gaza has remade the world
reflections on genocide, resistance, and carrying the struggle forward
The first demonstration I attended to protest against the genocide in Gaza—a vigil and ceasefire rally organized by progressive Jewish groups in Washington, D.C.—took place in October 2023, just a few days after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the beginning of Israel’s bombardment. Around a thousand people assembled in Farragut Square and marched a few blocks south to the White House, where the crowd surrounded the building and smaller groups of us blocked off each of the entrances. The intention of blocking the building’s entrances, rather than maintaining the public spectacle of a single large crowd gathered outside the gates, was to send a message to White House staffers as they tried to enter and exit, demanding that they end their employer’s complicity in the genocide.
When all was said and done, it was little more than yet another purely symbolic expression of civil disobedience, the sort of tactic that has been increasingly (and rightly) critiqued as the genocide has worn on for being overly performative and largely ineffective. At the time, however, we were spurred on by the possibility—however remote—that the people working inside the building we were blockading, the people with the power to put an end to the carnage that was just beginning to unfold might look out the window and pay attention to us. Back then, of course, Joe Biden was still in office, and as disillusioned as I and most of my fellow travelers on the left already were after three years of feckless Democratic Party leadership, we still held on to a glimmer of hope that perhaps, if only we were able to mobilize enough public outrage and opposition, we might be able to exert sufficient pressure to shift the administration’s policy of unwavering support for Israel.
Two years later, the situation has changed so drastically that it feels trite to even point it out. We all know by now how things played out—the refusal by Biden (and later by his anointed successor, Kamala Harris) to heed the public outcry and exert any meaningful leverage to stop the genocide, the relentless demonization and smear campaigns against anyone who offered even the most milquetoast criticisms of the Zionist entity, the brutal repression of student protesters during last spring’s wave of encampments. We know also what happened next, how Biden’s toothless liberalism and promises that “nothing would fundamentally change” ended up meekly giving way for the triumphant resurgence of Donald Trump—the bloody, putrid expectoration of a decrepit empire in its final death throes—and the subsequent ascendance of fascism at a pace that has caught even the most cynical among us off guard.
All of this, of course, has taken place against a backdrop of escalating carnage in Gaza and across the Middle East. As I am writing these words, two years and a day since the genocide began, media outlets are reporting that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the “first phase” of what appears to be the most comprehensive ceasefire plan yet. Whether that ceasefire holds, and what comes next as negotiations continue over the longer-term horizons of Trump’s proposed ‘peace plan’—a plan that, if implemented, would entail the complete demilitarization of the resistance, the denial of Palestinian self-determination, and the installation of a neocolonial ‘transitional authority’ dominated by Western elites and war criminals—remains to be seen. But even if this latest development does prove to bring about a lasting cessation to what is only the most recent episode in a 77-year history of Zionist settler-colonial brutality against the Palestinians, there can be no undoing the devastation that has already been wrought.
That devastation is so complete and so incomprehensibly horrific that it is impossible to offer more than a cursory sketch of it here. Since October 2023, conservative estimates indicate that Israel has murdered some 67,000 people in Gaza, more than 80 percent of them civilians. 92 percent of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, along with 89 percent of water and sanitation infrastructure and 92 percent of schools. The most recent months of the genocide have seen Israel sadistically and systematically weaponize starvation against Gaza’s besieged population, leaving more than half a million people facing “catastrophic” famine while desperate Palestinians are gunned down indiscriminately at aid distribution sites that have been turned into killing fields. And as if the desolation of Gaza weren’t enough, the repeated expansion of Israel’s onslaught to target the wider Middle East has put the fundamentally imperial nature of this war and genocide on full display. Earlier this year, Israel launched a U.S.-backed war of aggression against the people of Iran, and in the span of just three days in September, it bombed six countries across the region—Lebanon, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen—all but two of which had already been attacked by the Zionist entity multiple times since the start of the genocide.
As we pass the second anniversary of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, when Palestinian resistance fighters heroically tore down the walls of the Gaza ghetto, as well as the second anniversary of the genocide’s beginning, now is a moment to reflect on everything that has happened since then—especially as it seems that a lasting ceasefire has finally begun to take hold. Upon such reflection, it is clearer now than ever before that the events of the last two years have fundamentally reshaped not only the world around us, but the way we as human beings look at and move through and respond to it. Gaza, in other words, has remade the world. The rest of this essay is dedicated to making sense of exactly how that remaking has unfolded, and where we go from here.
• • •
We have all, in one way or another, been forever altered by the genocide in Gaza. Whether we care to admit it to ourselves or not, we are all a little more hardened, a little more cynical, a little less trusting in the platitudes about humanity’s inherent goodness that we were taught as children to believe. The routinization of mass slaughter as just another facet of our daily lives, the overwhelming constancy with which we have been inundated with graphic images of suffering and atrocity—not to mention the disturbing ease with which the vast majority of us, in the face of this inundation, have been able to continue living happily during the war—has contributed significantly to this profound sense of alienation from our collective humanity.
But even as the genocide has indelibly touched our individual and collective psyches at the most fundamental level, it is equally true that, in ways that it is perhaps still too early to fully discern, the larger world we inhabit has been forever altered as well. After two years of genocide, the so-called ‘liberal international order’—already severely tarnished by decade after decade of Western (particularly American) leaders unilaterally forcing their imperial hegemony onto the rest of the world with smiles on their faces and guns in their hands—has been shattered beyond all hope of repair. In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Gaza genocide has proven to be for the 21st century what the Nazi Holocaust was for the 20th.
Before I develop this argument any further, a note on Holocaust analogies: there are some who will read what I have just written and find it obvious to the point of banality; there are no doubt many more who will be scandalized and even outraged. Even amid the sea change in public opinion regarding Israel that has taken place since October of 2023, there still remains a taboo in mainstream discourse against pointing out the obvious—that Netanyahu’s Israel has spent two years deploying against Palestinians the same exterminatory logics that Hitler’s Germany once deployed against the Jews of Europe, with deportation trains and gas chambers replaced by AI-powered drone systems and precision-guided munitions as the preferred instruments of mechanized mass slaughter. To do so is to risk charges of rank antisemitism, of downplaying and even outright denying the Holocaust—but after two relentless years of livestreamed genocidal barbarism, we can no longer afford to entertain such bad-faith accusations. If ‘Never Again’ is to be more than an empty slogan, we must have the moral courage to call a spade a spade.
My intention, then, in drawing this admittedly controversial comparison is not to provoke shock for its own sake, nor is it to reify the exceptionalist logic that treats the Holocaust as the universal reference point for evil in its purest form—what the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, in his powerful London Review of Books essay “The Shoah After Gaza,” calls “the measure of all crimes.” Rather, it is to highlight the unique function that the carnage in Gaza, like the Holocaust before it, has come to serve as an epoch-defining atrocity, shattering widely-held illusions and shining a light on realities that many would rather not face. The horrors of the Second World War, and in particular the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, brought about a profound rupture in Europe’s self-conception as the cradle of Enlightenment civilization (a self-conception that had, for centuries, underpinned the European project of spreading that civilization throughout the colonial world at gunpoint). A generation of European thinkers were spawned who sought desperately to make sense of the decimation of the image of the enlightened, civilized West, to understand how such a West could have produced such barbarity. In the process, a deeply distorted view began to emerge, reinforced by popular culture and political discourse, which placed the Holocaust on a dubious pedestal of exceptionalism—exceptional not only in the sense of being a unique and incommensurable evil, but more importantly in the sense of representing a particularly bloody deviation from a pre-existing standard of civilization that Europe had supposedly enjoyed.
In the introduction to his seminal 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (himself a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis as a teenager) sums up this exceptionalist narrative—a narrative which he forcefully rejects—as follows:
The etiological myth deeply entrenched in the self-consciousness of our Western society is the morally elevating story of humanity emerging from pre-social barbarity . . . In view of this myth, long ago ossified into the common sense of our era, the Holocaust can only be understood as the failure of civilization (i.e. of human purposive, reason-guided activity) to contain the morbid natural predilections of whatever has been left of nature in man.
Nearly a century after the end of World War II, this exceptionalist narrative of ‘Holocaust-as-rupture’ continues to loom large in our collective imagination. Even at the time, however, this view was powerfully challenged by anticolonial thinkers who watched it all unfold from the vantage point of Europe’s colonies, recognizing in Europe’s civilizational debasement the same barbarity that the West had long inflicted on the colonized world. Perhaps the most famous—though by no means the only—such critic was the Martinican poet and anticolonial leader Aimé Césaire, who wrote of Nazism in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism:
[Europeans] hide the truth from themselves . . . that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
Many others among Césaire’s anticolonial contemporaries, from the Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru to the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore, offered similar indictments. What this contestation over the Holocaust’s origins and its implications for Western modernity reveals, then, is that rather than representing a rupture in or deviation from that modernity, the Holocaust served to expose the fundamental hypocrisy and brutality that had always festered at the heart of it. As Bauman puts it in Modernity and the Holocaust, “every ‘ingredient’ of the Holocaust—all those many things that rendered it possible—was . . . fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world.”1
If the Holocaust in Europe shattered the illusions that underpinned Western civilizational identity in the early decades of the 20th century, then the holocaust in Gaza, three-quarters of a century later, has had a similar effect on the illusions that underpin our understanding of the international order in these early decades of the 21st. For decades since the end of World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the trans-Atlantic alliance of Western Europe and the United States has sought to position itself as the protector of liberalism on the world stage, championing the international promotion of democracy, human rights, and political freedoms while pursuing ever-greater degrees of global integration. The events of the last two years, however, have revealed the complete and utter moral bankruptcy of a ‘rules-based international order’ whose rules are set and enforced by the same Western powers that have continued without fail to provide moral, political, financial, and material support for Israel’s genocide. The fact that European leaders (the United States, in classic American fashion, still insists on sticking to its guns) are only now beginning to grow publicly uncomfortable with the sheer barbarity of the Zionist entity’s genocide, issuing tepid statements of quasi-condemnation and halfhearted gestures toward recognition of a Palestinian state, is—to put it lightly—far too little, far too late.
And just as the Nazi Holocaust was no aberration, but was in fact “fully in keeping” with the fundamental logics of European civilization, so too is the Gaza genocide fully in keeping with the fundamental logics of our current global order. Zionism seeks to exterminate the Palestinians not because of some primordial ‘ancient hatreds’ that cleave along ethnic or religious lines, but rather because Palestinian resistance to settler-colonial occupation and erasure poses an existential threat to the imperialist world system of which the state of Israel has always functioned as a key outpost. This is why Western countries, and in particular the U.S., have remained so resolute for so long in supporting Israel—they recognize, as we all should, that the current genocide is really a proxy war, waged by the United States’ most important vassal state, to defend and uphold the crumbling edifice of a world system in which the West’s imperialist boot can remain firmly pressed against the necks of the darker nations.
To say that Gaza has remade the world, however, means more than merely pointing out that it has shattered widely-held illusions about the world we live in. In giving the lie to the mythology of the liberal international order, the events of the last two years have also proven transformative for the collective empowerment of the Global South, and contributed significantly to what the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research calls the “churning of the global order.” The ‘new mood’ of assertiveness and self-determination that Tricontinental executive director Vijay Prashad has identified among Southern nations has taken root in large part as a response to the growing moral isolation of the West as a result of the genocide, and the complete delegitimization of Western powers’ claims to be legitimate arbiters of human rights and global justice.
Of course, the antecedents of these shifts—the structural contradictions of neoliberal globalization, the rise of China as an alternative leader on the world stage, the growing push for multilateralism and South-South cooperation—long predate October 7th. There can be little doubt, however that the genocide has dramatically accelerated these transformations. From South Africa accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice to China explicitly affirming Palestinians’ right to armed resistance to Southern states taking the enforcement of international law into their own hands through the formation of the Hague Group, Global South countries have used the genocide in Gaza to confront Western hypocrisy and hegemony in ways that would have been all but unthinkable just a few years ago. And lest we fall into the trap of treating these developments as if they are taking place merely at the highest levels of state policy and foreign relations, it’s worth remembering that every ‘official’ expression of Global South solidarity with Palestine has been accompanied by grassroots mobilization on the part of the masses, who have rallied in the thousands and millions across the Global South to pressure their governments from below.
Underpinning this outpouring of solidarity is the recognition that the devastation unleashed by Israel on Gaza does not exist in a vacuum—that what is being done to the Palestinians today could well be done to the rest of the Global South tomorrow. Few world leaders have been more outspoken on this point than Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has repeatedly used his platform in international fora to draw attention to this chilling reality. In his speech at the December 2023 COP28 climate summit in Dubai, for example, Petro called the genocide in Gaza a “rehearsal for the future,” warning that “the unleashing of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian people is what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate crisis.” Nearly two years later, in a July 2025 speech at the Hague Group’s emergency conference in Bogotá, Petro repeated his warning, declaring that “Gaza is simply an experiment by the mega-rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how you respond to a rebellion of humanity.” And just a few weeks ago, in his September address to the United Nations General Assembly, Petro connected the genocide in Gaza to the escalation of imperialist aggression in Latin America, emphasizing once again that “they will not just bomb Gaza, not just the Caribbean as they are doing already, but all of humanity that demands freedom.”
• • •
When reflecting on the events of the last two years, there is of course an inherent danger in speaking about the Gaza genocide and its implications for the overall state of the world in such sweeping and conceptual terms—namely, that doing so risks further dehumanizing Palestinians by treating their very material suffering as a sort of symbolic blank canvas onto which all manner of abstract conclusions can be projected. For those of us engaged in the intellectual work of trying to make sense of war and genocide, it is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that we are talking about real human beings who have suffered—and continue to suffer—real and unimaginable loss and devastation. In an August 2025 essay for the LA Review of Books, Mary Turfah argues powerfully against precisely this sort of sanitized abstraction, writing:
I will admit that I don’t care, not right now, about reordering the world, in salvaging it at all. The beginning and end of my concern is stopping the genocide in Gaza, whose people—like all people—exist not as a moral lesson or a symbol, but as people.
I am, of course, profoundly sympathetic to this position. At the same time, however, I remain firm in my belief that we cannot afford to miss the forest for the trees. The reality is that the genocide in Gaza, as I have highlighted extensively above, is the symptom and not the disease. It is the logical outgrowth, and indeed the inevitable conclusion, of an imperialist world-system that is structurally designed to facilitate the merciless exploitation of the global periphery and the international working class by a small handful of elites in the imperial core—and to punish with extreme brutality any people that dares to challenge that system.
In other words, we have no choice but to care about reordering the world, no choice but to pay attention to the very real shifts in the global order that have been engendered and intensified by both the genocide itself and by the Global South’s reactions to it. To argue, as I have maintained here, that “Gaza has remade the world” is to argue that Gaza has further sharpened the internal contradictions of the capitalist-imperialist world system, hastening their development and bringing us closer to the final crisis that will lead to that system’s inevitable collapse. What will follow in the wake of that collapse—socialism or barbarism, a liberated world or an annihilated one—is by no means a foregone conclusion. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that Gaza has started to remake the world, but that it is ultimately up to the revolutionary masses, in the Global South and the imperial core alike, to determine what form that remaking will ultimately take.
All of this is to say that even as we celebrate the news of a ceasefire in Gaza, it is incumbent upon us to remember that this is not the end of anything, but rather just one link in a long chain of historical developments that are accelerating and intensifying with each passing day. With this in mind, must remain steadfast in our commitment to a revolutionary politics whose horizon is nothing less than the liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed peoples—a liberation that can only come with the complete overthrow of the entire capitalist-imperialist world system. Anything short of that will inevitably lead us back to where we find ourselves now, picking up the pieces in the wake of yet another genocidal calamity—perhaps in Palestine, perhaps somewhere else.
• • •
In August 1971, the Black revolutionary martyr George Jackson completed his manifesto Blood in My Eye while incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. Just days later, he was murdered by prison guards while attempting to liberate himself from captivity. (Notably, after his own martyrdom, authorities found a handwritten copy of the poem “Enemy of the Sun” by the revolutionary Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim in Jackson’s cell. The poem was later mistakenly published in the Black Panther Party’s newspaper under Jackson’s name, in what the Black Studies scholar Greg Thomas calls “a magical ‘mistake’ that would cement a certain Black/Palestinian connection for decades to come.”)
In Blood in My Eye, Jackson wrote of the life-and-death urgency of revolution and liberation for oppressed people everywhere, exhorting the reader:
Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.
More than half a century later, these words still ring true. In the decades since Jackson wrote Blood in My Eye, generations of people around the world have continued to die needlessly, continued to live “poor butchered half-lives” as a result of the same systems that Jackson dedicated his tragically short life to resisting. The tens of thousands dead in Gaza are among their number, their names the latest additions to an unending list of those who have been martyred over the centuries by the West’s imperialist barbarity. We owe it to their memory, and to the memory of those countless millions who came before them, to carry forward the torch of revolution until victory and liberation.
In the words of the chant that has echoed at Palestinian protests around the world, from Ramallah to London to New York and beyond:
يا شَهِيد اِرْتَاح اِرْتَاح واِحْنَا نْوَاصِل الكِفَاح
O martyr, rest, rest, and we will continue the struggle!
culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox:
Bauman himself recognized the parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews, telling the Polish magazine Polityka in 2011 that “it is forbidden to stay silent in the face of Israeli crimes and their persecution of Palestinians exactly because the fate of Jews in Europe had similar beginnings – discrimination, pogroms, ghettoes, concluding with the Shoah.” Bauman died in 2017, at the age of 91, but we can imagine what he would have of thought about the Gaza genocide, had he been alive to witness it.