Nancy Fraser, New Left Review:
Here, I want to examine a different aspect of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza: its significance as a ‘world event’, an epochal turning point that also serves to reveal, and so to signify, the nature of the times. I aim to do so in a register that will range between the political, the social, the philosophical and the personal. I argue that ‘Gaza’ signifies a crisis for the moral order that has held sway across much of the West for the past half century. Installed in the United States from the 1970s onward, and serving to justify its global hegemony along with Israeli expansionism, that order was centred on the Nazi Judeocide as the ultimate emblem of ‘radical evil’, delimiting the horizon within which wrong and its rectification could be thought. Today, however, Auschwitz itself is invoked as justification for a new genocide. The effect is to leave the Holocaust-centred Western moral order in tatters, no longer able to conceal or contain the glaring crimes committed by the Israeli state and its American backer. In the current period, ‘Gaza’ bids to replace ‘Auschwitz’ as symbol for the worst human atrocities of our time.
