On: Israel and Iran trade strikes: what does this mean for peace deal? - The Latest

The radio crackles with news of strikes and ceasefires, of men in distant rooms deciding who will live and who will die. They speak of “peace deals” as if peace were a transaction, as if the blood already spilled were not still wet on the ground. I think of the streets of Harlem, where boys who have never seen Tehran or Tel Aviv will pay for this with their bodies - enlisted or imprisoned, it makes no difference. The machinery grinds on, and the boys are ground with it.

The men who announce these things do so from rooms where the air is cool and the walls are thick. They do not hear the mothers weeping. They do not feel the heat of the explosions they authorize. They have arranged their lives so that consequence is always someone else’s burden. This is not evil; it is something worse - a kind of innocence, a refusal to know what they have already decided.

And the people? The people are told to fear each other, to hate in advance, to prepare for war as if it were weather - inevitable, impersonal. But war is never impersonal. It is always intimate. It is always a boot on a neck, a child’s body in the rubble, a mother’s scream that goes unanswered.

They will call this diplomacy. I call it arithmetic. And the sum is always the same: the powerful add, the powerless subtract.

The ceasefire is a pause, not an end. The reckoning is coming. And when it does, they will wonder why no one warned them. But we have been warning them. They just refuse to hear.