Gaza and the death of morality
9 Min Read
The genocide in Gaza has stripped the global order of its last illusion: exposing a civilization that feels nothing and justifies everything.
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Gaza and the death of morality (Photo by Mahdi Rtail)
It will always be Gaza at the world’s throat.
Not one single breath of relief will make some sense of what the mightiest land and its children have seen, in an age that will be remembered for its barbaric violence and its frightening indifference.
Gaza is not a tragedy of politics; it is the moral collapse of the world order itself. The bombed hospitals, starved families, flesh on the walls, the blood pools in playgrounds, have stripped away the illusion that the so-called defenders of human rights still possess a conscience.
The world not only failed Gaza; it failed its own humanity, and heralded the era of monsters.
The anatomy of moral apathy
In 1963, James Baldwin wrote that “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.”
His diagnosis of American racism, what he called the moral apathy and the death of the heart, captures with devastating precision the paralysis of our own time. It is not only ignorance, but the deliberate refusal to see and to feel. It was the comfort of detachment and the safety of pretending another’s suffering does not demand one’s attention.
In Baldwin’s America, this apathy justified the oppression of Black people. In today’s world, it justifies first the annihilation of Palestinians, then the obliteration of the greater region. The mechanism is the same: strip a people of their humanity, then mourn their deaths as inevitable. Moral apathy allows the powerful to commit atrocities without guilt, and the spectators to watch without discomfort.
Baldwin understood that apathy is the true face of oppression. It is not only the cruelty of those who act, but the silence of those who allow. In that sense, Gaza is not merely a site of violence; it is a mirror reflecting the collapse of the moral imagination of our time.
The hollowing of the human
Truthfully, the very concepts of empathy and morality have been fragmented as the world transformed into a terrible dystopia that blurred the lines and weakened their integrity. It is only right to recall their definitions, to firmly understand what is at stake.
Empathy and morality are often spoken of together, but they are not the same. Morality is a construct. It is learned, taught, and enforced. It can be shaped, just as it can be corrupted. Empathy, by contrast, is instinctive. It is the natural human impulse to feel another’s pain, to respond to it as if it were our own.
But empathy, too, can be eroded.
We live in a world that overwhelms the senses while numbing the soul. Constant exposure to suffering, through the relentless churn of media, has made compassion feel like exhaustion. Wars unfold in real time, yet barely register beyond a click or scroll.
Here chimes in Hannah Arendt's warning of "the banality of evil;" the ordinary obedience that allows atrocities to become mere routine. Today's banality of evil is digital: it scrolls, rationalizes, and moves on. Sometimes, it immediately skips. When an entire world can watch the starvation of children in Gaza and call it "self-defense" or "a complicated situation" [for those who understand the horrors but are entrenched in the bothsidesism of it all], morality has lost its meaning and empathy has lost its pulse.
Morality without empathy is empty. It becomes a language of justification rather than justice. It is what allows warplanes to drop tonnes of bombs on hospitals and shelter tents while invoking "security", or to allow famine to gnaw at civilians' bones while claiming "necessity."
When power monopolizes the definition of right and wrong, of black and white, morality ceases to be ethical and becomes ideological.
The collapse of the global conscience
If morality and empathy are the twin pillars of our shared humanity, Gaza has shown that both have collapsed. Every institution that once claimed moral authority, from the United Nations to the self-appointed guardians of democracy, has failed the people of Palestine. Resolutions are passed and ignored; laws are cited but never enforced.
The silence of Western governments and their active complicity has turned the genocide in Gaza into the most damning indictment of our age. The same powers that lecture the world on democracy and human rights are arming the occupation, vetoing ceasefires, and criminalizing dissent.
This is not a deviation from the system; it is its design.
The “rules-based international order” is not collapsing; it is revealing itself. Built on centuries of colonial hierarchy, it was never intended to protect the oppressed but to preserve the privileges of empire. The same logic that once justified colonialism in Africa and Asia now sustains the occupation of Palestine.
The mania of morality
Even the humanitarian machinery built around this order has revealed its own moral emptiness. Many governments and NGOs have watched the horror in Gaza and chosen symbolism over substance. They have rushed to evacuate donkeys, dogs, and cats [lives that make for comforting headlines], while leaving the animals’ human owners to face the bombs.
Others have airlifted children to “safety,” but only by separating them from their mothers, fathers, and siblings.
This is a perfect example of bureaucracy masquerading as virtue, an ugly fetish for appearances, a compassion staged for the camera, completely detached from human connection.
In truth, much of the global humanitarian system now operates as spectacle. It feeds on crisis, translating agony into funding and pain into public-relations campaigns. Governments and aid agencies measure empathy by visibility rather than justice.
In Gaza, Palestinians juggled evading Israeli fire and putting on a show to garner the world's sympathy. And the world sat and watched: One for the money, two for the show.
This moral theater is what Baldwin foresaw when he warned that a society built on denial becomes spiritually diseased. The world has learned to perform empathy without feeling it, to moralize suffering without stopping it.
Gaza exposes the final stage of this decay: the moment when morality becomes a fetish rather than a force for good.
The machinery of domination
There is something very sinister and purely disturbing about seeing humiliation and not batting an eye. Does degradation not call for revolt anymore?
The occupation that rules over Palestinians is not sustained solely by military power; it thrives on humiliation. Its architecture, from checkpoints, blockades, raids, and bombings, is designed to crush the spirit, to make survival itself an act of defiance.
What we see in Gaza is the perfection of domination: a system that reduces life to control, that finds order in subjugation, and that feeds on cycles of destruction to maintain its own sense of purpose. This machinery is not an aberration; it is the logic of empire in its purest form.
"Israel" dresses Palestinian detainees in sweatshirts with inherently violent scriptures printed on them. Its soldiers assault women before their husbands' and fathers' eyes. They unleash attack dogs on children. "Israel" is a nauseatingly twisted entity which possesses a pathological need for dehumanization to preserve its power.
It is a parasite, and it leaves germs of rot on a planetary scale in Gaza. Its violence, and the complicity and silence that sustain it, expose how deeply moral rot has infected global politics. The world's most powerful care to defend impunity, of which "Israel" has been given carte blanche, instead of justice.
The moral bankruptcy of empire
The empires of today no longer call themselves empires, yet their behavior remains unchanged. Their moral narratives of “freedom,” “civilization,” and “security” are rebrands of older lies. The genocide in Gaza has torn through this language, exposing a system that prizes order over justice, silence over truth, and profit over life.
To call this moral decay would imply that morality once existed at its core. In truth, the system has always been morally bankrupt. It survives through selective empathy, mourning European lives while dismissing Arab ones as collateral. It speaks of human rights while profiting from human suffering.
The thing is, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Gaza has made it impossible to unsee. The myth of Western moral superiority has crumbled. The genocide has not merely destroyed Palestinian lives; it has shattered the diseased moral architecture of the modern world.
Reclaiming the human
To face Gaza is to confront the spiritual rot within our civilization. It requires abandoning neutrality, for neutrality in the face of cruelty is complicity.
To feel again, to allow empathy to pierce through apathy, is the first act of resistance. In a time when governments criminalize compassion and media sanitizes mass murder, empathy itself becomes revolutionary. To stand with Gaza is not a gesture of charity; it is a moral necessity.
If the world continues to alienate itself from Gaza’s suffering, it will not be the end of Palestine alone, it will be the end of humanity’s claim to morality. For a system that can justify genocide cannot sustain life, and a conscience that can tolerate it cannot survive.
The question before us is not whether this world order can be reformed. It cannot. It was never moral; it was merely convenient. The question is whether we, as people, can rediscover our capacity to feel before it is too late.
Right now, Gaza is the sanctuary of the last drop of humanity. In the ruins, we see both: the beginning of the end of a spiritually empty empire, and the final test of our moral integrity.
