Gaza As a World Event
By Nancy Fraser
Published by The New Left Review
NLR 158•Mar/Apr 2026
The meanings of Gaza continue to unfold. Eloquent, well-documented reports like those of the un Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories; acclaimed cinematic works like The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025); poetry such as Refaat Alareer’s If I Must Die (2024); analysis by Palestinian historians such as Rashid Khalidi and jurists like Rabea Eghbariah—all these and many more have addressed the import of Israel’s scorched-earth assault, its repeated attacks on aid-distribution sites and ‘safe zones’, its tactics of siege and starvation, its displacement of millions of Palestinians into those ‘unthinkable wastelands of rubble, sewage and decomposing bodies’ described by the un Rapporteur.1
Here, I want to examine a different aspect of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza: its significance as a ‘world event’, an epochal turning point that also serves to reveal, and so to signify, the nature of the times. I aim to do so in a register that will range between the political, the social, the philosophical and the personal. I argue that ‘Gaza’ signifies a crisis for the moral order that has held sway across much of the West for the past half century. Installed in the United States from the 1970s onward, and serving to justify its global hegemony along with Israeli expansionism, that order was centred on the Nazi Judeocide as the ultimate emblem of ‘radical evil’, delimiting the horizon within which wrong and its rectification could be thought.footnote2 Today, however, Auschwitz itself is invoked as justification for a new genocide. The effect is to leave the Holocaust-centred Western moral order in tatters, no longer able to conceal or contain the glaring crimes committed by the Israeli state and its American backer. In the current period, ‘Gaza’ bids to replace ‘Auschwitz’ as symbol for the worst human atrocities of our time.
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