The Lockheed Martin quarterly report
lands on mahogany desks
the same morning
Amal's school becomes rubble.
Precision guided munitions,
they call them in Surrey boardrooms.
Precision guided profit margins
climbing with each Palestinian grave.
Listen now:
the factory hum in Derby
where guidance systems roll off assembly lines
like prayers in reverse,
each circuit board programmed
to find its way
to a child's bedroom in Gaza,
to a hospital corridor in Rafah,
to the exact coordinates
of someone's last breath.
BAE Systems needs war
the way Manchester needs rain.
Raytheon requires resistance
to justify next year's budget.
The mathematics are elegant:
one dead Palestinian child
equals 0.003% quarterly growth.
One flattened refugee camp
funds the CEO's daughter's riding lessons
in the Cotswolds.
But here's what they don't calculate:
the Palestinian grandmother
who teaches her granddaughter
to count in English
while British bombs
teach her to count backwards
from ten
nine
eight
seven
before the silence.
The arms fair at ExCeL London
showcases this year's innovations.
Champagne reception,
canapés served on silver platters
while the latest drone technology
demonstrates its targeting precision
on video screens
showing real-time footage
from real-time murders
in real-time Palestine.
Defence contractors applaud.
The market responds favourably.
Shares rise like smoke
from burning hospitals.
In Westminster corridors
where Balfour's ghost still whispers
colonial promises,
ministers sign export licences
with Mont Blanc pens
that cost more
than a Palestinian family's monthly food allowance
before the siege,
before the starvation,
before we decided
hunger was a weapon
and called it strategy.
The worker in Warton
who assembles wing components
for F-35 fighter jets
goes home to her council flat,
watches the news,
sees Gaza burning,
changes the channel
because the connection
between her labour and their dying
is too precise to bear.
This is capitalism's genius:
it alienates us
not just from our work
but from its consequences.
The bomb that kills
travels through so many hands,
so many spreadsheets,
so many departments,
that no one person
can claim responsibility
for the specific child
who stops breathing
when it explodes.
Yet someone profits.
Someone always profits.
The cycle perfects itself:
create instability,
sell weapons to both sides,
profit from the chaos,
invest those profits in creating more instability.
The Palestinian who dies today in Jenin
funds tomorrow's weapons shipment
to kill his neighbour.
Capital doesn't just accumulate.
It spreads like infection,
each arms sale
carrying the virus
of organised violence
to new territories,
new populations,
new graveyards that will require
new weapons to fill.
But now listen:
in Gaza's ruins tonight,
a Palestinian poet
writes verses
on the back of a British bomb fragment,
her words rising like smoke
from the ashes of our complicity,
her voice carrying
across the Mediterranean
to remind us
that every empire
that built itself on other people's bones
eventually discovered
that the dead don't stay buried forever.
The arms dealers sleep
in Surrey mansions
built on Palestinian graves,
but their dreams
are interrupted
by the sound of children singing
in languages they tried to silence,
in voices they tried to bury,
with words that refuse
to be translated into profit margins.
The blood money never washes clean.
It just changes currency,
changes banks,
changes hands,
but never changes its essential nature:
the price we agreed to pay
for looking away
while other people's children subsidised
our prosperity.
Capital's war machine grinds on,
but every machine has moving parts
that wear down,
gears that seize,
systems that fail
when enough people refuse
to oil them with their silence.
The Palestinian child
who dies tonight in British-made rubble
will never know
her death was necessary
for quarterly growth targets.
But her mother knows.
Her father knows.
Her teachers know.
Her friends know.
And they remember.
And memory,
unlike capital,
refuses liquidation,
accumulates interest
in the currency of resistance,
compounds daily
in the hearts of those
who refuse to forget
that another world
is not just possible
but inevitable
when enough hands
stop building the machine
and start dismantling it
piece by bloody piece.
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