Gaza reveals the brutal new ethos of global geopolitics

Arab News

5 days ago

https://arab.news/v58d2
The systematic destruction of Gaza transcends diplomatic failure and exposes a fundamental realignment in international ethical and political frameworks. This realignment is characterized by deliberate, structured complicity from dominant global powers, facilitating military operations independently verified by UN bodies, human rights monitors, and jurists as satisfying the legal criteria for genocide. Such complicity operates through four measurable channels: continuous arms transfers exceeding $18 billion documented since October 2023, recurrent diplomatic obstruction via five Security Council vetoes blocking ceasefire resolutions, methodical disinformation campaigns targeting mortality data, and the wholesale deprivation of humanitarian assistance.
Officially confirmed direct fatalities now exceed 56,000, with civilians comprising over 70 percent of this figure. Yet this represents only the immediate kinetic impact. Rigorous analyses — validated by studies of siege warfare in Mosul (2016-2017) and Fallujah (2004) — demonstrate that indirect deaths from engineered famine, hospital collapses, and waterborne diseases consistently quadruple direct casualties. Applied to Gaza's density (5,791 persons per sq. km) and a 92 percent acute food insecurity rate, the adjusted mortality projection easily surpasses 250,000. It is the obliteration of some 10 percent of Gaza's pre-conflict population within 19 months, which exceeds the cumulative death tolls of Bosnia (1992-1995) and surpasses the pace of Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
What is more, the denial infrastructure operates with clinical precision, beginning with systematic data suppression that dismisses Gaza Health Ministry figures — historically corroborated by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Human Rights Watch — despite admissions of lacking alternative methodologies. The denial even extends to linguistic obfuscation, where over 14,000 child deaths are classified as 'collateral damage' despite targeting protocols permitting 100:1 civilian-to-combatant ratios and documented deployment of 2,000-pound bombs on designated safe zones.
Simultaneously, physical erasure manifests through the destruction of 87 percent of Gaza's cemeteries and enforced mass anonymous interments, denying both life and dignity after death through the obliteration of burial rites. Together, these mechanisms transmute tacit consent into active participation in normalizing atrocities.
Furthermore, the systematic inversion of ethical language serves as both instrument and symptom of collective moral abdication. Military operations documented to violate international humanitarian law, including the destruction of 72 hospitals and 85 percent of educational facilities per the UN's Satellite Center analysis, persistently receive the paradoxical designation of 'the world's most moral army.'
Such linguistic corruption extends to the reframing of ceasefire demands to prevent further child casualties (12,500-plus UN-verified deaths) as antisemitic acts rather than humanitarian imperatives. Simultaneously, documented state rhetoric explicitly denying a people's existence and invoking territorial expansion from 'river to sea' — a phrase historically associated with settler-colonial projects — faces negligible diplomatic consequence, receiving merely three UN General Assembly condemnations versus 47 for comparable territorial claims elsewhere since 2020.
Gaza is a live demonstration of the effective nullification of universal norms.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
Historical guilt over genocide is weaponized to legitimize current atrocities, despite demographic reality: 82 percent of contemporary Gaza's population descends from refugees displaced before 1948, bearing no conceivable responsibility for European crimes. It generates a grotesque paradox wherein institutions from historically perpetrator nations now systematically accuse genocide victims' descendants of bigotry — a tactic deployed in 68 percent of university protests suppressed according to American Civil Liberties Union documentation. The perversion culminates in the silencing of Shoah descendants themselves, with Jewish-led ceasefire advocacy groups such as IfNotNow facing state surveillance at five times the rate of non-Jewish organizations.
The ensuing linguistic ecosystem transforms legal prohibitions into justificatory tools: Where international law prohibits collective punishment, it is reframed as 'self-defense'; where the Genocide Convention criminalizes starvation, it becomes 'sanction enforcement.' It creates a self-replicating corrosion that transcends semantics, operating as the ideological infrastructure enabling the annihilation of Gaza.
Overall, the operational pattern emerging from Gaza reveals more than isolated policy failures; it constitutes a blueprint for systemic value erosion overtaking global geopolitics. When states providing 74 percent of Israel's arms imports between October 2023 and July 2025 simultaneously sanction International Criminal Court prosecutors investigating potential war crimes, they actively dismantle the judicial mechanisms created to uphold their proclaimed 'rules-based order.'
This material contradiction manifests in quantifiable terms: While the US allocated $61.4 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine within 60 days of invasion, the UN's $2.7 billion humanitarian appeal for Gaza remained 67 percent underfunded after eight months of bombardment that destroyed 62 percent of housing units and 84 percent of health facilities.
Moreover, the selective application of principles becomes statistically unambiguous when examining parallel crises. Sudan's conflict displaced 8.6 million civilians by mid-2025 — the largest internal displacement crisis recorded by UNHCR — while pushing 15.3 million into emergency hunger levels, according to IPC assessments. Yet donor conferences secured barely 23 percent of required funding, contrasting sharply with the $186 billion mobilized for Ukraine.
The EU's migration containment expenditures demonstrate similar disparity: $4.6 billion paid to Turkiye since 2016, $1.9 billion to Libya's coast guard since 2017, and $102 million to Mauritania in 2025 alone — transactions documented by the EU's own auditors as directly reinforcing regimes with UN-verified torture rates exceeding 40 percent among detained migrants. These financial flows correlate with a 300 percent increase in Mediterranean migrant fatalities since 2020, according to IOM missing migrants data.
Inevitably, Gaza has become a horrifying consequence of raw power consistently redefining ethical boundaries. Weapons shipments to conflicts violating international humanitarian law quadrupled among major exporters between 2023-2025, while referrals to the ICC decreased by 38 percent during the same period. When judicial processes face obstruction rates exceeding 90 percent for cases involving powerful states, as indicated by the ICJ's pending docket, the operational precedent becomes clear. Rules apply precisely inversely to geopolitical influence, with consequences calculated in millions of avoidable casualties.
The international legal architecture, painstakingly built post-1945, faces unprecedented disrepute. The unchecked ability of powerful states to flout provisional measures from the ICJ regarding genocide risk, and to actively punish the ICC for pursuing arrest warrants, signals a dangerous erosion of much-needed accountability. When core instruments such as the Genocide Convention are rendered unenforceable against specific allies through political obstruction and threats, the entire framework loses legitimacy in the eyes of the Global South.
To conclude, the clear hypocrisy is fueling a deepening rift, irrevocably damaging Western claims to moral leadership. The consequence is a world where 'might makes right' is the operational doctrine, humanitarian law is negotiable based on political alignment, and the value of human life is explicitly quantified by passport and geopolitical utility.
Gaza stands as the most potent symbol of this new, brutal ethos: a live demonstration of impunity and the effective nullification of universal norms when applied to the disfavored. The lasting repercussion is the entrenchment of a global system where abdication of morality is normalized, and raw power is the sole remaining arbiter.
• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. X: @HafedAlGhwell