe children in the head. The war distracts from the theft while it builds the precedent, because every month the world watches Gaza starve without consequence is a month the same methods become thinkable in Beirut, in Tehran, in whichever city comes after, the complacency rehearsed on Palestinians first and performed everywhere else. And the coverage that files Gaza under Iran is doing the policy’s work for it, because this starvation did not begin with the Iran war and will not end with it.

Lebanon should bury whatever doubt remains about what is being exported. The south is receiving the Gaza method nearly unedited, evacuation orders emptying everything below the Litani River, a seventh of the country’s territory ordered abandoned, more than 800,000 people displaced, hospitals struck, the land burned with white phosphorus, and when displaced families walked home to Kfar Kila against Israeli instructions in January of last year, soldiers shot twenty-two of them dead, because in this system the punishable offense, in Gaza and in Lebanon alike, is going home. If you are looking at the destruction you too will find it consistent with the domicide Israel practiced in Gaza, and one step closer to genocidal methodology against the people of South Lebanon. Israel’s own finance minister made the comparison, promising that “very soon Dahiyeh will resemble Khan Younis,”. Gaza has served as a laboratory, and what Israel did there will not stay there. It already has not. The cancer’s primary site is Palestine, and it has metastasized outward, into the valleys below the Litani, into the skies over Tehran, and no treatment of the metastases will hold while the primary site is left to grow, just as doctors cannot cure a cancer that has spread throughout the body while refusing to confront the tumor itself.

You cannot resolve Lebanon while the method that empties Lebanon is being perfected in Palestine. You cannot negotiate stability with Iran while the prize for instability, Palestinian land, is being annexed under the negotiation’s smoke. Israel has to be stopped at the nexus of its power, in Palestine, or the same violence will keep manifesting elsewhere with the address changed and the method intact. And if Palestine is conquered, the world will have issued a green light to a greater Middle East that no longer involves the Middle East or its people, greater for its authors, emptied of everyone else. Sam Abu Haikal was buried wrapped in a Palestinian flag, carried in his father’s arms, with all his innocent dreams dying with him. Sam was also the war, the whole of it, the text that every headline keeps filing as a footnote to someone else’s missiles. The forgetting, the forgotten, is Israel’s final weapon, and it is the only one aimed directly at you.

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