One man fired like a madman at figures a drone had spotted. He killed an old man, unarmed, and three teenage boys. Bullets tore through them. Their organs spilled out. A commander spat on the bodies. He screamed: This is what happens to anybody who messes with Israel.
A woman called Maya described torture. She urinated on prisoners. Other soldiers laughed.
A man called Juda shot a Palestinian at a checkpoint. The man had his hands up. He was surrendering. Juda fired anyway. His superior gave the order. The army record said a terrorist had been killed.
Yuval, the man who killed the old man and the boys, told Haaretz something else. My friends called me a hero but I felt like a monster. Two days after speaking to the newspaper he was admitted to a psychiatric ward.
I put the article down.
Then I remembered the Palestine Papers from 2011. Leaked documents. They showed the Palestinian Authority's own negotiators making secret offers. They would let Israel annex nearly all of East Jerusalem. They would accept only a symbolic number of refugees returning. Their own people did not know. Their own representatives had given away the heart of their national struggle behind closed doors.
My mind went somewhere dark. Somewhere funny. Somewhere hopeless.
What we actually need is an alien from space. A creature with godlike hacking skills. It could break into every sealed Israeli military server. Every drone footage archive. Every buried after action report. It could dump everything onto every screen on Earth. The killing fields at aid checkpoints. The torture camp at Sde Teiman. Soldiers urinating on prisoners. Commanders spitting on corpses. The old man and the three teenage boys riddled with bullets. Their bodies left for dogs. Then the world would see. Then the world would feel shame. Then the world would finally act.
But there is no alien. That is the joke. And the joke is not funny.
My mind kept going. If your own representatives betray you, what is left? The Palestinian Authority offered away Jerusalem in secret. Diplomacy looks like a trap. Negotiation looks like a farce. The only thing left is to fight.
That is where Hamas came in. I am not calling them heroes. They are not saints. They are a militant Islamist group. They have launched rockets from civilian areas. They have put command centres inside hospitals. They have killed Israeli civilians. That is all true. But that is not the point. The point is structural. When your official leadership works with the occupier, when every peace process brings more settlements and more secret concessions, armed resistance becomes the only remaining choice for many people. Hamas did not create that situation. They walked into a room that was already on fire.
That thought took me to my science fiction collection. This real story has the shape of a sci fi tragedy. The Fremen in Dune. The Maquis in Star Trek Deep Space Nine. The dark side of the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars. Each one shows trapped people making terrible choices because no good choices exist.
This essay is what came out of that spiral.
Frank Herbert's Dune gives us the Fremen. A people crushed by centuries of occupation. Their planet Arrakis has been stripped and exploited by the Harkonnens, a brutal enemy with better technology. The Fremen have built their whole culture around survival and secrecy. They have waited generations for a messiah.
Paul Atreides arrives. He fits the prophecy. By accident. By design. By manipulation. The Fremen call him the Lisan al Gaib. He trains them into a fierce army. He leads them to victory. Then his jihad spreads across the galaxy. Sixty billion people die.
Paul knows he has become a monster. He could have stopped the jihad. But stopping it would have required his death and the death of everyone he loved. So he did nothing. He let the killing happen. He spent the rest of his life trying to outrun what he had done.
Here is the question Dune asks. When an oppressed people can only free themselves through a violent, religious resistance that will also destroy them, is the victory worth the cost?
That is the Palestinian question. After the Palestine Papers leaked, many Palestinians decided diplomacy was a trap. Their own negotiator, Saeb Erekat, was recorded saying something devastating. What is in that paper gives Israel the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history, symbolic number of refugees return, demilitarised state. What more can I give?
When a people learn their leaders offered away Jerusalem in secret, many will turn to the faction that fights. Hamas does that. Hamas resists. Hamas refuses to negotiate away the right of return. But Hamas has no realistic path to a state. Only a path to the next devastating war. Thousands of civilians die each time.
The Fremen won Arrakis and lost their souls. Have Palestinians won anything at all?
Star Trek Deep Space Nine gave us the Maquis. Federation colonists whose homes were handed to the Cardassian Empire as part of a peace treaty. They had no say in the deal. Suddenly they lived under a brutal occupying power. The Federation called them terrorists when they picked up weapons to defend themselves.
Commander Hudson explains the logic. He was Starfleet. Now he leads the Maquis. The colonists have every reason to believe the Cardassians will not let them stay. The Cardassians have a long history of cruelty. Against the Bajorans. Against anyone who resists. The Federation signed the treaty for the greater good. But the colonists pay the price.
This is the West Bank. The Oslo Accords were the treaty. The Palestinian Authority runs the occupation while coordinating security with the Israeli army. Hamas is the Maquis. The faction that refused to accept a deal that left them under someone else's boot.
The episode asks a hard question. When a Starfleet officer sets a bomb that kills Cardassians, is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter? The show does not answer. It leaves the ambiguity sitting there. Uncomfortable. Unresolved.
That ambiguity is the truth. The Maquis are not purely good. They kill civilians sometimes. They break the law. But the treaty that abandoned them created them. The Federation's peace was built on their backs.
Israel's peace process has been built on Palestinian backs for thirty years. Settlements grew during every round of talks. The Palestine Papers showed the Palestinian Authority offering almost everything. Jerusalem. Refugees. Security control. Israel still wanted more. Tzipi Livni, then Israel's foreign minister, told the Palestinians something that sums it up. We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands. But I really appreciate it. Appreciation. Not acceptance. Concessions met with nothing.
The Maquis were crushed. Not by the Cardassians. By the Dominion, a superpower that saw them as collateral damage. Small resistance movements rarely survive when great powers play games over their heads.
Palestine is the Maquis. Israel is Cardassia. The United States is the Federation, talking about values while arming one side. No Dominion is coming to save anyone.
Star Wars looks simple on the surface. The Rebel Alliance is good. The Empire is evil. But watch again when you are older. You see the cracks.
The Rebellion kills people. They spy. They sacrifice innocent lives for the greater good. In Rogue One, Cassian Andor shoots his own informant in the back rather than let him be captured. The film wants you to feel the weight of that choice. Then it wants you to accept it as necessary. That is the problem of asymmetric war. The weaker side cannot afford the moral luxuries of the stronger.
The Haaretz testimonies show what happens when the stronger side drops those luxuries. A soldier called Ran worked in an airstrike planning unit. He said soldiers would enter Palestinian homes and enjoy the destruction. They stole electrical appliances, gold jewellery, cash. Everything. He said: We believed that all Arabs were Nazis and that stealing from the Nazis was a great opportunity. The slaughter of children in Gaza was completely normal for us. We would immediately head to Tel Aviv for hamburgers.
This is not the Empire. This is the Rebellion after winning, after keeping on fighting, after losing its soul. When you convince yourself your enemy is less than human, you become what you hate. The comparison to the Holocaust is grotesque and revealing. We believed all Arabs were Nazis.
The Haaretz soldiers felt like monsters because they saw themselves turning into the Empire. Yuval said: Our actions in Gaza were reminiscent of the Holocaust.
But Palestinians watching their children die under Israeli bombs see the Empire every day. Nobody in this story gets to be the Rebellion any more. Everyone is the Empire to someone.
The Prime Directive is Starfleet's highest law. No interference in the internal affairs of other civilisations. The idea sounds noble. Respect for cultural autonomy. Rejection of colonialism. But in practice the Prime Directive has justified terrible things. Episode after episode shows Starfleet refusing to stop genocide, slavery, environmental collapse. All because interfering would break the rule.
Those episodes teach a different lesson. The Prime Directive is not good. Non interference is not neutrality. It is complicity with the stronger party. When you refuse to stop a massacre, you are choosing the massacre.
The international community has lived this lesson for seventy five years. The United Nations has passed endless resolutions. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Nothing changes. The United States vetoes Security Council actions. European countries issue statements and send aid. They do nothing meaningful to stop the occupation, the settlements, or the bombings.
Star Trek believes humanity can be better. The reality of Palestine and Israel crashes into that belief. We could be better. We choose not to be.
A Haaretz soldier said something that stays with me. He imagined his wife like the dismembered woman he saw. He imagined his children like the burned children. He was not describing science fiction. He was describing what he had done. He felt the horror only after he had done it. The system that sent him to Gaza never asked him to feel it beforehand.
No science fiction story wants to admit this. There is no heroic third act coming. The Fremen won Arrakis and became the oppressors. The Rebel Alliance became the New Republic, corrupt immediately, fallen to the First Order. The Maquis were exterminated. The Prime Directive remains a shield for inaction.
The only way out is boring. Slow. Undramatic. Nonviolent mass resistance. Disciplined, sustained, unified. Global economic pressure through BDS. Legal war through the ICC. Eventually, maybe, a one state solution with full citizenship and equal rights for everyone between the river and the sea.
That is not a Death Star explosion. That is a fifty year slog.
But that is not the real ending. The real ending is darker.
What we actually need is an alien from space to hack all the evidence. So the world can see. Feel shame. Finally act.
Think about what that sentence means. We have given up on human institutions. The UN cannot act. The ICC cannot act. The United States will not act. The media cannot agree on basic facts. So we imagine help from another world. A creature with no politics. No pressure. No fear. It could pull every drone video, every after action report, every buried confession from every sealed hard drive in Israel's military archives.
We imagine that alien dumping everything onto every screen on Earth. The killing fields at aid checkpoints. The torture at Sde Teiman. Soldiers urinating on prisoners. Commanders spitting on corpses. The looting of children's piggy banks. The old man and the three teenage boys riddled with bullets. Their bodies left for dogs.
Then the world would feel shame. Then the world would act.
But the alien never comes.
Since we have no alien, we need brave moral people with nothing to lose.
That is the only real ending. Not a solution. A condition. The Haaretz soldiers spoke because they were already broken. Already hospitalised. Already beyond the reach of military discipline or social shame. They had nothing left to lose except their own souls. They tried to save those souls by telling the truth.
The next whistleblower will not be a hero in a movie. It will be a mid level intelligence officer with access to the archive and a family that will disown them. A military prosecutor who has closed one too many files. A psychologist who has treated one too many soldiers having night terrors about children burning.
No superpowers. No alien hacking. Just a conscience. And a willingness to sacrifice everything. Career. Country. Family. Freedom.
That is not a satisfying ending. It is not a solution. It is the only path forward that stops everyone pretending nothing happened.
The joke was that it would take an alien with hacking skills to get the truth out of Israel's sealed military files. But the truth is already here. It is in Haaretz. It is in the Palestine Papers. It is in the eyes of broken soldiers and grieving parents. We just do not want to look.
No alien is coming. We have to do it ourselves. The people who will do it are already out there. Sitting on the evidence. Waiting for the moment when their conscience outweighs their fear.
The only question is whether they will act before they end up like Yuval. In a psychiatric ward. Or worse. Taking their secrets to the grave.
Sources
Haaretz soldier testimonies as reported by Defapress, April 19 2026
Al Jazeera Palestine Papers coverage 2011
The Globe and Mail Palestine Papers coverage 2011
Looper analysis of Star Trek Maquis
Mark Watches DS9 The Maquis Part I
University of Oklahoma essay on Paul Atreides and identity
A Forum of Ice and Fire discussion of Pauls moral choices in Dune
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