- There are places, by virtue of being the embodiment of the horrors of the world, that transcend their geographical boundaries to become concepts. This happened with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and now with Gaza. It is no longer limited to Palestine, but has become present in our imagination, in our consciences, and in our moral heritage if you wish. It refers to an era that is coming to an end and one that starts with different rules. *In his book Gaza and the Fate of the World (Arba, Madrid, 2026), the Spanish scholar Santiago Alba Rico uses a metaphor from the world of children to express what is happening between countries. In childhood, children agree on a set of rules, in order to appeal to them if they disagree in play. But in the adult world, Alba Rico takes from Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, an example of a coup against the laws of international relations, and reads this coup in a context illustrated by the book's subtitle, which is “An Examination of Truth and Powerand the return of barbarism, "where Gaza is a way to read the shape of the new world.
This establishment is close to the transformation of Gaza in the Israeli war of extermination on it into a "concept" that Albert Rico meets with Hiroshima, as it is a place that reduces to a historical experience that has become different from what it was before. In his reading, extermination reveals the form of the system that is being formed, and the limits of the protection afforded by its UN institutions. Before this moment, or right up to it, reading Alba Rico includes moments of European history, with Israel described as a continuation offor“Worst Europe in the Middle East.” This brings Israel back to the core of its genesis by defining the latest colonial projects in the Middle East. Except that Palestine, in the Nakba of 1948, paid the consequences of the European persecution of the Jews, so that the Zionist project, according to Alba Rico, arose in conjunction with European anti-Semitism. The review of this establishment, in a critical framework, is accompanied in reading it, with the need to dismantle the identity between Israel and the Jews, as Zionism is linked to the need to resist racism and reject punishmentby Israel against the Palestinians.
Arguing for the shape of the New World, Alba Rico returns to the post-World War II order, which imposed restrictions on the use of force. With the collapse of those limitations foreshadowed by the war of annihilation, criticism of double standards became linked to a defense of the possibility of maintaining a common standard that unites humanity. As such, Alba Rico links the EU's credibility in rejecting genocide, with physical actions againstIsrael, goes beyond statements of condemnation to changing relationships with it. In this context, the necessity of restoring collective political action is theorized, which prevents reducing the confrontation with the disaster to mere declarations of positions.Moral. It stops at the language that describes the disaster, by warning against consuming words, so as not to lose its ability to name facts. It does not see that genocide is a word that suits the pain, and it is seen according to the "legal connotation", which relates to the destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part, as happened in Gaza.
