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.

But Fraser maintains that this moral order is undergoing a profound crisis. Auschwitz no longer functions as a limit on violence; rather, it is “invoked as justification for a new genocide.” This is the central formulation of her essay. She does not claim that Gaza is Auschwitz, nor does she propose a mechanical comparison between two distinct historical events. She argues, instead, that the memory of Auschwitz is being used to conceal or justify the destruction of Gaza.

The problem, therefore, is not that the West has forgotten the lesson of Auschwitz, but that it has adopted a selective perspective toward that “lesson.” The memory of the Nazi genocide has been transformed into a moral exception. Rather than sustaining a universal prohibition against the destruction of peoples, it becomes a source of immunity for the State of Israel. The result is that the categories that should make it possible to recognize radical evil are suspended when violence is exercised by Israel, in the name of its divine destiny, against the Palestinian people.

Fraser does not formulate this thesis in abstract terms. She traces it across several settings: Germany, the United States, the Jewish diaspora, Israel, Japan, and Palestine. In all of these cases, she finds the same operation: the reversal of the positions of victim and perpetrator, the neutralization of criticism through accusations of antisemitism, and the use of Holocaust memory to prevent judgment of the present.

The question of antisemitism occupies a central place in this operation. Fraser does not say that antisemitism does not exist, nor does she relativize the historical persecution of Jews. On the contrary, she begins from the recognition that antisemitism has been one of the most persistent and destructive forms of modern racism. Her question moves in another direction: what happens when the accusation of antisemitism is used to prevent the genocide in Gaza from being named?

Fraser takes up Susan Neiman’s expression, “philosemitic McCarthyism.” The phrase designates a politics that presents itself as a defense of Jews but operates as ideological surveillance. In Germany and the United States, Fraser argues, accusations of antisemitism have become instruments for excluding professors, canceling exhibitions, censoring artists, targeting students, banning organizations, and blocking solidarity with Palestine.

The issue is not only that those who criticize the Israeli government are punished, but that the field of what may and may not be said is reorganized. In the contexts Fraser examines, the accusation of antisemitism is detached from the struggle against anti-Jewish hatred and becomes a mechanism of political protection for the State of Israel. Its function ceases to be moral and becomes institutional: to cancel, exclude, discipline, intimidate, and make the word Palestine unsayable.

Fraser shows that this mechanism has a specifically “German” dimension. The doctrine of Staatsräson identifies Germany’s responsibility for the extermination of European Jews with the defense of the security of the State of Israel. The memory of the Shoah leaves the horizon of universal human rights and is translated into unconditional support for Israel, even when the Israeli state adopts practices of occupation, colonization, expulsion, apartheid, indiscriminate bombing, home destruction, starvation, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide.

Fraser’s criticism is not that Germany clings to the memory of Auschwitz. It is that it uses that memory selectively. The memory of the extermination of European Jews becomes a reason of state that requires the defense of Israel, while refraining from calling into question the genocidal assault on Gaza. In this way, German responsibility for the Shoah is not translated into a universal obligation to protect human life, but into political support that leaves the dignity and lives of Palestinians outside all consideration.

This displacement does not affect Palestinians alone. It also affects Jews who refuse to identify Judaism, Zionism, and the State of Israel with one another. Fraser insists that there is another Jewish tradition: universalist, anticolonial, socialist, anti-Zionist, or non-Zionist. This tradition includes Orthodox currents that rejected the creation of a Jewish state, the Bund, forms of Arab-Jewish identity, Eastern European Jewish socialisms, and thinkers such as Martin Buber. Against the identification of Judaism with Israel, Fraser recovers the possibility of another Judaism.

The principle that articulates this tradition appears at the end of Fraser’s analysis: “Never again, by anyone, to anyone. Period.” The phrase summarizes a decisive difference. “Never again” can become—and this is what it ultimately becomes in its Zionist version—“never again against us.” That is, it becomes the formula for unlimited national security, permanent preventive war, and a moral exception. But it can also mean never again against anyone. It can be a universal prohibition against turning any people into an object of extermination, displacement, or starvation.

Fraser shows that the State of Israel has shifted the meaning of that memory. The Jew persecuted by Nazism is transformed into the figure of the “tough Jew”: the militarized subject who claims that, because he was a victim in the past, he cannot be the perpetrator of genocide in the present. The memory of extermination thus becomes a guarantee of innocence, an alibi that suspends judgment of present violence. The argument works as follows: because we were persecuted, we cannot persecute; because we were exterminated, we cannot exterminate; because we were victims, all violence exercised in the name of our security is justified.

Fraser rejects this logic. For her, Gaza opens an identity crisis for Israel and for Israeli Jews. The question is no longer only what Auschwitz meant for the State of Israel. The question is what Gaza will mean for future generations. How will those who today accept or sustain the destruction of Gaza explain the fact that a state that presents itself as the heir to the victims of Auschwitz has been accused of committing genocide against the Palestinian people?

This is where this text extends the argument to Argentina. Fraser does not analyze the Argentine case. But her reading makes it possible to formulate an unavoidable question: what happens when a society that has built a decisive part of its democratic identity around human rights chooses to align itself with the State of Israel while Gaza is being destroyed?

Argentina has a singular history. The dictatorship turned forced disappearance, torture, kidnapping, the appropriation of children, and state secrecy into methods of government. Democratic recovery was articulated, to a considerable extent, around the rejection of those crimes. The struggle of the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the trials of those responsible, and the public work of memory created a political tradition that cannot be reduced to a national commemoration. That tradition contains a demand: no reason of state can justify the destruction of human lives.

That demand loses its meaning if it is applied only to one’s own past. The memory of the disappeared cannot be a closed inheritance. It cannot function as proof of moral superiority before other peoples and cease to operate when the victims are Palestinians. A human-rights politics that recognizes only its own victims is not universalist. It is a selective national memory.

Argentina’s current position toward Israel must be read in this framework. It is not merely a diplomatic relationship. Javier Milei’s government has turned its relationship with Israel into a political, moral, and spiritual identification. Israel appears as an ally of the West, as a model of security, as a reference point for order, and as part of a civilizational war. Palestine lies outside that frame. It does not appear as a people subjected to occupation, displacement, and destruction, but as an extension of terrorism and threat.

This alignment entails a decision about the meaning of human rights. Argentina is not simply maintaining relations with Israel or defending the security of its population. It aligns itself with a state that Fraser describes as the author of a genocide in Gaza and against which the International Court of Justice has opened proceedings over alleged violations of the Genocide Convention. The gravity of this position does not lie only in its diplomatic content. It lies in what it does to Argentine memory.

The comparison with South Africa makes this clear.

South Africa did not treat its experience of apartheid as an isolated national inheritance. When it brought Israel before the International Court of Justice, it linked the Palestinian situation to a history of segregation, dispossession, racial subordination, and state violence. It did not claim that Palestine was identical to South Africa. It did not reduce one history to the other. But it maintained that its past imposed a responsibility toward a people subjected to a contemporary form of destruction and exclusion.

South Africa turns memory into obligation. Reconciliation does not mean forgetting or neutrality. It means that a society that has known segregation cannot remain indifferent when another people is subjected to displacement, starvation, bombardment, and dispossession. Its foreign policy extends its historical memory.

Argentina takes the opposite path. Its human-rights tradition risks becoming an internal liturgy: the horror of the dictatorship is remembered, the victims are honored, the language of “never again” is repeated, but its scope is suspended when the destroyed people is Palestine and the responsible state is Israel, a political ally. Memory is preserved as identity, but it ceases to operate as moral judgment.

The contrast is decisive. South Africa starts from its past in order to recognize present violence. Argentina uses its past without allowing that past to interrogate its present. South Africa understands that the experience of oppression obliges one to answer for others. Argentina, under the current government, accepts an alliance with Israel that subordinates the memory of human rights to a geopolitical decision.

This is what makes Fraser’s notion of a “world event” intelligible. Gaza is not only the place where massive destruction is taking place. It is the point at which the words that organize contemporary political language reveal their actual meaning: human rights, memory, genocide, security, civilization, victimhood, responsibility.

Gaza compels us to decide whether Auschwitz will continue to function as a national exception or whether it will recover a universal meaning. It compels us to decide whether “never again” means never again against us or never again against anyone. It compels us to decide whether memory serves to shield states or to protect peoples.

Fraser does not conclude only with a diagnosis of moral ruin. She asks whether Gaza might also contain a principle of hope: solidarity, self-determination, reconstruction, repair, and care. That question does not imply that destruction can be compensated for by a moral gain. It suggests that Palestinian visibility, the rupture of the Western consensus, and the emergence of new solidarities may open a different political field.

The question is whether the societies that today sustain or tolerate the destruction of Gaza will be able to assume that rupture. Israel will have to answer for what it has done. Its allies will also have to answer. Argentina is among them. Not only because of its votes, declarations, or agreements, but because it has decided which lives deserve to be defended and which dead may be accepted as part of the order of the world.

Reference

Fraser, Nancy. “Gaza as World Event.” New Left Review, no. 158, March–April 2026, pp. 49–64.