Nancy Fraser, the Gaza Event, and the Memory of Human Rights in Argentina

In “Gaza as World Event,” published in issue 158 of New Left Review, Nancy Fraser argues that Gaza must be understood as a world event. She is not referring only to the war, the humanitarian crisis, or the regional catastrophe it entails. Gaza is a world event because it alters the moral categories through which the West has thought about genocide, the place of the victim, the responsibility of the perpetrator of a crime against humanity, memory, and repair.

Fraser formulates her thesis as follows. Gaza reveals a crisis in the moral order that took shape in the West during the second half of the twentieth century around Auschwitz. The extermination of European Jews became the emblem of radical evil and the limit from which extreme violence could be conceived. Auschwitz organized the language of “never again.” It named the prohibition against destroying a people, against making a state’s claimed security a sufficient reason for the extermination of a marked population.

On Magnifica Humanitas

How should we think about artificial intelligence? As a tool, as a weapon, as an ambivalent technology that could serve emancipatory ends but that, under current conditions of power, will very likely lead to new forms of domination and destruction? These descriptions undoubtedly contain something true. Yet I would like to think of AI as a new historical figure of totality. In many respects, it condenses the contemporary aspiration to translate everything into a functional network of data, correlations, and predictions. AI is therefore not simply another instrument placed before us, but a mediation that reorganizes the very field in which something can appear as meaningful, useful, visible, communicable, or governable.

The Catholic Right at a Crossroads

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Just hours before Pope Leo XIV’s arrival in Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso turned the debate over the regularization of migrants into an almost perfect scene of our moral confusion. The president of the Madrid region mocked the left for having suddenly become so “churchy,” as if appealing to Christianity in defense of the poor foreigner were a sentimental imposture, an opportunistic maneuver, or a misplaced naïveté. But the problem was not the religious sincerity of her adversaries. The problem lay in the phrase she herself chose to define regularization: “importing mass poverty.”

The expression matters because it does not merely reject an administrative measure. It condenses an entire worldview. The migrant does not appear there as a person who works, belongs to a neighborhood, has a family, is religious or not, studies, cares for others, works as a waiter or a bricklayer, as a domestic worker or as a caregiver for other vulnerable people. No. Here the migrant appears as “imported poverty,” as a threat arriving from outside to degrade or corrupt an order that is presumed to be one’s own, legitimate, and threatened by exteriority. Poverty ceases to be a social relation produced by economic, labor, political, and urban structures. It becomes an attribute of the foreigner. The poor person is no longer someone who has been impoverished; he is someone who brings poverty with him.

The scene becomes even more significant because of its religious frame. Part of the Spanish right preserves Christianity as cultural heritage, as a civilizational marker, as a symbolic reserve against secularization, Islam, progressivism, or the loss of national identity. But when Christianity is translated into a concrete demand before the poor foreigner, when it ceases to function as a cultural banner and begins to politically challenge the organization of the community, it becomes uncomfortable. Then mockery appears: the others are “little chapel-goers,” “more papist than the pope,” naïve people who do not understand the harshness of the real world.

Now, this is not about judging anyone’s faith. The question is different: what happens to a right that invokes the Catholic inheritance as identity, but becomes uncomfortable when that same inheritance reminds it of the presence of the poor, the foreigner, and the vulnerable? What happens when a society that claims to be heir to Christianity turns the poor migrant into a threat and the rich migrant into an opportunity? (*)

The word “subhumans” must appear as a question, not as an affirmation. It names the operation that makes political cruelty possible: reducing the other to an inferior form of existence. In Milei’s Argentina, that operation can be recognized in a public language saturated with insults: “kukas,” “leftist pieces of shit,” “orcs,” “mandrills,” parasites of the state, enemies of freedom. This is not merely rhetorical vulgarity. It is a pedagogy of dehumanization. A society that becomes accustomed to naming its adversaries in this way also becomes accustomed to seeing them suffer without scandal. This is why the mirror of Gaza is so unbearable. There, the language of dehumanization has accompanied extreme material destruction: Palestinians turned into an undifferentiated threat, civilians reduced to suspects, an entire population treated as an obstacle. The comparison does not erase the differences between Argentina and Palestine; it presupposes them. But it allows us to perceive a moral continuity: when political language abandons the idea of common humanity, violence ceases to appear as a crime and begins to present itself as cleansing, defense, adjustment, or liberation.

The position of Javier Milei’s government toward the State of Israel should not be read as just another eccentricity of its foreign policy, nor as a simple declaration of ideological affinity with Benjamin Netanyahu. It is something more serious. What is condensed in it is a profound transformation of the Argentine political imagination: the abandonment of that grammar of human rights which, with all its limitations, organized much of democratic legitimacy after 1983.

There are names that do not circulate in the Western public sphere merely as historical references, but as symbols imbued with moral authority. Tibet, Israel, Venezuela, and Cuba belong, in very different ways, to that constellation. They are not equivalent cases: they do not share the same history, nor the same political structure, nor do they occupy the same place in the international order. However, they share a troubling function: they can operate as privileged figures within the imperial grammar that distributes compassion, manages outrage, and legitimizes certain forms of violence.

I do not intend here to take a position on the Tibetan issue vis-à-vis China, on Israel and Palestine, on the Cuban exile community vis-à-vis Castroism, or on the Venezuelan exile community vis-à-vis Chavism. The point is another: to examine how certain experiences of suffering, exile, persecution, or loss are transformed, within the Western sphere, into credentials of political authority and moral justification. When that transformation is complete, the critical potential of those causes is neutralized: the wound ceases to disrupt the order and begins to be managed by it; its representatives, in turn, run the risk of becoming captive to the very power bloc that grants them visibility.

Tibet can function as the spiritual image of a nation oppressed by China. Israel can present itself as the living memory of persecution and return. The Cuban exile community can appear as a privileged witness against communism. The Venezuelan exile community can serve as living proof of the failure of Bolivarian socialism. In all cases, the suffering invoked may be real. But the reality of the suffering does not guarantee the innocence of its political use.

On Pacification as Control and Peace as Justice

1. The Flotilla and the Price of Peace

The flotilla does not merely challenge the blockade of Gaza. It challenges the peace that is being imposed: a peace without justice, without reparations, and without recognition; a peace understood as closing the book, managing the damage, and normalizing violence.

Its significance goes beyond the aid it carries. It disrupts the attempt to reduce Gaza to a technical, humanitarian, or military problem, rather than an indictment of the international order that has allowed its destruction.

The context must not be downplayed. Gaza is neither an abstract humanitarian crisis nor just another episode of violence in the Middle East. International organizations, human rights bodies, and courts have placed what has occurred within the legal and political framework of genocide. Amnesty International stated in December 2024 that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry held that Israel had committed genocide in the Strip. The International Court of Justice has kept open the case filed by South Africa under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, with provisional measures ordered since January 2024. Israel rejects these accusations. But the debate is already part of the legal, diplomatic, and moral discourse of our time.