• History is unsparing; it keeps the receipts. If Gaza cannot puncture our illusions, nothing will, until the logic we perfected abroad is perfected at home
• Siege and starvation are tools of policy. People are extruded into statelessness. Indiscriminate violence is normalized through the vocabulary of 'proportionality.'
• Weapons are traded and marketed as ethics. It would be to admit that Gaza is not an exception but a mirror 

The author is an analyst

ISTANBUL 

There is a reflex that passes for analysis in much of today’s commentariat: every crisis in the Middle East is filed under "religion," "ancient hatred," or the region's alleged resistance to progress. This story comforts Western audiences because it flatters them. If the fire is fueled by superstition and sect, then modernity, our modernity, remains innocent.

It is a comforting story. It is also false.

Gaza is the clearest refutation. Its catastrophe is not an eruption of theology but the outcome of policy, drawn up in air-conditioned rooms far from mosques and refugee camps, funded in national budgets, defended at lecterns and in editorial meetings. Occupation, blockade, targeted assassinations, mass displacement, the throttling of food, water, electricity and medicine, none of this is the work of "tribalism." It is the work of states.

Several voices inside the West have said as much, and they are heard precisely because they refuse the narcotic of distance. The economist Jeffrey Sachs has described Gaza’s ruin as manufactured: not the spasm of a premodern culture but the predictable result of long military, diplomatic, and economic strategies underwritten by Western power. Strip away the euphemisms and what remains are choices: to arm, to shield, to excuse. When a crisis is engineered, attributing it to "backwardness" becomes another act of manufactured consent.

From a different angle, the physician and writer Gabor Maté insists the keyword is not “sect” but “trauma.” A survivor of European anti-Jewish persecution, he names Gaza for what it is: a place where an entire people have been punished into a permanent state of emergency. He does not pretend the wounds on either side of the wall are symmetrical; he does ask what it means when the once-dehumanized learn to survive by dehumanizing others, with a chorus of Western respectability applauding the choreography of "self-defense." The point is not to score moral equivalences but to break the spell of body_abstraction. Slogans about civilization dissolve when you look, closely, at bodies and rubble.  

A laboratory of control

The political scientist Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has spent decades documenting the legal architecture that turns Gaza into a model of collective punishment. His claim is as stark as it is unsettling: Gaza has been treated as a laboratory for methods of control - surveillance, siege, periodic “mowing” - while Western capitals supply the hardware and the diplomatic umbrella. Each assault is followed by a familiar ritual: investigations delayed, resolutions softened, headlines stripped of agents and verbs. The language of “security” goes to work not to explain but to erase.

Even within Europe’s institutions, the varnish has begun to crack. In Strasbourg, Irish MEP Clare Daly has called her colleagues morally bankrupt for celebrating human rights with one hand while licensing weapons with the other. A handful of parliamentarians from Ireland, Spain, and Scandinavia have demanded sanctions and an end to military cooperation. They remain a minority. But their dissent exposes a larger hypocrisy: the West does not merely witness Gaza; it participates in Gaza.

All of this brings us back to the word that hangs over the region like a verdict: “backward.” What does the West mean by it? If modernity is rational inquiry, the rule of law, universal rights, and a refusal to worship force, then Gaza is not a test the Middle East has failed. It is a test the West keeps failing in public.

Rational inquiry demands we follow evidence, not allegories about "civilizations." The evidence shows policies -blockade, settlement, bombardment - repeated across administrations and alliances, defended with the same talking points, leading to the same outcomes. The rule of law requires we apply legal standards irrespective of the perpetrator. Yet in Gaza, law is performed as theater: the script of humanitarian concern, the stage dressing of investigations, and the curtain of forgetfulness falls. Universal rights mean precisely that: the life of a child in Khan Younis counts the same as a child in Kraków or Kansas. But “universality” is too often a border-checked passport. And the refusal to worship force? Watch how quickly the rhetoric of democracy becomes a hymn to the precision of munitions.  

Power, impunity, and manufactured forgetfulness

There is, of course, religion in the story of Gaza, as there is in the story of Europe and America. There are identities, rituals, sacred claims. But to explain Gaza by invoking religion is like explaining a famine by discussing the poetry of wheat. It misses the power that decides who eats.

The more honest account is simpler and uglier: Gaza is what happens when power meets impunity and discovers that the world will tolerate both. It is what happens when editorial boards reduce civilians to collateral language, when parliaments measure outrage by alliance, when universities reward the management of controversy rather than the pursuit of truth. This is also what happens when the language of “modernity” is used not to illuminate but to anesthetize.

And yet, there remain needles of light. Whistleblowers, aid workers, lawyers collecting evidence line by line, journalists who refuse the passive voice, lawmakers who won’t trade their consciences for an invitation to the next security briefing, citizens who organize not because it is fashionable but because it is right. Their persistence forces the real question to the surface: not “Why is the Middle East backward?” but “Why do modern societies so easily make peace with cruelty when it is their allies who commit it?”

To read our own geography with our own eyes would be to name what we see. Siege and starvation are tools of policy. People are extruded into statelessness. Indiscriminate violence is normalized through the vocabulary of "proportionality." Weapons are traded and marketed as ethics. It would be to admit that Gaza is not an exception but a mirror. We do not avert our gaze because Gaza is too alien. We avert it because Gaza is too familiar.  

Who is truly backward?

So who, then, is truly backward? The farmer whose house is pulverized and who, the next day, sifts concrete dust for a photograph to bury? Or the Cabinet that orders the strike and the Cabinet that supplies the bomb, and the newsroom that edits the headline until the perpetrator disappears? Backwardness is not about religion or geography. It is the willingness to accept the suffering of others as the price of our own comfort, and to call that acceptance “reason.”

If modernity means anything worth having, it must mean the courage to break with the opiate of comforting lies. It means refusing complicity, not only with what we fund and arm, but with what we excuse. It means insisting that law is not a costume, that rights are not a currency, that the life of a child is not a geopolitical variable. It means listening to those within our own tradition, economists who follow the money, doctors who treat the wounds, scholars who trace the law, parliamentarians who refuse the whip, when they tell us what we already know but fear to say.

History is unsparing; it keeps the receipts. If Gaza cannot puncture our illusions, nothing will, until the logic we perfected abroad is perfected at home. The question is no longer whether the Middle East is fit for modernity. It is whether we are.

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy.