The Map Eaters

 

Sometimes, when the darkness comes creeping in around the edges of your vision like smoke from a house fire you can’t quite see yet, you start to understand that some stories ain’t meant to have happy endings. This here’s one of those stories, friend, and if you’re the type who needs your bedtime tales tied up neat with a bow, well, you might want to stop reading right about now.

On the slopes of Mount Homesh—and doesn’t that name just roll off your tongue like broken glass?—the children played among the bones of old settlements. Their laughter echoed off the hills with the kind of bright, terrible sound that makes you think of wind chimes made from human teeth. It was September 1st, 2025, the first day of a new school year, and somebody had gone and built a kindergarten where one hadn’t stood for twenty years.

Now, I’ve seen my share of cursed ground, and let me tell you something about places where they build new things on old bones: the earth remembers. It always remembers.

Those kids—Jewish children with their faces bright as new pennies—they ran and played like children do everywhere, sketching houses and stars with their crayons, innocent as the day is long. But innocence, well, that’s a funny thing. Sometimes it’s a shield, and sometimes it’s just another word for blindness.

“The children who begin their days here with laughter and song,” declared Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, his voice carrying the kind of certainty that makes your skin crawl, “are the true answer to anyone who thinks these settlements will be dismantled.”

Truth is a slippery fish, though, especially when you’re standing on land that’s got more claims on it than a widow’s got tears. And while those children played their innocent games under Samaria’s blue sky—a sky that looked pretty enough, if you didn’t notice how it was streaked with gray like an old man’s hair—other children, Palestinian kids, were playing different games entirely.

These other children, see, they were hiding in the rubble of the Halimah al-Saadiyah school in Jabalia, northern Gaza. Their games involved staying alive, dodging missiles, and pretending that the sound of explosions was just thunder from a distant storm. But children, bless their hearts, they know the difference between thunder and the sound of their world ending. They always know.

The contrast between these two playgrounds—one filled with the sound of innocent laughter, the other with the whisper of falling concrete and the wet sound of dreams dying—well, that contrast was sharp enough to cut glass. It was like having two photographs side by side: one in living color, the other in black and white and red all over.

You want to know what evil looks like? It doesn’t always come with fangs and claws and things that go bump in the night. Sometimes it comes wearing a kindergarten teacher’s smile and speaking in the measured tones of political necessity. Sometimes it comes with crayons and construction paper and the sound of children singing nursery rhymes while other children learn to count by the number of explosions they hear each day.

Homesh and Gaza—they were like two sides of the same coin, if that coin happened to be minted in hell. On one side, children drew their futures in bright colors. On the other, they sketched their nightmares in blood and dust and the gray of concrete that’s learned to cry.

The world, it seemed, still hadn’t figured out how to love all its children the same.

Now, Smotrich, he had himself a plan. Called it the E1 project, which sounds innocent enough until you realize that sometimes the most terrible things come with the most boring names. He’d approved more than 3,000 new homes across the West Bank, each one a nail in the coffin of something that might have been.

Palestine, you see, wasn’t a country anymore. Hadn’t been for a long time. It was more like a jigsaw puzzle that somebody had taken apart and hidden the pieces, leaving only scattered fragments connected by roads and checkpoints and the kind of hope that dies a little more each day.

If you looked at a map—and I mean really looked, the way you might study the face of someone you love who’s about to leave you forever—you’d see how the land had been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Since 1947, Palestine had been shrinking, piece by piece, until what was left looked like the work of some cosmic cancer, eating away at the edges until there was barely anything left to recognize.

Tahani Mustafa, a Palestinian-Israeli analyst who knew a thing or two about watching things die slowly, called the E1 project a “red line.” She told Al Jazeera, “There will be nothing left to recognize if the international community continues to allow Israel to annex the West Bank and destroy Gaza.”

But red lines, well, they’re funny things. They only work if someone’s willing to enforce them, and the world has a way of looking the other way when the screaming gets too loud.

The strategy was simple, in the way that cancer is simple. Build roads that slice through communities like a knife through flesh. Create enclaves—little islands of desperation surrounded by a sea of someone else’s control. Make the map look like a dropped mirror, all fragments and sharp edges that cut anyone who tries to put the pieces back together.

The UN had a name for what was happening. They called it genocide, which is a fancy word for the systematic murder of a people. It’s the kind of word that should make everyone stop what they’re doing and pay attention, but somehow it just became another piece of paper in another filing cabinet in another office where people who’ve never watched children die make decisions about other people’s lives.

Over 600,000 Israeli settlers were living on occupied land now, and that number grew every day like a tumor that’s found something sweet to feed on. The two-state solution—that beautiful dream of two peoples living side by side in peace—was starting to look like a fairy tale told to children to help them sleep at night.

Ilan Pappé, a man who understood the difference between myths and truth, put it plain: the reality of colonization had made the two-state solution “an impossible vision.” It was like offering to share a house with someone who’d already moved into every room and changed all the locks.

Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto stood before the United Nations and spoke of the two-state solution like it was still possible, like it was still real. “The two descendants of Abraham must live in reconciliation, peace, and harmony,” he said, and his words sounded beautiful in that big hall with its flags and its pretensions of civilized discourse.

But beautiful words are like beautiful flowers growing in poisoned soil—they look pretty until you realize what’s feeding them.

Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, wasn’t interested in pretty words or impossible dreams. He said it plain on his X account, and later to the Washington Post: “There will be no Palestinian state. This land belongs to us.”

At least he was honest about it. There’s something almost refreshing about naked ambition when it stops pretending to be something else.

Tareq Baconi, who’d spent years watching this slow-motion catastrophe unfold, understood what was really happening. The two-state solution wasn’t a solution at all—it was just another way of avoiding the truth. It was like offering to let someone keep their house after you’ve already bulldozed the foundation.

The truth was this: some hungers can’t be satisfied, only fed. Some thirsts can’t be quenched, only deepened. And sometimes, when the darkness finally comes calling—and it always comes calling—the only thing left to do is decide whether you’re going to hide your eyes or bear witness to what’s really happening in the world.

The children in Homesh kept playing their innocent games, sketching their bright futures with their bright crayons. The children in Gaza kept counting explosions and learning new words for fear.

And the world kept turning, indifferent as a stone, while somewhere in the distance, you could hear the sound of maps being redrawn with blood and the laughter of children who didn’t yet understand what their games really meant.

Sometimes, when the story’s too big and too terrible to tell all at once, all you can do is light a candle in the darkness and hope someone, somewhere, is still listening.

Because in the end, we’re all just children playing games we don’t fully understand, in a world that’s forgotten how to love us all the same.