Why is Palestine Everyone's Struggle?
The globally exportable genocide
Lavinia Marchetti, May 28, 2026
Translated by Tlaxcala
Translator’s note: The text below could—and indeed should—serve as the basis for a substantive “theoretical-practical” debate among the tens of thousands of people around the world who stand in solidarity with martyred Palestine, on the following question: how can we really put an end to this monstrosity?-FG, Tlaxcala
There is a wrong way to say that Palestine is the decisive struggle of our time, and it consists of thinking of it as the worst of the ongoing catastrophes. Trying to rank suffering misses the theoretical point. As I write, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, the war of recent months between Iran and the USraeli bloc has reformatted the price of crude oil and with it the price of bread on a planetary scale, Sudan continues to count its dead on the margins of the visible, Lebanon drags itself through the Israeli bombings of 2024 and is heading towards a genocide on the Gaza “laboratory model,” Taiwan receives USAmerican arms supplies like a new Berlin of 1948, European leaders huddle around the word rearmament. The point is elsewhere. Gaza is not to be measured alongside these catastrophes: it contains them. It is the testing ground where we verify what the world will accept over the next fifty years.
The difference between a war and Gaza rests entirely on this function as a prototype, an exportable genocide on a large scale. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a classic twentieth-century war, between states, with trench lines and nationalist rhetoric from the previous century. The clash with Iran in 2025 was the first major conflict of the emerging multipolar order, and it established two decisive facts. The Israeli army can now reach any target on the planet. Hormuz can be closed in retaliation for Western aggression. In Sudan, there is a civil war for control of extractive resources and for a thousand other reasons, on a scale larger than Gaza in terms of death toll, yet it remains invisible in European public discourse, further proof of the racial selectivity of Western mourning. All these wars/massacres follow known logics. They are twentieth-century catastrophes extended into the twenty-first. Gaza is something else. There, we are verifying what can be done to a defenseless population in front of an interconnected world population, without paying any political cost. The first fully video-recorded genocide in human history is happening in high definition, broadcast live by the victims themselves through their phones.
From this function derives the theoretical centrality of Palestine. The laboratory concerns not only the control technology that Tel Aviv has been exporting for decades, from autonomous drones to biometric surveillance suites. That is the industrial level, already widely analyzed. Beneath it, a more radical level is at work. What is being experimented with is what international public consciousness is capable of absorbing. The twentieth-century justification of successful propaganda no longer applies, because Israeli propaganda, in two years of war, has lost. The internet is saturated with incontrovertible images, and even the editorial pages of major Western newspapers have changed their lexicon. This fact is known to anyone who can read. Yet it remains politically unaddressed. The distance between what is universally known and what is politically translated into action remains the true invention of Gaza, and it is the historical novelty of our time.
The spectacle of the fully transmitted genocide has generated a new political figure: the mass spectator capable of unlimited endurance. That figure is the export commodity of the Gaza laboratory, and it is the typical citizen of the coming world regime. Their behavior has a precise structure. They know in real time what is happening there, they accumulate information and indignation, and yet they do not move to political action.
When they do, they are handled by European police as a public order problem, filed by German and French prosecutors under the label of “apology,” expelled from universities in the English-speaking world, massacred and denounced, as if this were the “norm.” The Italian Prime Minister called the country’s largest street mobilization since 2003 “ideological.” The mass spectator is the raw material for the future European surveillance state, and it is there that they are being shaped.
The Netanyahu government has demonstrated, between 2023 and today, something that political science had not yet theorized. You can commit genocide in front of eight billion witnesses when you combine the absolute military cover of a nuclear power and a semantic mechanism capable of transforming any criticism of your government into a hate crime. The Western press, in this scheme, is the dependent variable. It continues to speak of “conflict” in the face of a disproportion of seventy thousand to one, because it speaks the language of the power that funds it.
The semantic mechanism is the great political innovation of the decade. When I started dealing with Palestine, twenty years ago, the accusation of antisemitism against those who criticized Tel Aviv’s policy was still rare and difficult to utter in public. Today, it is the condition for access to debate. The overlap between Judaism as a tradition and the politics of the Israeli government has formed in a few years and has turned into a taboo what until the 1970s was the subject of frank debate within the Jewish left itself.
A European civil society that accepts this overlap preemptively surrenders the freedom to speak on a precise point, and in doing so thinks it is protecting a memory. It is actually protecting a government.
The closure of Hormuz, in this context, must be read beyond energy geopolitics. It is a long-term political symptom. Iran sealed the strait in retaliation for an aggression born out of the Gaza war, and it is the first time since 1973 that a regional power has imposed an immediate economic cost on the West for its Middle Eastern policy. The resulting increase in the price of crude oil directly hits the budgets of European families. The accelerated rearmament of the continent, publicly motivated by the Russian threat, is in fact also paid for to allow the Western military industry to maintain the Israeli posture in the region. The European squares, which protest together against rearmament and for Gaza, grasped this structural link before the governments did.
The question posed by the struggle for Palestine, and which no other contemporary war poses with the same clarity, is anthropological. It concerns the limit of tolerance of the human species in the face of the full visibility of its own crime. Throughout the twentieth century, the great massacres took place outside the visual field of contemporaneity. Auschwitz was fully seen after the liberation of the camps, Rwanda after the last bodies had already been thrown into the rivers. Gaza is seen as it happens, in high definition, through the phone of its dying reaching our phones. For the first time in its history, the human species has all the information necessary to stop a genocide while it is ongoing. And it chooses not to stop it. That choice is the anthropological stake of the laboratory.
Precise consequences follow from such a discovery. International law, built on the ruins of 1945 around the promise that certain crimes would no longer be committed with impunity, proves to be a decorative tool. The Hague Courts produce acts that states ignore. The UN votes resolutions that the United States has blocked for decades. Sanctions against Israel have never even been seriously discussed in European councils. The great conquest of the twentieth century, the idea of an international community capable of naming crime and punishing it, died in front of the hospitals of Khan Younis.
That corpse is called International Law, and Gaza is its burial place.
Colonialism, as Caribbean thinkers of the last century reminded us, is a machine that always returns to its starting point. Europe, after training for five centuries on non-European peoples, was invaded by its own techniques of domination and produced Hitler. The Israeli model, trained for eighty years on Palestinians, is already returning to European cities. Biometric surveillance of public space is a literal copy of the Qalandiya checkpoints. The emergency law that European prosecutors are applying to university students occupying a classroom is a literal copy of the British military regulations of 1945, inherited and perfected by the Israeli administration after 1948. The automatic machine guns on the wall in the West Bank will be installed, sooner or later, on European borders against African migrants. We already know this. And we accept it in silence.
Zionism, in this sense, represents the most mature form of a five-century-old European political drive, and it is the way in which Europe studies itself through its own Middle Eastern extension. Defending Palestine means defending Europe itself from its own drift. Means refusing that the hallmark of our time becomes ineptitude, the inability of eight billion interconnected people to intervene against a crime documented live.
That is why the struggle for Palestine is everyone’s struggle. The centrality of Gaza is independent of the ranking of suffering, and also independent of the particular election of the Palestinian people among the victims of our time. Gaza is central because it measures what the human species is willing to tolerate in full knowledge of the facts. If we tolerate it to the end, the next genocide will be easier to consume, and the next even more so, until the day when the colonialism we trained ourselves to accept there returns to demand its toll at our own homes. By then, we will have already lost the right to call ourselves civils.
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