Gaza as World Event

JVL Introduction

American scholar Nancy Fraser, renowned for her writings on social justice and on feminism, turns here to the topic of Gaza.

She focuses on “its significance as a ‘world event’, an epochal turning point that also serves to reveal, and so to signify, the nature of the times”.

She makes her case at many levels but especially of it as “ a crisis for the moral order that has held sway across much of the West for the past half century”.

That order revolved around the Holocaust as the symbol of ultimate evil. Yet with that experience being used today to justify a new genocide, ‘Gaza’ is replacing ‘Auschwitz’ as the symbol of such radical evil.

Might our radical rejection of that, she wonders, make ‘Gaza’ also “contain the principle of hope—of solidarity and social justice, self-determination and reconstruction, repair and care for the planet”?

RK

This article was originally published by New Left Review, 158, March–April 2026 on Sat 21 Mar 2026. Read the original here.