It began yesterday , as these things often do, with a child asking if the sky was angry.
The mother did not have an answer.
She only knew that she had forty seconds to decide whether the hallway or the bathtub was the safer place to die.
Forty seconds between the warning siren and the firestorm. Forty seconds to hold her son and pretend that hiding was still a kind of hope.
In Tel Aviv, another child stared out a reinforced window, hearing his father curse under his breath in a language older than empires.
“We had no choice,” said the man on the television.
“But when do we?” whispered the father.
The Empire of Fear
The bomb did not fall on Iran.
It fell on the idea that nations can outgrow their ghosts.
Israel’s strike was precise in its coordinates, imprecise in its consequences.
It hit a military facility. It hit an oil artery.
But it also hit memory. It hit myth. It hit the unbearable inheritance both nations refuse to bury.
Israel, birthed from the charred bones of Auschwitz, still breathes as if hunted.
Iran, humiliated by coups and sanctions, still dreams of ancient glory.
Both are run by men who mistake vengeance for vision.
The Language of the Liars
They call it a “surgical strike.”
But surgery heals. This dismembers.
They say it was “measured.”
But they never measure the burned dolls, the shattered nerves, the silence between fathers and sons.
They say it was “defensive.”
But there is nothing defensive about bombing a country struggling under sanctions, drought, and dissent.
We are told to pick sides.
As if history were that clean.
As if trauma cannot be passed down like heirlooms.
As if the child in the bunker and the child in the crater are not cousins in the same collapsing dream.
Power Forgets the Body
No headline mentioned the nurse in Isfahan who couldn’t get to the hospital because the roads were closed.
No tweet counted the embryos that thawed and died in a bombed fertility clinic.
No one eulogized the poet whose manuscript turned to ash with his home.
This is how war works in the 21st century.
It’s clean on screens.
It’s carnage off-camera.
The West applauds. The markets tremble.
And somewhere in a village, a boy draws a picture of fire and calls it God.
Who Profits from Apocalypse?
The U.S. sells more weapons.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s approval rating jumps.
Iran’s hardliners crush dissent with a new excuse.
The oil price surges. Wall Street feasts.
And the mothers?
They learn to pack go-bags.
They learn how to tell bedtime stories that include missile shadows.
They learn that grief is not an event — it’s an atmosphere.
The Bomb Is Not the End — It Is the Beginning
This was not a war.
It was a message.
“We will define what safety means.”
“We will decide who is allowed to dream.”
“We will burn your future to save ours.”
But what if safety cannot be built on supremacy?
What if every bomb dropped on another child’s home ricochets back into our own?
The child who asked about the sky?
He no longer asks.
He just flinches when the wind slams the door.
That’s what the bomb destroyed.
Not Iran. Not enrichment sites. Not centrifuges.
It destroyed the idea that our children might grow up unafraid.