by Jasim Al-Azzawi

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

For decades, the world was made to feel guilty for seeing clearly. That era is finished.

There is a moment in the moral life of nations when the lies that sustained them can no longer hold. Israel is living through that moment. The images that came out of Gaza were not evidence of war’s brutality. They are the autopsy of the painstakingly constructed myth of Israel as a refuge for the persecuted, a democracy in the desert, and a moral beacon in a sea of barbarism. That myth, so elaborately maintained, so viciously defended, has now been burned alive in the same rubble it created.

The journalist and writer Chris Hedges, one of the few voices in American media who dared speak plainly while others trembled, warned years ago that “we have given Israel carte blanche to ethnically cleanse, occupy and oppress.” The world did not listen, drowned out by the accusation of antisemitism, that blunt instrument wielded not to protect Jewish people but to silence hard truths. For a generation, the charge worked. It froze tongues, ended careers, and shuttered debates. Today, it lands like a spent cartridge on a stone floor. The world has seen too much.

“Gaza is not just a place. It is a judgment,” Gideon Levy, Haaretz.

Gideon Levy, writing from inside Israel with the lonely courage of a man who has refused every comfortable silence, has spent decades documenting what his own country refused to see. He wrote that Israel has “lost its way” and that “the occupation is not just a political issue; it is a moral catastrophe.”

Now the catastrophe is visible to everyone. There are no more filters or pretenses. A child’s limb in the rubble. A hospital reduced to a grave. A family erased in a single strike. The world watches and remembers. Savvy public relations cannot repair this shattered image.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued warrants for the Israeli PM Netanyahu and former defense minister Galant for crimes against humanity. Israel’s military has been placed on the United Nations List of Shame. These are not the inventions of propagandists; they are the verdicts of Western institutions. The question no longer concerns Israel alone. It concerns the Western powers who provided the bombs, the diplomatic cover, and the ritual vetoes. The West made itself an accomplice and must now reckon with what it enabled. In his Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges writes, “The question is not whether Israel will survive this war. The question is whether its soul — if it had one left — can”.

The young generation in Europe and North America has watched all of this on their phones, in real time, with their own eyes. They did not live through the Holocaust. They feel no inherited guilt — and they are right not to. Generational guilt, weaponized as political paralysis, is not memory; it is manipulation.

When Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that “the banality of evil” lies not in monsters but in functionaries who follow orders and look away, she could not have imagined that her words would one day apply to the very state created in the shadow of that evil. But history is merciless in its ironies.

READ: Israeli Knesset passes law mandating death penalty for Palestinian prisoners

Millions have marched. London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Jakarta, Johannesburg. The numbers are not a transient mood; they are a damning verdict. Sympathy for Palestine is no longer a fringe position whispered at the margins of polite society. It has become the common moral stand of a new generation that refuses to inherit its parents’ silences.

“The arc of the moral universe is long,” said Martin Luther King Jr., “but it bends toward justice.” It is bending now — painfully, irreversibly, in the direction of Gaza.

What has been destroyed in these months is not merely infrastructure. It is the last scaffolding of a contrived myth. The story Israel propagated about itself has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Zionism’s stranglehold on Western powers and people is in its death throes. The fear of being labeled an anti-Semite draws derision and laughter. Israel today is the most hated country on the planet, a pariah state, isolated and despised as a genocidal country. The Holocaust of Gaza achieved all that. 

Even the formidable citadels are crumbling. The United States Congress — that long-reliable fortress of unconditional Israel support, where AIPAC’s influence once made dissent a career-ending heresy — is no longer impregnable. The torrent has breached its walls. No sanctuary remains.

A state that perpetrates what the ICJ has formally designated as a plausible genocide loses any claim to a moral legacy. The contradiction is obscene. It is seared now into the retinas of a watching world, frame by frame, child by child, rubble by rubble. No press office can unsee it. No diplomat, however silver-tongued, can launder it with a carefully crafted speech at the United Nations. The wound is too deep for stitching. Zionism has done what no enemy could — it has devoured its own myth, in its own fire, with its own hands. And history, that patient, merciless accountant, has finally opened its ledger.

OPINION: Two leaders, two quagmires

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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