Afrasianet - Dr. Mohammed Al-Senussi - Can War Redefine Victim?

A question that seems simple, but in essence it reframes the relationship between morality and reality, between memory and politics, between what we think is "good" and what we discover is just a mask that justifies violence.

The image of Israel has been built since it was planted in the heart of the Arab world, on the idea of the eternal victim, the one who survived the ashes of the Holocaust to establish an entity that would protect it from the repetition of history. But history, as Hegel said, is only repeated as a tragedy first, then as a farce.

The Palestinian tragedy that has extended since the Nakba to the present day has revealed that the victim who has not been reconciled to her wounds turns over time into an executioner who is afraid to see his face in the mirror.

In this latest war on Gaza, the world no longer sees the conflict with the same old eyes. The image that used to reduce the issue to "Israel's self-defense" has dissipated under a torrent of images of demolished homes, mutilated children, and the dust that swallows the tales.

For the first time, the story is no longer told from Tel Aviv or Washington, but from the destroyed alleys, from under the rubble, from the mouth of a woman looking for her son, or children dying of hunger.

And here the profound transformation occurred: Israel is no longer a symbol of survival, but a model of excessive power that has lost its moral compass. A change of meaning, a shift in consciousness.

Shifting Meaning: From the Holocaust to Gaza

It is a cruel irony in history that those who have raised the slogan "The Holocaust will not be repeated" are practicing – in the name of fear of its recurrence – violence that makes the tragedy renewable, but in other, more bloody and expansive forms.

This is where the dialectic of memory and power comes into play: when the victim holds her memory unaccounted, that memory transforms from a space of remembrance and a lesson into an instrument of domination and justification.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the "pettiness of evil" when she saw that major crimes do not need monsters, but rather officers who obey orders and perform their duties with a clear conscience.

In Gaza, this ordinary evil is clearly embodied: a pilot pressing a button, an analyst justifying on the screen, a spokesperson explaining the need to destroy an entire neighborhood because "terrorism is hiding in it." 

The Holocaust has been used in the Western imagination as a legal document to absolve Israel of moral accountability. But the images of the recent war have revealed that this legitimacy has been broken in the face of an unbeautified reality: children being killed in front of the cameras, bodies being exhumed from the rubble.

As Noam Chomsky said, the most dangerous thing the Western media does is  to "sterilize" the language when it talks about the crimes of the Allies, calling the bombing "precision surgery" and the massacres "collateral damage." But this time, the world is starting to name things.

Israel, which has long monopolized the narrative of oppression, suddenly found itself in the position of the perpetrator, while the Palestinians, who were deprived of their own narrative, were the ones who told the story with their blood.

The Collapse of the Old Novel

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has built its existence on three narrative pillars that underpin its discourse to the world: fear, innocence, and necessity.

The fear of extermination as a permanent justification for violence, the moral innocence of the victim as immunity to criticism, and the necessity of force as a condition for survival. But these three pillars – which had seemed to be firmly established for decades – began to crumble one by one, under the pressure of a new global consciousness.

The world, which has long believed in the myth of "the only democracy in the Middle East", has come to see with its own eyes that this democracy was nothing but a legal veneer covering a system based on discrimination, segregation and settlement. The power that claimed to protect life is now guarding a colonial project that lives on the negation of the other.

Here, what can be described, to borrow from Slavoj Žižek, is the "unfolding of the imaginary structure": the discourse that has created Israel's image as a rational and just victim is no longer able to protect itself from the truth that overflows through its cracks.

The realistic image—the scenes of destruction, murder, and displacement—overflowed the symbolic system that had monopolized the interpretation of events, and the function of the old novel collapsed, because reality itself rebelled against its narrative.

Social media has played a fundamental role in this transformation. Public consciousness is no longer dependent on what major Western channels broadcast; the "digital citizen" has become both a witness and a judge.

The overflow of the picture broke the monopoly of the novel. When the images multiply, the dominance is broken, because the image that was the only truth has become one among the millions of testimonies.

Thus, Israel's narrative collapsed not because of a political statement, but because of an undeniable human spectacle.

The global consciousness has become more resistant to the moral hypnosis practiced by Western media and political institutions for decades.

The world is discovering his hypocrisy

Perhaps the biggest exposure of this war is the exposure of the West itself to the Gaza mirror. How can a world that raises the slogan of humanity in Ukraine justify the killing in Gaza? How do "universal values" turn into selective tools that are applied where the great powers want, and to the exclusion of undesirable peoples?

Slavoj Žižek spoke of the "excessive spectacle of violence," in which the shocking multitude of images turns into a collective numbness. But Gaza has broken this pattern because violence is no longer consumed in silence; it is exposing the moral structure that justifies itself as human. The West has been forced to see its true face: a world that condemns the Russian occupation for "violating international law" and rewards the Israeli occupation for "protecting itself."

It is what Chomsky calls "organized hypocrisy": when the defense of freedom becomes conditioned by the type of geography and the color of the victim.

This war has not only exposed Israel, but has exposed the void of the global moral discourse that has long used human rights as a cover for the balance of power.

Perhaps the painful irony is that the conscience that was produced to protect man from savagery has itself become a tool for perpetuating savagery, as long as the perpetrator is a political ally or a cultural extension of the West.

Israel as a Mirror: From Moral Exceptionalism to a Colonial Model

For the first time in decades, Western intellectual elites are talking about Israel not as an exceptional case, but as an extension of a colonial system that is not yet dead.

Israel is no longer the "bulwark of democracy," but a mirror that reflects the flaws of the Western project itself: the tendency to justify violence when it serves interests, and the claim of moral superiority to justify control.

The question that arises here: Is Israel "us" in our naked image?

In this question lies the danger of the shift, because it shifts the debate from politics to morality, from justifying actions to self-accountability.

When Israel drops its victim's garment, it falls in the eyes of many as representing the essence of what the West wanted to forget: its colonial past.

What is happening today is not just a critique of Israeli policies, but a questioning of the moral basis on which the Zionist idea itself was based: the idea of collective salvation through the exclusion of the other.

In the global imagination, Israel has been transformed from a symbol of survival into a mirror of domination, an instrument of genocide, and from a model of democratic modernity to a laboratory of organized violence practiced in the name of security.

In this sense, Israel is no longer the Middle East issue, but the world's self-contained issue.

The Quiet Shift in Global Consciousness

From American universities to the arenas of Europe, from artists in Latin America to student movements in Canada, a new consciousness is forming that does not necessarily reflect a political position, but rather a moral rejection.

The new generation does not see Palestine as a distant national cause, but as a mirror to test the sincerity of the values on which they were raised: justice, freedom, and human dignity.

This quiet transformation is not made by governments, but by individual consciences that are tired of the duality of discourse, the logic of "the life worth the sad" and the "life that is not worth it," as the philosopher Judith Butler puts it.

It is not just a political awakening, but a moral awakening.

Communities that watched Gaza burn realized that silence was no longer neutral, but rather complicit in crime.

As politicians insist on repeating the old language, a new consciousness is forming deep down that sees Palestine not as a crisis, but as a benchmark of humanity.

Conclusion

Can a global consciousness be born out of the rubble? A question that sounds poetic, but at its core a test of humanity's conscience: are we able to learn from pain, or do we only see it when it is our pain?

Gaza may not have won in the usual military sense, but it has won a deeper battle: the battle of meaning. It has revealed that power is not a moral privilege, and that the victim is not an eternal identity. It has forced the world to view itself not as a judgment of a distant tragedy, but as part of a structure that reproduces injustice in the name of values.

When the old symbols collapse, the world is no longer the same. Israel, which built its image on the myth of oppression, now finds itself in an existential moral dilemma: how can its historical victim justify its current cruelty? How can a force that claims to defend itself destroy everything that makes the defense legitimate?

The mask has fallen: force does not confer innocence, and survival does not justify crime.

In the images of Gaza, the world saw its reflection: that the victim could become an executioner when her memory was not confronted, that civilization could collude with brutality when it numbed itself with the language of the law, and that the truth could speak in the voice of the oppressed rather than the powerful.

It is not a war on Gaza alone, but a war on the world's image of itself.

The war may not be over yet, but something has broken in human consciousness, and it will not be easily fixed.

The world does not see Israel as it used to be, and perhaps for the first time in a long time is beginning to see itself as it is: a torn entity between the claim of morality and the exercise of hegemony, between the discourse of humanity and the reality of indifference.

Between the rubble and the mirror, a moment of truth is born: not only about Gaza, but about what it means to be human beings in a time when the meaning of human beings is being eroded. 

Dr. Mohammed Al-Senussi - Professor of Forward-Looking Studies and International Affairs at Mohammed V University in Morocco.