When victims no longer fit the narrative

On the hierarchy of empathy in the West

There are moments in which a civilization is judged not only by what it condemns, but above all by what it no longer appears capable of seeing. The mass murders committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 constituted such a moment. The murder of civilians, the abduction of children and elderly people, the systematic humiliation of bodies, and the increasingly documented acts of sexual violence belong among the most horrifying episodes of political brutality in the recent history of the Middle East. Yet around these crimes, large parts of the Western intellectual and cultural landscape descended into a peculiar silence, not a complete silence, but a silence marked by relativization, discomfort, and evasion.

While universities, media institutions, and civil society organizations mobilized with remarkable speed around Palestinian suffering in Gaza, a comparable moral mobilization surrounding the victims of Hamas remained strikingly limited. The recently published report Silenced No More, which assembles testimonies and forensic indications of sexual violence committed by Hamas, generated no weeks-long media cycle, no mass protest movement, and scarcely any intellectual self-reflection within academic institutions that ordinarily speak in the language of gender violence, intersectionality, and human rights. Television talkshows remained largely silent. Demonstration movements that present themselves as the moral conscience of society remained almost entirely silent regarding these victims. Even within political and cultural institutions, a fundamental confrontation with the nature of these crimes remained conspicuously absent.

At the same time, symbolic and political attention within many administrative circles remained directed almost exclusively towards Palestinian victimhood. This became visible in the ease with which Dutch public officials publicly aligned themselves with initiatives centered upon the Palestinian historical tragedy, while a comparable public moral recognition of Israeli victims remained largely absent. It was precisely this asymmetry that strengthened for many the impression that certain forms of collective suffering are culturally recognizable almost immediately, while others evoke primarily discomfort.

The debate surrounding the Nakba monument in Amsterdam and Utrecht made that tension visible. While the historical tragedy of Palestinian displacement received explicit public and administrative recognition, a comparable institutional acknowledgement of the traumas of 7 October remained strikingly absent. As a result, what emerged was not merely a political difference of perspective, but also a symbolic hierarchy of remembrance.

Far more revealing than the atrocities themselves, ultimately, was the manner in which sections of Western society responded to them — or deliberately refused to respond to them.

For where the atrocities committed by Hamas did receive attention, they were strikingly often immediately relativized, contextualized, or even implicitly legitimized. Before the bodies had even been recovered, statements appeared concerning “the context”, “the occupation”, and “the despair of oppressed peoples”, as though the nature of violence itself had become dependent upon the identity of the victims. It was precisely there that an uncomfortable truth revealed itself: some victims are permitted to remain victims only so long as they do not disturb the dominant moral narrative.

Why is it that some victims immediately become part of a universal human appeal, while others remain trapped within ideological hesitation? Why does empathy increasingly appear dependent upon whether a victim fits within a dominant political narrative?

Not every victim is granted the same human status. That is perhaps one of the most uncomfortable conclusions to emerge from the public debate since 7 October. Although modern Western societies prefer to regard themselves as universally humanistic — as civilizations in which every human life deserves equal protection and equal moral dignity — empathy in practice rarely functions in a truly universal manner. Some victims are immediately absorbed into a collective moral consciousness. Their names, faces, and stories become symbols of humanity itself. Other victims disappear almost instantly into political relativization, ideological restraint, or even open justification of the violence inflicted upon them.

It is there that a deeper moral crisis begins to reveal itself.

The images emerging from Gaza triggered a global wave of emotion, activism, and social mobilization. Universities were overwhelmed by protests. Public squares filled with demonstrators. Cultural institutions, media figures, and public officials spoke out in forceful terms about colonialism, genocide, oppression, and human rights. Palestinian suffering was presented worldwide as a moral indictment of Israeli actions, while far less attention was devoted to the role of Hamas itself in the continuation of violence, repression, and human suffering within Gaza. As a consequence, a simplified moral framework emerged in which Palestinian civilians were portrayed almost exclusively as victims of external power, while Hamas’ responsibility for the militarization of society and the deliberate use of its own population as part of an ideological struggle was remarkably often pushed into the background.

Yet at the same time, a striking asymmetry unfolded. The victims of Hamas were seldom incorporated into that same universal moral vocabulary. The systematic slaughter of civilians, the mutilations, the executions of entire families, the abduction of children, and the testimonies of sexual violence disappeared with remarkable speed into the background of public debate. Not because the facts were unknown, but because they sat uncomfortably within an already constructed moral narrative.

It was precisely within that moral framework that the selective nature of public empathy became visible in practice. For the more the conflict was reduced to a schema of oppressor and oppressed, the less room remained for victims who complicated that schema.

Even within popular culture and entertainment, this asymmetry became visible. While the report Silenced No More published new testimonies and evidence concerning sexual violence during the Hamas attacks of 7 October, Dutch talkshows, media platforms, and cultural debates concentrated strikingly often on an entirely different question: whether Israel should still be permitted to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest.

That shift was revealing. Public debate appeared less shocked by the contents of the report itself than by the presence of an Israeli participant on a European stage. As though the moral tension of the conflict ultimately ought not to be resolved through confrontation with the horror of the violence itself, but rather through the identification of a recognizable moral culprit.

A remarkable inversion thereby took place: not the ideology that had produced the massacre became central, but the visibility of the society that had become the victim of that massacre. Cultural outrage therefore focused not primarily upon the crimes themselves, but upon the question of whether Israel should still be permitted to remain part of the moral and cultural West. Perhaps this also explains why collective indignation so often takes the place of genuine moral thought today. Within the safety of demonstrations, slogans, and shared moral rituals, the necessity of looking independently at reality begins to disappear. The crowd offers moral clarity precisely because it relieves the individual of the painful responsibility of enduring complexity.

Within that narrative, Palestinians function primarily as victims of history, power, and colonialism, while Israelis and Jews are increasingly reduced to representatives of power itself. The consequence is that violence against Palestinians is automatically interpreted as tragic and morally shocking, while violence against Israelis is regularly supplied with context, explanation, or implicit justification. In this way, a dangerous distinction emerges between what might be called the “good victims” and the “wrong victims”.

Behind that moral division lies a deeper mechanism. Modern ideological narratives struggle to tolerate victims who do not fit within their own ordering of good and evil. Once a conflict is interpreted entirely through a framework of oppressor and oppressed, a tendency emerges to arrange all facts in such a way that this moral equilibrium remains intact. Victims who confirm that equilibrium evoke empathy; victims who disturb it provoke discomfort.

The good victims affirm the existing worldview. Their suffering reinforces the ideological structure in which the world remains neatly divided between oppressor and oppressed. Their pain mobilizes collective empathy because such empathy produces no intellectual or moral tension. The wrong victims, by contrast, complicate the story. Their existence reveals that even those regarded as powerful or “colonial” may themselves become victims of barbaric violence. It is precisely for that reason that a subtle form of moral hesitation often emerges around them.

For once such victims were to be fully acknowledged, the narrative itself would begin to tremble. Reality would once again appear in all its moral complexity, and the comfort of a world in which guilt and innocence are predetermined would disappear. Perhaps that explains why sections of public debate appear to struggle so profoundly with Israeli victims: not because their suffering is invisible, but because it disrupts an ideological simplification upon which many have become morally dependent.

This hesitation rarely manifests itself as outright denial. Far more often, it appears in the form of immediate contextualization. Barely had the bodies of murdered Israeli civilians been discovered when parts of public debate had already shifted towards explanations concerning “the context”, “the occupation”, or “the despair of oppressed peoples”. Across social media, Dutch and other Western universities, and demonstrations, it was not uncommon for people to suggest that the victims themselves ultimately bore some responsibility for their own fate. As though the horror of a massacre depends upon the political position of the person who dies.

It is precisely there that the debate touches upon something deeper than geopolitics alone. A society that condemns violence unequivocally only when the victims are ideologically useful slowly loses its capacity for moral consistency. Empathy then ceases to be an expression of shared humanity and instead becomes an expression of political loyalty. The victim no longer counts as an individual, but merely as a symbol within a larger narrative.

That also explains the striking cultural silence surrounding reports such as Silenced No More. In almost any other context, testimonies concerning sexual violence, torture, and the deliberate humiliation of civilians would immediately lead to international campaigns, academic conferences, special television broadcasts, and public declarations of solidarity. But here, silence largely prevailed.

It was precisely that silence which proved revealing. Not only because the report spoke of violence against women, but also because it contained testimonies concerning abuse, humiliation, and sexual violence inflicted upon men, children, and even the bodies of victims themselves. Yet large parts of the cultural and institutional debate appeared unable to fully absorb these victims into the existing moral vocabulary.

Feminist organizations responded hesitantly. Human rights movements wavered. Cultural elites remained silent or shifted attention almost immediately back towards broader political structures. As though some forms of victimhood automatically evoke universal solidarity, while others must first be ideologically weighed before they are permitted moral recognition. Perhaps it was precisely this silence that proved most revealing. Not the loud demonstrations, not the slogans, not the television panels, but the strange inability to truly pause before what had been done to these bodies. As though certain forms of human suffering are not permitted to fully penetrate consciousness because they disturb the moral self-image of a society. As though the narrative itself is protected more carefully than the dead are mourned.

That same hesitation became visible within parts of the academic world. Across several Dutch and other Western universities, attention quickly shifted away from the events of 7 October towards campaigns advocating academic boycotts of Israeli institutions. Collaborations with Israeli universities were called into question, demonstrations focused upon cultural and scientific exclusion, and student movements spoke in the language of decolonization and resistance.

What was remarkable was not only the speed with which this mobilization emerged, but above all the absence of a comparable moral confrontation with the explicitly genocidal rhetoric and ideological foundations of Hamas itself.

As a result, an intellectual climate emerged in which the question of Israel’s legitimacy remained constantly central, while the moral implications of jihadist violence received strikingly little systematic attention. It was precisely within institutions that regard themselves as places of critical thought that one could observe how difficult it has become to think outside dominant ideological frameworks.

Campuses that ordinarily speak in the language of “safe spaces”, trauma, and discursive violence proved strikingly reluctant to take explicit positions against the ideological roots of Hamas’ violence. In some cases, an intellectual climate even emerged in which any explicit attention given to Israeli victims was regarded as an attempt to marginalize Palestinian suffering. In this way, a perverse moral equilibrium emerged in which recognizing one victim was experienced almost automatically as a betrayal of another.

It is precisely there that the danger of ideological thinking resides. Once people are viewed primarily as representatives of categories — colonizer, oppressed, white, Western, Zionist, or “decolonial” — the individual gradually disappears from view. The human being is replaced by his symbolic function. And once that occurs, a hierarchy of empathy inevitably emerges.

Perhaps this also explains the peculiar silence that arose around reports such as Silenced No More. Not because the facts were unknown, but because full recognition of those facts would destabilize the existing moral narrative. For once one were truly to confront what happened on 7 October — not only the murders, but also the systematic desecration of bodies, the sexual violence, the torture, and the open celebration of that violence — it would become far more difficult to continue reducing the conflict to a simple framework of colonizer and colonized.

That same mechanism becomes visible in the manner in which the suffering of Palestinian civilians is attributed almost exclusively to Israeli actions, while the role of Hamas in the destruction of its own social reality receives remarkably little central attention. Anyone who points this out within the media, universities, or cultural institutions quickly risks being dismissed as an apologist for power, colonialism, or “Zionism”. As though any attempt to hold Hamas morally and politically accountable automatically becomes suspect the moment Israel no longer appears exclusively as the absolute perpetrator.

It is precisely there that a deeper problem within modern moral culture begins to reveal itself. The greatest danger lies not in a lack of information, but in the loss of the ability to endure facts that disturb ideological simplicity. Once societies begin to value moral clarity more highly than truth itself, the temptation arises to render victims selectively visible and to reduce complexity to slogans, rituals, and collective indignation.

Perhaps that is ultimately the most disturbing thought of all: not that the horror of violence itself defines our age, but that civilized societies are becoming increasingly capable of recognizing that horror only selectively.

In the Netherlands, this moral asymmetry became visible with particular clarity: in public broadcasting, university campuses, cultural institutions, and even local administrative symbolism. Yet the phenomenon itself reaches far beyond the Dutch context. It reflects a broader moral condition within contemporary Western societies, in which empathy increasingly becomes dependent upon ideological usefulness rather than universal human recognition.

A society that is capable of empathy only towards victims who fit within its ideological narrative ultimately loses not only its moral credibility, but also its capacity for truth. And where truth gives way to political usefulness, even human suffering itself is ultimately reduced to scenery within a struggle for moral superiority.