Welcome to the Deadly Middle
I do not think he meant only people and places, but also dreams, morals, and narratives—that gray space that appears rational, yet is in truth a slow burial of reality.
It is in this middle that the world stands today. It is neither on the side of the crime—so that we may at least rest in the clarity of evil—nor on the side of the victim—so that we may seek refuge in the literature of pain. It stands in the middle, where the missile equals the stone, the executioner equals the wound, lies equal truth, and peace equals war.
Mahmoud Darwish would have smiled with deadly irony had he seen our world today. Despite all he foresaw, even in his worst nightmares he could not have imagined what we have become. He would have asked: what middle is this that I spoke of? It does not resemble neutrality; it is impotence disguised in the garments of reason—it is silent complicity.
The world does not lie because lying is useful, but because it cannot bear the truth. Truth is heavy; it demands a position, and a position demands loss. The middle, however, is the comfortable illusion: to stand between blood and slogans, between corpses and the “right of self-defense.”
Gaza does not die merely because it is weak, but because the world has chosen to see it in the middle. It is neither innocent enough to deserve salvation, nor guilty enough to merit execution. Here morality becomes an instrument of power, and the scale becomes a means to bury truth rather than measure it.
As for Israel, it has mastered the game of the middle: killing with one hand while complaining with the other; destroying, then asking the world to understand its existential threats. And the world, trapped in its deadly middle, nods in agreement—like someone signing a record of testimony rather than a death certificate.
Donald Trump is the only unvarnished truth in this scene—the clearest embodiment of it. Nietzschean in impulse without the philosophy, he believes truth is what power declares, and that morality is a luxury of the defeated. He said what others avoid and did what they are ashamed even to admit. He speaks of peace and proceeds toward war; he speaks of a paradise he will enter but never set foot in. Corrupt, yet denouncing corruption. He did not shape the world in his image; he merely exposed its true face.
In the Palestinian middle, we too are not innocent. We entered the killing space: no complete resistance, no complete state; no unity, no reckoning. We address the world with our contradictions—asking for justice while divided, seeking sympathy while differing in everything except our capacity to differ. What we failed to dismantle yesterday returned to us as siege after siege, war after war, moral spectacle, and a “troublesome” cause.
The middle is not a safe place. It is where values die without a funeral—where justice becomes diplomatic language, pain becomes a number, and blood becomes context.
Mahmoud Darwish said, “On this land there is what deserves life.” They added, with sly silence: so long as it does not disturb the balances. Here, in the deadly middle, not only do the powerful triumph—the silent do as well, those who stand at equal distance from victim and executioner.
Here, in the deadly middle, it is not only the strong who prevail, but the silent—and those who stand equidistant from crime and victim, believing that standing without a position is the highest form of wisdom.
This middle is not neutrality; it is a deferred suicide of meaning. Either we choose truth with all the loss it entails, or we remain in the middle—where the body is not killed, but the ability to name it for what it is.
Welcome to the deadly middle: the place where no one is condemned, no one is saved, and no one survives.
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