Gaza and the End of History

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During a recent panel on Gaza and human rights held in Bangkok, I was asked whether the destruction of Gaza represents a watershed moment for the twenty-first century. The answer, of course, is unequivocally in the affirmative. Nearly two years into Israel’s onslaught, we have heard something like this claim made many times: there is the world before this annihilation, and the world after. Have we really understood what this means?

Gaza has become a symbol both of Western hypocrisy and of its victims’ recourse to human rights and international law as a final forum of appeal for collective deliverance.

Gaza’s utterly ruined landscape serves as a mirror, reflecting the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the liberal international order. Israel’s unchecked bombardment not just of Gaza but of Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, and now Syria; its unprecedented and systematic devastation of health care systems and the most basic infrastructure for sustaining human life; its blockade of humanitarian aid, attacks at food distribution sites, and use of starvation as an instrument of collective punishment; its criminal disregard for the murders and land-grabs committed by settlers in the West Bank—the totality of this relentless aggression, captured only in part by this morbid catalogue and compounded by every mechanism of rationalization and denial, reveals the complete erosion of international humanitarian law, the double standards that govern the rhetoric of human rights, and the racism that sits at the core of the West’s strained efforts to maintain geopolitical hegemony. A poll conducted by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and reported in Haaretz earlier this year reported that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support expelling Palestinians from Gaza, 56 percent support expelling Israel’s own Arab citizens, 47 percent endorse the Israel Defense Forces acting “as Joshua did in Jericho—kill all its inhabitants,” and, among those who see Palestinians as Amalek, 93 percent believe the biblical injunction to “wipe out Amalek” still applies. As of this writing in late July, the magnitude of the hunger crisis is eliciting the strongest criticism of Israeli actions in Western media seen since the siege began, while two prominent Israeli humanitarian organizations, Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem, have joined the judgment of multiple other scholars and groups around the globe in declaring that Israel is committing genocide. What becomes of democracy, human rights, and moral responsibility in the face of all this?

Pankaj Mishra provides an answer in his recent book, The World After Gaza, which situates Israel’s genocidal campaign within a larger continuum of Western imperialism, entrenched racism, and colonial legacies. Among its many effects, what is being done to the people of Gaza—and what the United States continues to enable—is forcing a global reckoning as the West’s self-portrait as guardian of universal values decisively cracks under the weight of its complicity. Though long in the making, the unraveling is now more acute than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

The evidence is on wide display and only mounting. In a July speech at an emergency meeting of the Hague Group, a global alliance convened by the Progressive International in January to hold Israel accountable under international law, Colombian President Gustavo Petro offered a frankly dystopian interpretation to the thirty-two nations in attendance in Bogotá. “Gaza,” he said, “is simply an experiment by the ultra‑rich, trying to show all the people of the world how to respond to humanity’s rebellion.” “They plan to bomb all of us,” he added, then clarified—“those of us in the Global South, at least.” Invoking the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, he stressed that another of the casualties of this “barbarism” is multilateralism itself—the “chance for nations to come together,” the very “idea of global democracy” and its international institutions.

Of course, as Sven Lindqvist recounts in A History of Bombing (2000), colonial powers routinely bombed defenseless civilian populations, from Italian campaigns in Libya to British attacks in India and all over the Middle East; it was the European setting of Guernica that imbued its destruction with moral urgency for the West and gave its crimes a historical salience the victims of colonialism had always been denied. Today, growing solidarity with Gaza is perceived by so many in the West as a threat to Western interests and values precisely because it purports to extend moral concern to the “wrong” victims. It is no coincidence that seventeen of the twenty countries that have joined South Africa’s case charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice are from the so-called Global South.

Gaza has thus become a symbol both of Western hypocrisy and of its victims’ recourse to human rights and international law as a final forum of appeal for collective deliverance—the deliverance of the “wretched of the earth,” as Frantz Fanon famously called colonized subjects, whoever and wherever they may be. The legal and moral reverberations cannot be overstated, for the global order and for the future of humanity.

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Among the tragedies of the ongoing destruction is the apparent repetition of an ancient pattern, an eternal return of history from which Gaza cannot seem to escape. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, it has been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over centuries. Venit calvitium super Gazam, “Baldness has come upon Gaza,” reads the opening of Jeremiah 47:5 in the Vulgate. In Jewish Antiquities, Flavius Josephus tells how Gaza was attacked in the mid-second century BCE by Jonathan Maccabeus, who during the struggles between Demetrius II and Antiochus VI reached Gaza only to be shut out; in revenge he besieged it, plundered its suburbs, then accepted a plea for peace and took hostages to Jerusalem.

Decades later, after a protracted siege ending around 96 BCE, the Judean King Alexander Jannaeus captured Gaza, totally devastating it as part of his coastal expansion. The city lay desolate until it was restored to independence by the Roman general and statesman Pompey and rebuilt on or near a new site by the proconsul Aulus Gabinius in 57 BCE. It prospered again under early Roman rule, and then, with the first Jewish–Roman revolt in 66 CE, Judean extremists destroyed it once again. “Neither Sebaste nor Ashkelon withstood their fury,” Josephus writes. “These they burnt to the ground and then razed Anthedon and Gaza. In the vicinity of each of these cities many villages were pillaged and immense numbers of the inhabitants captured and slaughtered.”

The Jews were not the only ones to hate the “Gazaians,” as Josephus called the region’s inhabitants. In 395 AD, Porphyrius was appointed bishop of Gaza and set about converting the city’s predominantly pagan population, often through coercive measures that included the demolition of their temples and the repurposing of sacred spaces for Christian worship. Today, the bishop is considered one of the early saints of the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic traditions. In 1150, a church bearing his name was erected on the foundations of a fifth-century church dedicated to him—the very church that was shelled by the Israeli army on October 20, 2023, killing eighteen people as hundreds of Christians and Muslims were taking shelter there. A central moment in the Life of Saint Porphyrius, written by the bishop’s deacon Mark, is the destruction of the Temple of Marnas, presented as a triumph over idolatry. Mark records how the people of Gaza were forced to watch their most important religious sanctuary being destroyed by imperial troops, instigated by the bishop and a mob of vengeful Christians.

The French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu chronicles this longue durée in Gaza: A History (2014), tracing the siege of this tiny strip of land down to the contemporary world—through the Nakba, Israeli occupation after 1967, and the establishment of a total blockade upon the withdrawal of Israeli settlers in 2005—while capturing the real scale of historical time, political agency, and global significance of the region. The fact that even the broad sweep of this history remains virtually unknown, despite the prominence of Israel-Palestine in the foreign policy of Western governments for decades, is itself a measure of the depth of dehumanization to which Palestinians have always been subject in public consciousness in the West—reduced, at best, to alien Others or blank victims without a culture and without a past, and usually portrayed as much worse. “So much of our history has been occluded,” Edward Said noted in 1999. “We are invisible people.” The same remains true more than a quarter-century later.

Western powers’ reactions to the litany of Israeli military operations in Gaza in the recent past—Cast Lead in 2008–9, Pillar of Defense in 2012, Protective Edge in 2014, the air strikes of 2021—themselves followed a recurring trend: initial affirmation of Israel’s “right to self-defense” and “right to exist,” followed at most by muted or delayed criticism of disproportionate force once it is a fait accompli, and always minimal political or diplomatic consequences, if any at all. All the while, Israel imposed conditions on Gaza that culminated in growing global outrage at confining its two million residents to an “open-air prison.”

By underwriting Israel’s genocidal onslaught so flagrantly, Western governments have hastened the final discrediting of the legal order the West itself developed after World War II.

Well before the current genocide, then, countless scholars and human rights organizations were condemning an obvious double standard: while professing commitments to human rights and international law, Western governments fueled their subversion by failing to hold Israel accountable and directly aiding its crimes. The pattern of exoneration—the rigorously enforced indifference to the “victims of the victims”—warrants a psychoanalytic inquiry unto itself. Implicating unresolved guilt over the Shoah, compounded by an inability to regard Arabic-speaking peoples and Muslims as fully human, it reflects an insidious modern form of antisemitism, which on the one hand insists on support for Israel as the sine qua non of Jewishness and on the other collapses prejudice against a people into contestation of contingent state actions.

But the destruction this time, however continuous with a long history of oppression, is different. In addition to the apocalyptic scale of death and devastation, unseen in the previous fourteen wars on Gaza since the Nakba, there is, first, the reckoning that Mishra tracks: the death knell for whatever moral authority the West struggled to retain and project since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration’s use of torture (for which it has never faced accountability), and its declaration of a “global war on terror” after September 11. By underwriting Israel’s genocidal onslaught—financially, materially, and ideologically—so flagrantly these twenty-two months and counting, Western governments have hastened the final discrediting of the rules-based legal order that the West itself developed in the wreckage of World War II, structured around the four interlocking norms of the illegality of aggressive war, universal human rights and civilian protection, accountability for atrocity crimes, and multilateral cooperation.

The cases of Ireland, Spain, and Norway, which recognized the state of Palestine in May last year, are the exceptions that prove the rule. After the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November, leaders in Germany, Italy, and Poland vowed not to arrest Netanyahu or extradite him to the Hague should he visit their countries. For its part, the United States has imposed sanctions on Karim Khan, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, and Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, while Netanyahu has entered the country three times since February. Emmanuel Macron’s late-breaking declaration that France will recognize Palestinian statehood at the United Nations this September follows his initial strong support for Israel for months after October 7 and the country’s argument that the ICC warrant is invalid because Israel is not a member of the court.

In so decisively shredding the norms they helped establish, together with their associated moral and legal architecture—the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Nuremberg Principles of 1950, the Rome Statute of 1998—Western powers are presiding over the final collapse of their credibility in ways they do not appear to recognize or understand. The morbid systems are manifesting in the wider world, however. At recent conferences I attended in Cairo, Beirut, and Bangkok, variously focused on the future of capitalism, the long-term sequelae of historical trauma, and the fate of human rights discourse, young students and junior scholars from the Global South argued for a decisive turn away from intellectual, political, and moral frameworks associated with the West.

The impulse is understandable, and the critique should not be taken lightly. But there are profound costs to renouncing the universalism of human rights as nothing but a sham, intrinsically compromised by its affiliation with Western hypocrisy or its corruption by Western power. Doing so risks entrenching a West-East/North-South divide and fueling an “us versus them” dynamic reminiscent of Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” It also sets a perilous precedent for future violence, aggression, and war unchecked by even imperfect appeals to shared norms and values. In this regard, leading humanitarian organizations and think tanks—including Oxfam, the Overseas Development Institute, and the UN World Food Programme—have warned that Israel’s obstruction of relief efforts in Gaza threatens to undermine humanitarian responses in the roughly 130 other armed or protracted conflicts worldwide. As the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, further reminded the UN Security Council Open Debate on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in May, ignoring these rules is “a race to the moral bottom—a fast track to chaos and irreversible despair.”

For countless people around the world, particularly where democratic and liberal aspirations are relentlessly attacked and appeals to human rights remain the primary defense against authoritarian rule, the erosion of the credibility of the fundamental norms of the postwar order profoundly undermines ongoing political struggles against injustice. In his important book published earlier this year, Righting Wrongs, Kenneth Roth, the long-time director of Human Rights Watch, persuasively argues that exposing atrocities and advocating for justice is not merely a moral imperative but a crucial, oftentimes the only, means of holding power accountable on the global stage. International law and the broader human rights architecture are more than just a framework for an internal order that strives for peace and justice; they constitute a lifeline toward a fairer, more equitable future. Handing autocrats, tyrants, and oligarchs a regime of purely transactional governance with no accountability mechanism—where human rights cease to be intrinsic and legally enshrined and instead become arbitrary—would be our gravest mistake. Petro thus spoke in Bogotá of the need both to condemn prevailing “barbarism” and to give real meaning to the principles now being betrayed—to keep alive, that is, “the possibility of another kind of humanity, one that can love and think collectively.” As his work with the Hague Group makes clear, it has fallen to the Global South to carry that torch and lead the struggle for genuine equality and justice following the eclipse of Western integrity. Our best course is to keep pressing for critical engagement, exposing and challenging the West’s blind spots, double standards, racism, and imperial abuses while simultaneously advancing the universal human‑rights framework.

A second aspect of the ongoing onslaught that stands out relative to the past is the unprecedented weaponization and systematic destruction of the right to health and health care—that is, the right to life itself. The horrific figures are by now well-known: the thousands of children killed, the thousands amputated, and the irreversible damage to surviving bodies and minds. While health and health care have been attacked in previous conflicts and continue to be attacked in Ukraine, Sudan, and other conflicts around the world, never before has an entire health care system been systematically pulverized as a military strategy, nor have we seen so many health care professionals being systematically targeted, kidnapped, abused, and tortured. According to a World Health Organization database, more than two-thirds of all global attacks on health care were perpetrated in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7.

At an emergency meeting of the Hague Group, Colombian President Gustavo Petro stressed the need both to condemn the “barbarism” and to keep alive “the possibility of another kind of humanity.”

In a remarkable editorial published in May this year, The Lancet, one of the most impactful medical journals in the world, finally deplored the “silence and impunity” on Gaza. The editorial contends that Gaza’s health catastrophe—which public health experts around the world have warned about incessantly and to no avail—is no longer just a crisis of military violence but a crisis of global complicity: silence from health institutions and paralysis at the UN Security Council are enabling these ongoing blatant violations of international humanitarian law. Ending that silence, the editorial insists, is a professional and moral duty for the global health community and a prerequisite for protecting civilian lives.

Over thirty-two days last winter, Filiu himself documented conditions in Gaza while embedded with a Médecins Sans Frontières team stationed in the so-called “humanitarian zone” in central and southern Gaza. The only professional Western historian to my knowledge to have seen the devastation firsthand, his eyewitness testimony melds visceral reportage—night-time convoys through a landscape of endless rubble, stories of families repeatedly displaced, hospitals deliberately hit—with a historian’s long view of Gaza’s entrapment since 1967. Extracts of his diary, published by Le Monde earlier this year, echo the reports of Palestinians, doctors, and humanitarian groups over the last two years, portraying a territory subjected to what he describes as a methodical project of expulsion and destruction—in other words, the very definition of ethnic cleansing. His purpose, Filiu explains, was to contribute further direct evidence of the atrocities being committed that would otherwise remain unseen while Israel blocks international media access and to combat the “historical revisionism” of “Western governments, intellectual elites, and mainstream media,” despite the constant stream of videos, images, pleas, and reports that have flooded out of Gaza from the beginning. It is another stark measure of the dehumanization and racism at the core of the West’s alliance with Israel that these direct Palestinian testimonies have scarcely been heard or heeded in Western media, generally dismissed as antisemitic lies or Hamas propaganda while the claims of the Israeli army and government are reported and reflexively trusted without the most basic scrutiny.

And now, Gaza is starving, prompting a far too belated outpouring of alarm from Western elites. UNICEF has said that more than 9,000 children have been treated for malnutrition in Gaza this year. According to a May report from the World Health Organization, “This is one of the world’s worst hunger crises, unfolding in real time,” with “the entire 2.1 million population of Gaza . . . facing prolonged food shortages, with nearly half a million people in a catastrophic situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death.” In the wake of this news, seven European countries said in a joint statement that they “will not be silent in front of the man-made humanitarian catastrophe that is taking place before our eyes in Gaza,” and the EU started a review of its trade agreement with Israel.The situation has only declined since then, reaching such a paroxysm of catastrophe that outrage has begun to reach across partisan divides and into the pages of the New York Times.

Why now? Why, after twenty-two months of complacency and complicity, have some European and American elites suddenly changed their tone? The conceit that the basic facts or circumstances have changed—that real alarm was inappropriate until now—defies all serious analysis. Is it rather because starvation has long been the Achilles’ heel of imperial adventurism, a moral bridge too far for the enlightened nations? It would be flattering to the West to think so, but the shift instead looks driven by utilitarian considerations: an attempt to salvage some credibility in the face of plummeting popular support, and perhaps the belated recognition that, left completely unchecked, Netanyahu’s expansionist ambitions—to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip—spell disaster for the West’s own interests.

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Gaza, then, is much more than a “humanitarian catastrophe.” It is a turning point that lays bare the full range and cruel depths of the contemporary world’s contradictions—the unreconstructed moral biases and prejudices of entire populations, the fractures within nominally democratic polities, and the apparent fragility, even occasional futility, of resistance. It shows how swiftly majorities can capitulate, whether for survival or out of self-interest, and it exposes what is fundamentally wrong today: a persistent inability to recognize every human being as equal and deserving of dignity and life, whatever their beliefs, skin color, or religious affiliation. The universal human-rights framework has been totally eviscerated and lies in urgent need of repair. The United Nations itself—indispensable yet increasingly impotent—needs a fundamental reset. We cannot afford to revert to the pre–human rights era while regimes slide into authoritarianism, bigotry is rampant, xenophobia endures, and liberal democracy remains, for many, only an aspiration.

Filiu’s documentary testimony evokes the work of Simone Weil, the formidable philosopher-activist who traveled to Germany in 1932 to observe the rise of Hitler firsthand. While many of her contemporaries watched from afar—oblivious to Germany’s rapid descent into Nazism and the early persecution of Jews that followed Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933—Weil produced one of the earliest, clearest autopsies of the Weimar Republic’s collapse. Her prescient observations teach us that nations require “roots” in compassion and that only unconditional obligations to every person can keep the modern world from relapsing into perpetual war.

The so-called “advanced liberal democracies” of the West were identified so strongly with these principles during the second half of the twentieth century that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama could argue, to a chorus of agreement, that liberal democracy had triumphed as the terminus of history’s ideological development. The ongoing genocide in Gaza reveals that the contest over political legitimacy, human rights, and state sovereignty was always far from settled—that history’s conflicts over power, identity, and justice will persist until the claims of humanity reach “the last man.”

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