Another day, another soul crushed under the wheels of geopolitical machinery. Mona Khalil, a British-born turtle conservationist, has been killed by an Israeli strike in Lebanon. The news arrives with the grim predictability of a weather forecast in an age of perpetual war.
Let us not pretend this is a tragedy. It is a crime, a squalid emblem of our era’s moral incontinence. Khalil devoted her life to protecting sea turtles on Lebanon’s coast.
She was no soldier, no politician. She was a woman who believed in the quiet dignity of saving a creature that has outlived empires. And for that, she was rewarded with a missile.
We are told this is collateral damage. But the term is a lie, a bureaucratic euphemism for the failure of states to distinguish between combatants and the innocent. Compare this to the Victorian era, where imperialists at least had the decency to feel guilt over their colonial savageries.
They read Ruskin and wept over the fall of Carthage while burning villages in India. Today, we have no such pretence. We have drones and press releases.
Khalil’s death is a microcosm of a larger decay. The nation state, that once proud edifice of law and order, has become a machine for the efficient disposal of life. Lebanon, Israel, Britain: three nations complicit in a farce of sovereignty.
The turtles she saved will outlast us all. But that is cold comfort. Her killing joins the long list of sins we commit daily in the name of security, righteousness, or simply inertia.
The British government will issue a statement. There will be a brief moment of hand-wringing. Then the news cycle will move on, hungry for the next outrage.
This is not the Fall of Rome. That was a slow, dignified decline. We are living through the Fall of Common Sense.
Goodbye, Mona Khalil. Your turtles will remember you, even if we do not.
