I think everyone has already praised your clarity of writing and wonderful framing of the story, using a great sci-writer. This is one of the best “lowering of the mind” gently in to the shoes of suffering. For this, you deserve thanks for helping us feel the sense of humanity that is lacking in the destruction of a people crammed into a little space after a perpetual and planned invasion of their homeland.

But we know the delusion the average Israeli citizen is going through, having their beliefs about the justification for this atrocity their government has been committing for the last 366 plus days because we live in their shoes. If you take it that the American government calling Iran pre-1979 Revolution a “stable” and secure democracy, then you must be delusional, The actions the Shah took—jailing 300,000 political dissidents and kill an estimated 100,000–are actions a leader committed to “democracy” would take, then you’re delusional. But that is what we are. They were actions of autocracy or the flavor of it called authoritarianism. America funded arms deals to the “new” Iranian government, which, and this won’t be a surprise, practiced a new type of autocracy suing the same techniques but with a different color of frosting on that cake. We supported overthrowing the first democratically voted in leader of Egypt in 2013— the first democracy Egypt had—because of some flabby reasons. El-Sisi, nowhere near democracy and never having tasted it after, killed at least 1.100 resisters protesting in the town square and started jailing dissidents.

I won’t go into “The Indian Removal Act” of 1830 where Genocidian Jackson sent the army in to America’s many Palestines to eradicate the “natives” and steal their homeland, claiming it as their own, then carving up those seized countries into land blocks and auctioning them off to raise money and occupy them, dragging in slaves behind the new white owners to grow cotton fields. That bit lasted for over one hundred years until all was taken. “Oh, but we can’t revisit the past and what’s done is done.” We are remorseless people who believe the Shah was a stable democracy when told, that Egypt is now a stable democracy, that Israel is a stable democracy. The base of democracy, I’ve recently discovered, involves respecting your fellow human and not agreeing with your government when it is involved in slaughter for the sake of political expediency. Voting does not make a country democratic. Protecting the right of each citizen and their human rights does. Labels stick because they are repeated and what they cover up is unthought of overtime, like a broken-souled child in a dark basement under a dazzling city.

Obviously, an article that provokes and stays with you. Thanks.