How Gaza Hijacked the Western Left

Today, for much of the Western left, there seems to be only one cause truly worthy of visibility: Palestine. Not Palestine as a historical, social or geopolitical reality — but as an absolute, totemic symbol of suffering. Gaza has become the paradigm of the “righteously oppressed.” Everything else is just noise.

And yet, while “Free Palestine” is shouted in the streets, other voices are being silenced. Muslim women denouncing systemic violence. Homosexuals fleeing Islamic regimes in order not to be killed. Dissidents, converts, and exploited workers in Arab countries. They find no place in rallies, no space on posters. They are a dissonance. An inconvenience.

And it’s not just about Hamas. Today, the pro-Palestinian movement is part of a broader bloc — ideological and geopolitical — where authoritarian Arab states, theocratic monarchies, pan-Islamic media outlets, and universities funded by repressive regimes converge. Gaza has become the banner of powers that oppress their own people while waving the Palestinian cause to gain legitimacy abroad.

And the European left? It has stopped analyzing. Stopped reading. And, above all, stopped distinguishing. Under pressure from Anglo-American discourse, it has abandoned the Marxist method — the one that studies power relations, material contradictions, class composition — and adopted a moralized, Americanized vocabulary, where everything is split between “oppressor” and “oppressed,” “privileged” and “victim,” “white” and “non-white.” In that rigid framework, Palestine becomes the perfect symbol. Everything else disappears.

Let’s be clear: Gaza is not central. It never was. It only became so for those who replaced analysis with ritual, and social conflict with identity liturgy. The problem isn’t Gaza itself, but the obsession built around it. An obsession that has colonized the left’s imagination, suffocating other fronts: women’s struggles, workers’ movements, demands for religious or secular freedom, civil rights. Gaza has become the perfect fetish for those who no longer want to read the world, but only perform it.

It doesn’t matter if that flag is carried by states that imprison journalists, stone women, or criminalize homosexuality. It doesn’t matter if those same regimes fund the repression of popular uprisings in Iran, Syria, and Sudan. Consistency no longer matters. What matters is symbolic identity. And alignment.

And it’s not just radical student groups. Even moderate public officials, fully integrated into democratic institutions, take part in this selective construction. In Bologna, Mayor Matteo Lepore had the Palestinian flag displayed on the façade of City Hall, in solidarity with Gaza. A powerful symbolic gesture, capable of shaping civic imagination. Yet the same city has never taken a public stance for Iranian women, Turkish dissidents, victims of the Syrian regime, or migrants reduced to semi-slavery in the Gulf States.

In that context, Palestinian suffering becomes the only one deemed worthy of public representation. The others — more complex, less easy to codify — remain invisible. That this happened in Bologna — a symbolic city of the Italian left, democratic, antifascist, historically tied to critical thought — makes the gesture even more emblematic. As if a part of that tradition — the ability to discern, to read contradictions, to avoid automatic reflexes — had been erased. Or worse: reversed.

The left that once would have exposed this dynamic now goes along with it. Not out of betrayal, but out of disorientation. It has traded analysis for outrage. Strategy for moral positioning. It has forgotten that Marxism is not a religion of innocence, but a tool to understand and transform power relations — all of them. Including those exercised in the name of “anti-Zionism.”

So, while people rally for Gaza, they remain silent on Tehran. On Doha. On Riyadh. Real uprisings are ignored — those from below, from actual subalterns who don’t fit the aesthetic canons of Western progressivism. Forgotten is the fact that Arab peoples are not just victims to be represented, but political subjects, with ideas and real struggles — often against their own governments, religions, and armed movements.

The left that makes the Israeli occupation the sole lens through which justice is measured has already lost touch with reality. No conflict has the right to ideological centrality. And every selective silence is, ultimately, a political choice.

This is not about Gaza. The Roman Empire vanished — Gaza surely will too.
It’s about saving ourselves from analytical blindness. From the fear of dissent. From the abandonment of thought.

Dialectics is not a hashtag. It is a real process, full of contradictions, of clashing forces, of peoples in motion — often outside our field of vision.
While we argue over who suffers more, reality keeps moving: regimes grow stronger, movements radicalize, revolutions fade into silence.
The left that has stopped reading society no longer speaks to anyone.
And society, quite simply, stops listening.