[News] Gaza and the death of morality

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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  Gaza and the death of morality

Tala Alayli
October 30, 2025
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The genocide in Gaza has stripped the global order of its last illusion: 
exposing a civilization that feels nothing and justifies everything.

  * Gaza and the death of morality (Photo by Mahdi Rtail)
    <https://alpha-en-media.almayadeen.net/media/image/2025/10/29/84f2367e-9ae7-4dce-9723-a9e8559028eb.png?width=1000>
    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.

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