A witness to Gaza, and to the silence of the world.
For seventy-five years, Palestinians have lived under siege.
Their land was seized in 1948 during the Nakba, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes to make way for the new state of Israel. Villages were emptied, families scattered, and history rewritten. Those who remained lived under military rule, their movements controlled, their neighborhoods divided by checkpoints and walls.
Today, in Gaza, two million Palestinians are trapped in a strip of land scarcely larger than a midsized city. Generations have been born there and never left. They live fenced in by Israeli walls, watched by Israeli drones, and sealed by Israeli checkpoints. Water is rationed. Electricity comes and goes. Medicine is scarce. The sea is blockaded by the Israeli navy. The sky is patrolled by the Israeli air force.
And now, Gaza is rubble. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled by Israeli bombs. Apartment towers flattened. Schools destroyed. Hospitals turned into morgues. Refugee camps bombed repeatedly. No safe place remains.
Children are pulled from beneath collapsed concrete, lifeless or gasping. Infants die in incubators when the power is cut. Mothers cradle shrouded bodies. Fathers dig graves with their hands. Entire families erased in a single strike.
Starvation is used as a weapon. Israel blocks convoys of flour, rice, medicine, and fuel. People grind animal feed to make bread. Children cry through the night with nothing in their stomachs. Adults faint from hunger. The elderly wither in silence. Clean water is gone; people drink what is brackish, foul, or poisoned. At the very points where food and water are permitted for distribution, Israeli army snipers fire on the starving—men, women, and children—killing them as they wait in line.
Disease spreads. With hospitals destroyed and medicines blocked, wounds fester. Amputations are done without anesthesia. Doctors operate by flashlight. Nurses watch patients die because there are no supplies to save them.
The sound of drones never leaves. Day and night, the buzzing reminds everyone that death is circling overhead, choosing at random where to fall. Sleep is broken. Children no longer speak, their voices locked inside terror. Survivors carry eyes that look far beyond their years.
In Israel, the bombing is called defense. It is declared moral and necessary. Leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers invoke righteousness and divine mandate. They call their military “the most moral army in the world” even as they flatten cities and gun down the hungry. They speak the name of God while carrying out slaughter.
In the United States, the flow of weapons and money never stops. Successive presidents—Biden, Trump, Obama, and those before them—sign off on billions in military aid. American bombs fall on Palestinian homes. American diplomats veto ceasefire after ceasefire at the United Nations. American leaders speak of human rights while arming their violation.
In Europe, leaders of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the European Union repeat the same script: Israel has a right to defend itself. They send weapons, provide cover, and condemn resistance. They praise democracy while enabling occupation.
In churches and synagogues across the world, voices fall silent. Clergy look away. Congregations pray vaguely for “peace” without naming the crime. Some speak truth, but far more do not. Fear of losing donors, jobs, or reputations outweighs the duty to witness.
Those who do speak are punished. Students are blacklisted. Professors are fired. Journalists are censored. Activists are surveilled. Entire movements, like Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), are outlawed or smeared as antisemitic. Speaking truth about Palestine is treated as a crime.
And yet, the genocide continues.
Have you wondered,
Where is God?
The question echoes across every age. When silence followed, people did not stop asking. They began instead to explain.
At first, these explanations were simple, woven from fear, wonder, and the will to survive. As communities grew, explanations grew with them, becoming stories, rituals, and laws.
The answer begins not with deceit, but with human perception. From the beginning, our ancestors noticed patterns of cause and effect. Strike flint—spark. Drop seed—sprout. Hunt well—eat well. These observations gave coherence to a chaotic world.
From there, another question arose: why? Why does the river flood? Why does the sun return? Why does death come? The first great human question was not “who are we?” but “why is this so?”
When causes were visible, the answers were clear. But when causes were hidden, we projected intention. If sparks come from my striking, then storms must come from someone striking in the heavens. If I can give or withhold, then the rains must be the gift of someone greater. When the world was incomprehensible, we made it comprehensible by imagining it was like us.
Thus, the first gods were born. Not as lies, but as explanations—the first science in a way, the first theology. Spirits of river, sky, mountain, and death. They steadied the chaos by giving the unknown a face.
Over time, the gods multiplied and met one another. As cultures collided, people began to claim there must be only One God above all. This idea—monotheism—spread as a spiritual truism, but it has never been empirically true. Even now, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and the many sects within each speak of the “one God” yet describe, worship, and obey very different beings.
The claim of one God is itself another projection—an attempt at coherence that has never been realized in practice. The result is not unity but division, with each group insisting that their version of the One is the true One. Wars have been fought not over whether there is one God, but over what that God is like.
Coherence that collapses under evidence is not coherence at all.
This unfolding is not unique to theology. Human understanding has always moved through the same pattern.
For centuries, the earth was believed to be flat, the immovable center of the cosmos. To say otherwise was heresy. Then we saw the earth as it truly is—round, turning, circling a star. The cosmos had not changed. Our map had.
Centuries later, Newtonian physics seemed final. Its laws explained the world with precision. They were thought absolute. Then Einstein—an obscure clerk—saw further. Space curved, time bent, light itself obeyed deeper laws. Newton was not wrong, but incomplete. The cosmos had not changed. Our understanding had.
So too with theology. For millennia, God has been held as Being itself—the ultimate cause, the guarantor of coherence. But now, like the flat earth and Newton’s absolutes, this picture no longer holds. The evidence is clear: magic does not exist, divinity is projection, God never was.
What remains is not emptiness but clarity. Meaning persists—because it was never in heaven. It was always here, in praxis, in coherence, in the love and justice we create together.
If God never was, then what of Gaza? What of the rubble, the starving children, the silent heavens?
This is where the truth matters most. For if meaning were only in a divine hand, Gaza would be the ultimate evidence of God’s absence. But if meaning has always arisen from us, then Gaza is where the question becomes urgent, not hopeless.
Where is meaning in Gaza? It is not in the bombs, nor in the speeches that justify them. It is not in the pulpits that look away, nor in the prayers that refuse to name the crime.
Meaning is in the hands that dig through the rubble, lifting the living and the dead. It is in the nurses who stay by their patients when there is no medicine left. It is in the parents who share their last bread with their children. It is in the voices outside Gaza that refuse silence, even when censored, punished, or shamed.
It is in the coherence of those who act in defiance of incoherence. In the courage to love when the world teaches only fear. In the refusal to let life be reduced to numbers or rubble.
God never was. But meaning is. And in Gaza, it cries out—not from the heavens, but from the earth, from the living, from us.