Liberal myths confronted in Palestine

—   Naji al-Ali

by Shovon Das

THE history of modern Palestine cannot be understood without beginning with the Nakba — the violence of 1948 that led to the mass displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel. Entire villages were massacred, families scattered across borders, and a people transformed into one of the world’s longest-standing refugee populations. Yet the Nakba was never simply a historical event confined to the past. For Palestinians, it became an ongoing condition marked by dispossession, occupation, exile, siege, and the continuous denial of sovereignty and return.

One Palestinian survivor, Umm Mohammed al-Farra, who was expelled from her village as a child during the Nakba, recalled decades later:

‘We left believing we would return after a few days. My mother locked the door and carried the key with her. She kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, we will come back soon.’ But we never returned. I still remember the road, the crying, the fear, and the silence after we crossed the border. We were not carrying luggage, only blankets and bread. My father kept turning around to look at the village until we could no longer see it. In the camp, people waited every morning for news that they could go home, but the days became years. We grew old in tents. My mother died holding the key to the house. Even now, after everything, I still dream about the orange trees near our home.’

What is striking today is how Palestinians in Gaza Strip increasingly speak of the present through the language of the Nakba itself. One displaced Palestinian woman from northern Gaza, interviewed while carrying her belongings southward through rubble-filled roads, said: ‘My grandmother used to tell us how they walked in 1948 believing they would return in a few days. Now we are walking the same way. We became the story she warned us about.’ These testimonies reveal how memory functions in Palestinian life not as distant history but as lived continuity. For many Palestinians, 1948 appears as a structure of power repeating itself in real time.

Yet Gaza is doing something more than reviving the unresolved trauma of Palestinian displacement. It is also unraveling the moral and political claims upon which the modern liberal international order has long rested. The scale of destruction and the global response to it have exposed deep contradictions within contemporary systems of power — revealing both the architecture of the global war economy and the selective morality of liberal democracies.

One of the clearest examples of this contradiction emerged in the reaction of Western powers to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza Strip. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, European and North American governments responded with sweeping sanctions, diplomatic isolation, international legal initiatives, and repeated declarations that attacks on civilians, hospitals, power infrastructure, and residential areas constituted unacceptable violations of international law. Political leaders framed the war as a defining moral struggle for the defense of humanity and the ‘rules-based international order.’

Yet when similar patterns of devastation unfolded in Gaza — including the destruction of hospitals, refugee camps, universities, bakeries, water systems, and entire residential neighborhoods — many of those same governments either refused to demand an immediate ceasefire or continued military and diplomatic support for Israel. The contradiction became particularly stark after the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel was ‘plausible’ and ordered provisional measures to prevent genocidal acts. While Western governments had strongly supported international legal mechanisms in the context of Ukraine, several reacted to the ICJ ruling on Gaza with hesitation, silence, or outright dismissal. For much of the world, the message appeared unmistakable: international law was being defended vigorously in one context and relativised in another depending on geopolitical alignment.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western media outlets and political leaders repeatedly emphasised the humanity, modernity, and innocence of Ukrainian civilians. Refugees were welcomed across Europe under emergency protections, and public discourse centered on empathy, solidarity, and shared human vulnerability. In contrast, Palestinians in Gaza have frequently been framed through the vocabulary of security, extremism, and counterterrorism, even while enduring mass displacement and catastrophic civilian death. This disparity became especially visible in public reactions to the bombardment of Gaza’s hospitals and refugee camps. When Russian attacks targeted Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, such acts were immediately condemned as evidence of barbarism.

Yet after repeated Israeli strikes on medical facilities in Gaza, much of the dominant Western political discourse shifted toward debates over whether Hamas operated nearby, effectively transforming civilian protection from a legal principle into a conditional question. The contradiction became even more visible in the treatment of protest itself. Across several Western countries, universities, workers, journalists, and students expressing solidarity with Palestinians faced surveillance, arrests, suspensions, censorship, and accusations of extremism. In other words, liberal democracies that often portray themselves as defenders of free speech and dissent appeared increasingly intolerant when that dissent challenged the geopolitical consensus surrounding Israel. Together, these moments exposed how humanitarian values within liberal democracies are often applied unevenly — expanding when politically convenient and contracting when they threaten entrenched strategic alliances.

Equally revealing contradiction emerges from the relationship between Europe and Africa. While Western states present themselves as defenders of human rights and mobility justice, their external border regimes increasingly rely on the outsourcing of migration control to African states, militarised sea patrols, detention centers, and surveillance infrastructures designed to prevent African mobility toward Europe. Refugees fleeing war, famine, and political collapse across parts of Africa are routinely subjected to pushbacks, detention, or dangerous crossings, even as the language of human rights is invoked in international forums.

This became especially visible during the simultaneous refugee responses to Ukraine and Gaza. Ukrainian refugees were rapidly granted entry into Europe under temporary protection schemes, often framed in media discourse as culturally familiar and deserving of immediate solidarity. By contrast, African and Middle Eastern migrants attempting similar crossings have frequently faced racialised distinctions, securitised treatment, and bureaucratic exclusion. The contradiction is not merely administrative; it reflects a deeper hierarchy in the global distribution of empathy and protection. It is in this broader context that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justiceacquired symbolic force across Africa. Many saw it as a continuation of an anti-colonial legal struggle in which international law is invoked not as a neutral instrument but as a contested terrain shaped by histories of apartheid, racial domination, and uneven sovereignty.

The war in Gaza Strip has also exposed what Francesca Albanese describes as the ‘economy of genocide’ — the vast network of political, technological, and corporate interests that profit from occupation, siege, and perpetual warfare. Albanese argues that the destruction of Palestinian life is not sustained by military force alone but by an entire transnational economic system involving weapons manufacturers, surveillance companies, construction firms, data infrastructures, private security industries, and global financial actors. In this framework, occupation becomes economically productive. Technologies developed through the control and monitoring of Palestinians — including drones, biometric surveillance systems, predictive policing software, and urban warfare techniques — are later marketed internationally as ‘battle-tested’ products. The language itself reveals the brutality of the system: Palestinian suffering becomes a laboratory for profitable innovation. Albanese’s intervention is significant because it shifts the discussion beyond moral outrage alone and asks a more difficult question: who materially benefits from endless war?

Who counts as fully human within global politics? Which states are granted impunity? Can democracy coexist with permanent occupation and siege? And can a global order built upon military dominance genuinely sustain universal human rights? These are not peripheral questions anymore. They strike at the ideological foundations of the contemporary international system.

What is unraveling today, therefore, is not only the silence surrounding Palestinian suffering. It is the broader myth that the liberal international order operates according to consistent ethical principles. Palestine has become the place where that myth confronts its limits most visibly, most violently, and perhaps most irreversibly.

Shovon Das is a Phd researcher in Canada.