What is to Be Done?

Rethinking the world after Gaza

Over the last eighteen months, while bearing captive witness to the slow-rolling annihilation of the population of Gaza, many people, grasping for a way to try and halt what they are seeing, have highlighted the horrifying impact of the war on the innocent civilians of the territory, including stories of starvation, humiliation, deprival of dignity, and the murder of children. Since the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, and subsequent Israeli air and ground offensive in Gaza, such accounts of outrages against human rights have been in no short supply. Camera phone technology and social media have granted the world has ability to see what is taking place with unprecedented intimacy.

These efforts to catalogue the atrocities in Gaza have had a documentary value for journalists, researchers and historians, including myself. But they have also shown themselves to be politically inert. The war has not halted for even a moment in sympathy over such scenes. Indeed, with minor hiccups and adjustments, business has continued remarkably as usual. People have cried out repeatedly, asking, “How can the world can remain silent?” The world in turn has responded that it is capable of remaining silent with complete contentment. Over 50,000 people are dead in Gaza as of this writing. I would not be surprised if the final death toll is many multiples of that.

I recently came across an Instagram post by Hanif Abdurraqib, an American poet and writer, reflecting on the killing of Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat. Hossam was a talented and brave 23-year old reporter in Gaza, as well as a correspondent for Drop Site News. Abdurraqib is an accomplished writer himself, and his post, which denounced what he called “an irredeemable world,” poignantly conveyed the feeling of anguish and unfairness felt by many over society’s apparent indifference to human rights.

“Hundreds of children in Gaza killed in a 2 day stretch, and the world didn’t stop, didn’t offer any memorials. No buildings changed colors in their honor,” he wrote. “I live in a world that will not stop when atrocities are committed on a mass scale, if the victims of those atrocities do not pass a test built and administered by their oppressors.”

I’ve spent the majority of my adult life at this point listening, documenting, and trying to provide witness to the suffering of people who found themselves victims of political persecution and atrocity. What I have discovered is that the world does not, never has, and will not in future, operate on principles of fairness and equality. No one ever usually comes to rescue the weak, there are no universal standards, and there is no authority to petition for redress for ones moral grievances, however justified.

When it comes to protection from violence, the only currency that matters in the world is the ability of people to marshal political, economic, and military power as a deterrent. Human rights are not “real,” and, inasmuch as they once served as a useful fiction, even that fiction is now being formally discarded. Human rights were not real in Gaza, Bosnia, Chechnya, Myanmar, Xinjiang, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, or many other places where we have mutely watched mass atrocities take place in the last generation alone.

This is not just an abstract intellectual matter. It relates to the misspent efforts and increasing demoralization of millions of people who have found themselves unable to effect change, regardless of how badly they have desired it. A sincere belief in human rights to the neglect of hard power and material interests has become a kind of intellectual opium, rendering people dependent, numb, and depressed, as they wait for a nonexistent arc of history to bend in their favor.

History will not vindicate you, nor condemn your enemies. Since the time of Thucydides, the world has been full of peoples who simply disappeared from the pages of time for failing to match the strength of their opponents. As the Athenian historian observed, famously, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." You either win or lose. There are no moral victories. The important question is not to ask why the world is silent to your suffering, but how you allowed yourself to become so weak in the first place, and what you are going to do about it now.

No Rights

At the time of this writing, people in the United States are being blacklisted, censored, arrested, and deported from the country over their involvement in protests related to the war in Gaza last summer. This backlash, which I expect to escalate, has been mystifying and unnerving to many people. Many saw the protests against the war in Gaza, which included public rallies and encampments at major universities, as merely continuing an established American tradition of civil obedience in the name of human rights, running from the Civil Rights era, the 1968 Vietnam War demonstrations, right up to the 2020 summer national protests over the killing of George Floyd.

For a few decades, it was useful for many in power to strategically act as though such rights existed, and could be petitioned. It was a constructive fiction during the Cold War, when the U.S. was in an ideological competition with the USSR for the allegiance of the weak countries of the Third World. The problem is that as much strategic tolerance or encouragement the U.S. establishment may have offered to rights-based protests and arguments in the past, the Gaza protests cut against something that is much more important to people in power: their material and ideological commitment to the State of Israel, along with its powerful domestic supporters.

Gaza was the rock upon which post-World War II human rights discourse finally broke. We’re officially back to the old rules. An indifference to how the strong treat the weak is not a break from normalcy. Indeed, it is the almost unbroken norm of human history right up until the present day. No one was recorded expressing much concern over the human rights of their enemies during the wars between Athens and Sparta, the Mongol invasions, the Albigensian Crusade, the Spanish Inquisition, or the European wars of religion. Human nature has been constant and unchanging, and only the disorienting whir of technological progress has obscured this in our time.

Those of us in the West live in a world where states tend to define themselves as liberal. Liberal states do not accept, even in theory, the concept of hierarchical morality, which argues that the oppressed have a right to use any means necessary to respond to their aggressors, even up to the point that they themselves are freed of moral constraint. That is an idea whose origins lie in Marxism, whose influence in the world has collapsed even further than liberalism. What states do care about are legal categories, like civilian and non-civilian, which may serve their interest by defending their own people from harm amid a conflict, in exchange for granting reciprocity to others.

This is why the October 7 attacks, and some of the celebratory commentary at the time by foreign observers was so damaging. On principle, expressing schadenfreude over the killing of even one civilian as the satisfying outcome of “decolonization,” shatters any chance of a mutually beneficial agreement to minimize civilian harm in a war to come. A formal lifting of such a constraint always hurts the weaker party more. In this case, it hurt the Palestinians, who have needed to rely on moral suasion to defend their lives and interests, and to draw the sympathetic assistance and intervention of outside parties.

The responsibility for taking a life rests solely with the one who takes it. But on a practical level by justifying, celebrating, or even merely expressing insufficient sensitivity to attacks that killed Israeli civilians, some of their well-meaning supporters abroad helped hasten the demise of an already-declining human rights discourse that was a component of Palestinian survival, and to which people continue to appeal in Gaza with little meaningful response.

So What is to Be Done?

Firstly, If the language of human rights no longer works, it is important to learn instead how to speak to interest, which has proven to be a much more durable and effective concept throughout human history. Explaining to Americans, already exhausted by two decades of futile wars in the Middle East, why their involvement in the conflict in Gaza is bad for their economy, security, or national cohesion is likely to gather more attention than futile appeals for moral sympathy.

Whether you like it or not, the style of patriotic isolationism expressed by a person like Tucker Carlson is much more likely to convince a critical mass of Americans to cease the flow of weapons to Israel than dated 1968-style appeals to leftist global revolution, or purely altruistic invitations to care about the rights of distant foreigners. Political rhetoric is about accomplishing a particular strategy, not giving expression to ones innermost emotions. In a notable development, Carlson has become a rare mainstream political figure in the U.S. willing to have Palestinian guests on his program, and to criticize Israel and its domestic political lobby. For people in any cause, it is vital to rally as much support as possible from conservatives, libertarians, liberals, and leftists, rather than allowing it to be monopolized by any one group.

Secondly, its important to understand the implications of being weak. Civilization ebbs and flows, and there is no shame in being weak at a particular time, so long as you make an effort to understand the levers of power and how to amend your situation. Israel is an economic, technological, and political powerhouse relative to every other country in the region. Its supporters in West are likewise organized around interlocking networks of mutual support and cooperation. They have a clear mission aimed at influencing the American political system in their favor regardless of party politics, while positioning themselves in critical roles in major relevant industries, including defense, finance, technology, media. There’s nothing conspiratorial about acknowledging this reality. Indeed, it is an example of successful political strategizing, that has allowed them in a few decades to rise from being a discriminated and oft-despised minority, into a group that is able to effectively secure their interests and defend themselves from the fate of the weak.

Rather than scoring moral victories while the bodies continue to pile up from a relentless series of genocides, of which Gaza is merely the latest, its important to think about how to score material victories that can actually halt this train of atrocities. That means abandoning romantic ideas, expectations of instant gratification, and futile appeals to morality. Karam Shaar, a Syrian economist expressed what was needed well, when he commented on social media, in regards to recent Israeli aggression against Syria, about the need for Syrians to find an effective means of resistance, centered around the process of developing wealth, good governance, and bureaucratic organization.

“The struggle against Israel shouldn't be through grandiose slogans, light weapons, suicide attacks, or antisemitism—all of which have been tried for nearly a century. Tactics that, for nearly a century, have only fortified Israel’s global image as a besieged victim,” Shaar said. “True resistance is neither reactive nor romantic. It is strategic, patient, and rooted in building capable states and wielding political acumen It is a long game, whose fruits may not ripen for decades—but it is the only game worth playing.”

Don’t denounce the world for its silence. Instead, use your privilege to become judges, defense technology engineers, material scientists, investors, lobbyists, politicians, media moguls, and everything else that helps to tilt the scales of power in a tangible way. There are people who think it is literally immoral to wield power. These types of romantic ideas have proven incredibly dangerous, and there is no reason to indulge those who prefer to nurture their own imagined purity, while the horrors around them continue to accumulate. Building real strength is a project that will take generations. Tragically, it will not cancel out the consequences of previous bad decisions, of which we are now reaping the bitter harvest. But as Shaar said, it’s the only way. So don’t sabotage yourself today in the name of making a rhetorical point that expresses how you feel, but that won’t save a single life. Your efforts are actually going to be needed in the future.

The collective impotence of millions, perhaps billions, of people to stop or even hinder the annihilation of Gaza is a reflection of what the world looks like when you are unwilling or unable to create leverage for yourself in the only currency that matters in the world today. The problem is not hypocrisy, its hierarchy, and the implications of being at the bottom of one. That may not be a very inspiring or romantic lesson, but it has the virtue of being true. To the extent that this lesson is internalized, perhaps the next generation will not again have to bear witness to the shameful scenes now playing out in Gaza today