What is happening in Gaza is not an episode, nor an unfortunate escalation in a long conflict. It is not a “tragic complexity” to be endlessly debated on television panels. It is a political reality unfolding in real time: the systematic destruction of the conditions of life for an entire population, carried out with military precision, rhetorical justification, and international protection.

To understand this reality, one must abandon the comforting fiction of accident and return to history—not as memory, but as structure.

The West insists on presenting itself as the guardian of universal values: law, human rights, moral responsibility. Yet when Gaza burns, those values suddenly become flexible, conditional, selective. What we are witnessing is not a failure of principles, but their instrumentalization.

Colonial Violence as a System, Not an Event

The Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi warned long ago that colonial domination is never merely a matter of tanks and borders. In The Conditions of the Renaissance, he argued that colonialism functions as a system, sustained by power on the one hand and by intellectual and moral environments on the other. Colonial violence, he wrote, does not survive on force alone; it survives because it is made acceptable.

This insight is crucial today. Gaza is not destroyed in a vacuum. Its destruction is enabled by a global environment that tolerates, explains, relativizes, and ultimately absorbs mass civilian death without consequence.

Hospitals collapse, aid is blocked, civilians are displaced repeatedly, and entire neighborhoods are erased. Yet the dominant discourse does not speak the language of crime. It speaks the language of “security,” “context,” and “regrettable necessity.” Violence is not denied—it is managed rhetorically.

The Surveillance of Meaning

In The Intellectual Struggle in Colonized Countries, Bennabi developed one of his most powerful concepts: the surveillance of ideas. Modern domination, he argued, does not require constant coercion. It requires control over the field of meaning—over what can be said, how it can be said, and which questions are deemed legitimate.

This is precisely the mechanism at work today.

Facts from Gaza are available. Images circulate. Numbers are known. And yet, the conversation is endlessly redirected. The question is never what is being done, but how it should be framed. The victims are transformed into subjects of debate rather than holders of rights. Their suffering becomes an abstraction.

In this environment, language does not illuminate reality—it neutralizes it.

From Crusades to Delegated Violence

The continuity with history is not metaphorical. It is structural.
Yesterday, Europe waged its wars in the name of the Cross and “civilizing missions.” Today, it wages them in the name of democracy and counterterrorism. The vocabulary has changed; the hierarchy of lives has not.
What has changed is method.

The West no longer wishes to appear directly responsible for mass violence in the East. The moral and reputational costs are too high. So violence is delegated. It is outsourced to an actor that operates militarily while the West provides weapons, diplomatic cover, and narrative legitimacy.

Israel does not operate outside the Western system. It operates within it, as its forward executor. This is not a conspiracy; it is a geopolitical arrangement sustained by military aid, vetoes, and selective outrage.

Law Without Protection

In The Problem of Culture, Bennabi warned of a world in which values become technical tools—invoked without ethical substance. International law today illustrates this danger perfectly.

Legal language remains omnipresent, but its function has shifted. It no longer protects the vulnerable; it organizes exceptions. It no longer restrains power; it rationalizes it. Entire populations can be deprived of water, food, shelter, and medical care, while the debate remains trapped in procedural ambiguity.

When the destruction of life’s foundations becomes routine and unpunished, the question is no longer whether the term genocide is “controversial.” The question is whether we have emptied the word of meaning to preserve political comfort.

Israel Does Not Act Alone

This must be stated clearly: Israel does not act alone.

It acts with weapons supplied, with funds approved, with diplomatic shields activated, and with narratives carefully maintained. Every unchallenged strike, every blocked resolution, every moral evasion contributes to the same outcome: impunity.

Bennabi understood that the most dangerous form of domination is not the one that silences opposition, but the one that teaches the world to live with injustice as if it were normal.

What is unfolding in Gaza is not only a crime against Palestinians. It is a crime against the very idea of a post-colonial world. It reveals a global order that has learned to coexist with mass death—as long as the victims belong to the “wrong” side of history.

A Struggle Over Meaning

Gaza is not only a battlefield of territory. It is a battlefield of meaning.
And meaning, as Bennabi insisted, determines whether history records a people as victims—or erases them as footnotes.

The West may succeed in managing this genocide politically. It may succeed in delaying accountability. But history is unforgiving toward systems that mistake power for morality.

At some point, the question will no longer be what happened in Gaza, but who knew—and chose to look away.