This Isn’t Just War. It’s Inheritance.

Why I’m Writing This

I didn’t know what I didn’t know — not really — until I read that article and went chasing answers. What started as curiosity turned into hours of reading, fact-checking, piecing history together, and trying to wrap my head around something that doesn’t have easy edges.

My background’s in history, with a minor in psychology. My senior thesis was on shell shock in WWI — one of the first documented cases of war wrecking a person’s mental health and getting ignored. I’ve always paid attention to how conflict breaks people down.

But this? This isn’t just breaking people. It’s starving children on purpose. It’s making sure the trauma doesn’t just live in memory... it passes through bloodlines.

I’m not writing this from a place of political authority. I’m writing it from a place of gut-deep urgency. Because silence isn’t neutral. Silence is complicity. And this time, it’s being written into the nervous systems of unborn children.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You don’t even have to agree. But if you're reading this...
Just stay with it. That’s enough.

The Simplest Crime

Let’s skip the flags, the chants, and the talking points.
A child’s body doesn’t care who started it. It just needs food.

Right now, in Gaza, that basic need is being stripped away ... systematically.
No clean water. No food. No safety.
Parents are feeding their kids leaves and animal feed while watching them shrink and die (NPR, 2025).

This isn’t propaganda. It’s UN-confirmed famine conditions (OCHA, 2024).

You can call it war if that makes you sleep better...
But what do you call it when a baby dies from thirst because the water lines were bombed?

Where the Hate Comes From

Hamas is a violent extremist organization responsible for horrific attacks on civilians. Nothing here excuses that...
But if you want to understand why this war keeps repeating, you have to look at how it started.

Hamas was founded in 1987 during the First Intifada ... a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. It formed as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and merged religious ideology with armed resistance (Milton-Edwards, 2010).

Its 1988 charter is explicitly antisemitic ... quoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blaming Jews for world wars, and denying Israel’s right to exist (Hamas Charter, 1988).
In 2017, they issued a revised document to tone down the rhetoric, but the ideological foundation remains unchanged (MEMRI, 2017).

After winning the 2006 elections in Gaza, the Israeli and Egyptian blockade began. That blockade ... now over 17 years old ... severely limits access to food, medicine, fuel, and economic resources (B'Tselem, 2023).

Deprivation doesn’t dissolve hate...
It feeds it...
It passes it down.

What Is Hamas, Really?

To people in the West, Hamas can seem abstract. Here’s the closest historical parallel:

Think: The IRA, not ISIS

• Like the Irish Republican Army, Hamas is a nationalist militant group with a political wing, civilian support, and a long history of violent resistance.

• Both used terrorism and also ran social programs in their communities (English, 2003).

• Both emerged from oppression and occupation ... and both committed indefensible acts in response.

Another parallel? Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group that carried out bombings against British and Arab targets before Israel’s founding (Segev, 1999).

Understanding how something forms is not defending what it does.
Hamas has caused immense suffering. So has the Israeli state. And in the middle are families who never asked for any of it.

Trauma Doesn’t Die ... It Multiplies

This isn’t just about war. This is about biology.

Epigenetics shows that trauma doesn’t just live in memory ... it changes how genes express, especially during pregnancy and early development.

• In the Dutch Hunger Winter (1944–45), babies exposed to famine in utero went on to have higher rates of heart disease, depression, and anxiety ... and so did their children (Heijmans et al., 2008, Tobi et al., 2009).

• Holocaust survivors’ children showed alterations in stress-related gene expression linked to trauma (Yehuda et al., 2016).

• A 2021 study also found that children of war-exposed mothers had altered cortisol levels and dysregulated stress systems, even without direct trauma exposure ... their biology responded to a story they hadn’t even lived yet (Chen et al., 2021).

Now apply that to Gaza:

A generation raised in:

• Constant fear

• Chronic malnutrition

• Environmental collapse

• Inescapable grief

What gets passed down isn’t just memory ... it’s a nervous system locked in survival.

Peace in 2025 Is a Lie

We talk about peace like it’s a finish line. It’s not.

There is no peace when:

• Civilians are denied food and medicine

• Hospitals and refugee camps are bombed

• Aid convoys are blocked

• Generations are raised knowing they don’t matter

What we call “peace” is usually just a ceasefire with better PR.

Real peace takes food, shelter, justice, safety, and the radical belief that the next generation should live free of your trauma...
None of that exists right now.

No One Gets the Moral High Ground in a Mass Grave

• Hamas is not righteous.

• Israel is not innocent.

• And the rest of us? We are complicit every time we scroll past this and say, “It’s too complicated.”

This is not good versus evil...
It’s trauma versus trauma, power versus desperation ... and in the middle are children, born into rubble, waiting for the world to care.

Speaking Out Is a Form of Rebellion

There’s this idea that rebellion has to be loud. Explosive. Violent...
But sometimes, rebellion is saying something true when everyone else is lying, minimizing, or staying silent.

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
— George Orwell

Speaking up is hard.
It’s harder when you're the only one doing it.
It’s harder when you're afraid of being wrong, or judged, or told to "stay in your lane."

But if you're hesitating to talk about Gaza, or migrants at the border, or anti-trans laws, or reproductive rights, or Ukraine, or anywhere people are being dehumanized ... that hesitation might be the clearest sign that you need to.

And let’s be clear:
This isn’t about politics. It’s about people.
The ones holding power are human. Just like you. Just like the people they’re starving, bombing, and failing.
I don’t call out injustice because I’ve picked a team.
I call it out because bullshit is bullshit ... no matter who’s spewing it.
And if someone’s in power, they should be held to the same standard as anyone else. No free passes just because they’ve got a podium.

Recently, during a joint press conference, one country’s dignitary calmly corrected the other ... in real time.
No shouting. No posturing. Just facts. Clarity. Total control.
They stood there while bullshit flew and didn’t take the bait.

That’s not passivity. That’s precision.
That’s knowing what’s being thrown is shit ... and having the clarity to step over it instead of rolling in it.

That’s what courage looks like.
Not loud. Just unshakable.

What Are We Handing to the Next Generation?

Even if the bombs stopped tomorrow, the damage has already been done.

The bodies of the next generation are being shaped by war before they’re even born.
The trauma is becoming biological. It’s not just felt ... it’s coded. In cortisol. In inflammation. In gene expression. The grief doesn’t end. It replicates.

And if we don’t stop this now, they’ll carry it. And their children will carry it.

Because trauma doesn’t just disappear. It gets inherited.
And so does silence.

-Matt

References

• Heijmans, B.T., et al. (2008). Persistent epigenetic differences associated with prenatal exposure to famine in humans. PNAS.

• Tobi, E.W., et al. (2009). DNA methylation differences after exposure to prenatal famine are common and timing- and sex-specific. Human Molecular Genetics.

• Yehuda, R., et al. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry.

• Chen, Y., et al. (2021). Maternal PTSD and altered cortisol in children: Transgenerational neuroendocrine consequences of trauma. Journal of Affective Disorders, 289, 60–68.

• Milton-Edwards, B. (2010). Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement. Polity Press.

• English, R. (2003). Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. Oxford University Press.

• Segev, T. (1999). One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate.

• Hamas Charter (1988). Yale Avalon Project. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

• MEMRI. (2017). Hamas’s New Document Of Principles. https://www.memri.org

• B’Tselem. (2023). Gaza: Imprisonment and Closure. https://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip

• United Nations OCHA (2024). Situation Reports and Famine Alerts. https://www.unocha.org

• NPR (2025). As Gaza starves, the next generation may also endure the consequences. https://www.npr.org