Category Archives: Gaza

Trading Antisemitism in US For Help in Foreign Wars?

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Al Jazeera is the global media company funded by Qatar, governed through a board appointed by the Qatari state and used to project Qatari influence around the world. Its digital arm, AJ+, was built in 2013 specifically for younger Americans who consume news through social media rather than television. By the late 2010s, it had become one of Facebook’s largest news-video publishers, generating billions of views and millions of followers while focusing heavily on race, social justice and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a peculiar cocktail of a socialist-jihadi alliance at that time, which is now mainstreamed.

AJ+ has a long history of peddling Hamas propaganda

In September 2020, the Trump Justice Department concluded that AJ+ was acting on behalf of a foreign principal and ordered it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Registration would not have restricted its journalism, but simply would have required public disclosure of its relationship with Qatar and periodic reporting similar to that required of other foreign state-backed media organizations like those from Turkey (TRT), China (CGTN) and Russia (RT).

AJ+ refused to register. Republican lawmakers including Chuck Grassley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Todd Young pressed DOJ to enforce its own determination.

Then, in May 2022, the Biden Justice Department withdrew the order after reviewing additional information submitted by AJ+. What changed has never been publicly explained. DOJ has not identified the decisive new facts, released its legal analysis or explained why AJ+ was treated differently from other foreign state-funded broadcasters.

“AJ+’s reporting ‘supports an inference’ that its broadcasts are ‘designed to influence the opinions and perspectives of its U.S. audience as directed by the foreign principals and for their principal benefit.’…

Given Al Jazeera’s and TikTok’s public prominence in the U.S., mounting evidence of their use to advance foreign agendas, and the Biden Administration’s own national security concerns with the two companies, the Committee is puzzled that the Department appears to have either ceased or paused enforcement of FARA registration requirements for the companies without explanation.” – February 8, 2024 letter from the Committee on Oversight and Accountability

The timing naturally raises questions.

Only months earlier, the United States had completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Qatar had become indispensable to Washington—hosting negotiations with the Taliban, assisting the evacuation from Kabul and serving as one of America’s principal diplomatic intermediaries in the region.

There is no public evidence that the FARA reversal was connected to Qatar’s diplomatic role but it is reasonable to ask whether a government relying heavily on Doha’s cooperation became less interested in forcing Qatar’s flagship media network to register as a foreign agent.

The same question now confronts the second Trump administration. Although Trump’s first Justice Department initiated the FARA action, his current administration has not publicly reopened the case. That may simply reflect DOJ’s legal judgment or competing priorities. It may also reflect Qatar’s continuing importance as a partner in addressing Iran, Gaza and other regional crises.

A final question – closer to home – may be the most consequential. During this same period, antisemitism reached levels not seen in decades while anti-Israel activism surged across American campuses and social media, principally from young people. And AJ+ was one of the most influential foreign state-funded digital news brands reaching young Americans, peddling such hatred over this time.

The unanswered question is whether Washington accepted greater Qatari influence inside the United States – including directly and indirectly promoting antisemitism – in exchange for Qatar’s assistance abroad.

Whether making Al Jazeera and AJ+ register under FARA would suddenly change these trends is unknown. But it is also unknown and curious why the government stopped asking the Qatari media powerhouse to do so.

Gaza Was Called “Hell on Earth” Long Before This War

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Long before the current war began, prominent advocates for the Palestinian cause were describing Gaza as “hell on earth.”

In January 2009, Palestinian Queen Rania of Jordan released a video for UNRWA titled “Hell on Earth.” Eight months later, speaking at UNRWA’s 60th anniversary, she recalled that video and lamented that Gaza was still “Hell on Earth.”

Palestinian Queen of Jordan Rania called Gaza “Hell on Earth” in 2009

In May 2021, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared, “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza today.”

When Israel began to respond to the war waged by Gazans in 2023, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Gaza had become “a living hell.” In January 2024, UN humanitarian coordinator Sigrid Kaag told the Security Council, “Gaza is hell on earth.”

The description has been remarkably consistent. What has often been missing is the question: Why?

Hell is not merely a place of suffering. It is a place where evil reigns.

Hamas violently seized Gaza in 2007 after defeating Fatah in a brief but brutal civil war. Fighters executed political rivals, threw some from rooftops, publicly brutalized opponents, and dragged the bodies of alleged collaborators through the streets. Those who challenged Hamas risked imprisonment, torture, or death. Independent political life disappeared, and an entire generation grew up under the rule of an armed Islamist movement that prioritized rockets, tunnels, and perpetual conflict over building a prosperous society.

Hamas drags a disloyal Gazan through the streets to his death

And Hamas was a known entity, a political party which won 56% of Palestinian parliament in elections with the most antisemitic political charter ever written. It remains the most popular political group to this day, expected to win Palestinian elections in every poll.

Calling Gaza “hell on earth” without acknowledging who built that system leaves the story unfinished. Should people want to transform the region, they must work to end the evil rule and worldview that turned part of the holy land into such a place in the first place.

Israel Is Surrounded by Failed States – and Failed States in Waiting

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Much of the discussion about Israel’s security focuses on borders, settlements, or ceasefires. Less attention is paid to a more fundamental reality: Israel is surrounded by governments that have failed – or have yet to demonstrate they can function as sovereign states.

To Israel’s north lies Lebanon, a country where the government spent years unable to enforce a monopoly on force within its own territory. While the Lebanese Army wore the national uniform, Hezbollah built an independent army, amassed an enormous missile arsenal, dug tunnels, launched drones, and ultimately dragged the country into war. A sovereign state that cannot control its own territory has surrendered one of the defining responsibilities of statehood.

Lebanese pound to Israeli shekel exchange rate, defaulting on debt in March 2020, enormous explosion in Beirut for stored Hezbollah weapons in August 2020. The bank devalued currency by 90% in February 2023 and again in February 2024

Next to Lebanon is Syria. More than a decade of civil war shattered the country’s institutions, fractured its territory among competing armed groups and foreign militaries, and left millions displaced. Syria has long stood as one of the clearest examples of state failure in the modern Middle East.

Syrian civil war killed nearly 600,000 and dispersed 13 million. It is now ruled by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani who headed ISIS in the region

To Israel’s south lies Gaza. Hamas spent years and billions of dollars to build an underground military fortress instead of a functional society. The result was war after war after war. Destruction and death.

Hamas on October 7, 2023 slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel and brought over 250 people as hostages into Gaza to cheering crowds.

In the West Bank, the picture is different but equally troubling. The Palestinian Authority maintains civil institutions in parts of the territory, yet it has never established a monopoly on force or unified governance. Rival armed factions continue to operate, political legitimacy remains deeply contested, and governance has been divided from Gaza for nearly two decades.

“recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favouring armed struggle? That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” – James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute at the United Nations Security Council on June 27, 2023

The collapse of governance in the states surrounding Israel has turned the region into one of the world’s greatest concentrations of terrorist groups. This is the strategic reality Israel faces every day.

Its neighbors are not peaceful democracies with settled borders and accountable institutions. They are governments weakened by civil war, dominated by militias, or unable to establish unified authority. Israel is repeatedly asked to take security risks on the assumption that these entities will prevent terrorism and enforce agreements, even though their recent history demonstrates the opposite.

The tragedy is not only Israel’s. The greatest victims of failed governance are the Lebanese, Syrians, and Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) themselves. They deserve governments that build economies instead of militias, schools instead of tunnels, courts instead of armed factions, and national institutions instead of perpetual conflict.

Peace agreements are negotiated between states because states can make commitments and enforce them. Militias cannot. Failed governments cannot. A failed state in waiting cannot.

Until the governments surrounding Israel control their territory, uphold the rule of law, and prioritize their people over perpetual conflict, Israel’s security challenges will remain the consequence of failed governance, not simply hostile neighbors.

Does Israel’s War Meet the Catholic Just War Test?

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For more than sixteen centuries, the Catholic Church has wrestled with one of humanity’s most difficult questions: When, if ever, is war morally justified?

St. Augustine laid the foundation by teaching that, “The purpose of all wars is peace.” War was never to be pursued for conquest, revenge, or hatred, but only to restore a just peace.

St. Thomas Aquinas refined that principle, writing that, “In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign… Secondly, a just cause… Thirdly… the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church later added that “The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration.” It identifies four additional requirements: the aggressor must inflict lasting, grave and certain damage; peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted; there must be a serious prospect of success; and the use of force must not create evils greater than those it seeks to eliminate.

These principles have recently been invoked by Catholics questioning Israel’s wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

The first question is legitimate authority.

Israel is a sovereign state with an elected government entrusted with protecting its citizens. Hamas is a terrorist organization that seized control of Gaza by force. Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed militia that operates independently of the Lebanese government while maintaining its own army. Iran finances, arms, trains, and directs proxy organizations across the region while repeatedly calling for Israel’s destruction.

The Catholic tradition recognizes a government’s duty to defend those under its care. That responsibility belongs to Israel’s government. It does not belong to terrorist organizations.

The second question is just cause.

Israel did not manufacture this conflict. On October 7, Hamas crossed into Israel and deliberately massacred civilians, raped women, tortured families, burned people alive in their homes, and kidnapped more than 250 men, women, children, and elderly people. Hezbollah opened a northern front with sustained rocket attacks, while Iran’s regional proxy network joined the conflict.

Catholic teaching has long recognized that governments possess both the right and the obligation to defend innocent life against grave aggression.

The third question is right intention.

Israel has repeatedly stated that its objective is the dismantling of Hamas’s military capability, the removal of Hezbollah’s threat along its northern border, and the degradation of Iran’s ability to wage war through proxies. Those are military objectives directed toward restoring security.

Its enemies have declared something fundamentally different: that the Jewish state should be destroyed. One side seeks to eliminate a military threat. The other seeks to eliminate a nation.

The Catechism next asks whether war is truly the last resort.

Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza in 2005. Instead of peace, Hamas transformed Gaza into an armed fortress, investing billions in rockets, tunnels, command centers, and military infrastructure embedded beneath civilian neighborhoods. Ceasefires repeatedly collapsed. Diplomatic initiatives failed to end the attacks. Every pause became an opportunity for Hamas and Hezbollah to rearm.

Hamas tunnels

Catholic teaching does not require a nation to absorb repeated massacres while endlessly hoping the next ceasefire will succeed where every previous one failed.

There must also be a reasonable chance of success.

Israel’s objectives have been difficult but attainable: dismantling terrorist command structures, destroying military infrastructure, rescuing hostages, degrading missile capabilities, and reducing Iran’s capacity to project violence through its proxies. Success doesn’t mean perfect peace. It means substantially reducing a continuing threat to innocent life.

Finally comes proportionality and discrimination.

These principles are often reduced to comparing casualty figures. That is not how Catholic teaching understands proportionality. The question is whether the military response is proportionate to removing the evil being confronted and whether civilians are intentionally protected.

Hamas deliberately embeds military assets beneath hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential neighborhoods. It stores weapons among civilians, fires rockets from civilian areas, steals humanitarian aid, and has long been accused of using civilians as shields. It refuses to let civilians enter the tunnels for shelter. Hezbollah has similarly embedded military infrastructure within Lebanese civilian communities.

Those realities fundamentally shape how Israel’s responsibilities must be judged.

The Catholic just war tradition was never intended to evaluate only one participant in a conflict. Every criterion applies equally to every combatant. A moral framework that scrutinizes Israel while ignoring Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran is no longer applying Catholic teaching consistently.

When the Church’s own criteria are applied carefully – legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, reasonable hope of success, proportionality, and discrimination – Israel’s campaign against Hamas and Iran’s proxy network presents a strong case for satisfying the classical requirements of a just war.

From a Hamas Double Standard to the Hamas Dangerous Standard

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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently declared that he supports “a monopoly on weapons by the Lebanese Government.”

He is right.

No sovereign state can exist when an organization maintains its own army outside central government control. Hezbollah may hold seats in parliament and participate in Lebanese politics, but that does not give it the right to possess an independent military force and wage war outside the direction of the government.

The obvious question is why the Secretary-General does not apply the same principle to Gaza.

If Lebanon requires a state monopoly on force, then so does any future Palestinian state. Hamas must be disarmed. There is no path to peace while an independent army remains outside governmental authority.

Yet the United Nations does not say so. Instead, it issues endless calls for ceasefires, negotiations, and diplomacy while avoiding the central reality that an armed movement dedicated to Israel’s destruction cannot simultaneously be the foundation for coexistence.

That double standard helps sustain the current conflict. Israelis and Gazans continue to suffer while international institutions refuse to confront the most basic requirement for ending the war.

But today’s war is not the real danger.

The real danger is what comes next.

Every major Palestinian poll points in the same direction. Palestinians are increasingly likely to hand control of the Palestinian Authority itself to Hamas or leaders who share Hamas’s objectives.

The result will not be a Palestinian Authority that replaces Hamas but Hamas becoming the Palestinian Authority.

At that point, Hamas will no longer be an armed movement operating from Gaza. It will be the internationally recognized government of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank. Its army will no longer be described as a militia but the armed forces of Palestine, internationally recognized, and still committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.

If so, the suffering of Israelis and Gazans today will pale in comparison to the conflict that follows.

Difficult situations are sometimes referred to as being between a rock and a hard place. The popular Palestinian terrorist group places the Middle East between a double standard and a destructive standard.

Related:

When Founding Fathers Are Psychopaths And Cowards (January 2024)

Podcast Episode: The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

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Pip: There is something clarifying about discovering that a political vocabulary you assumed was spontaneous had a drafting committee — and a host country.

Mara: Today we are following First.One.Through into the history of how anti-Israel rhetoric was systematically constructed, tracing the ideological architecture back to a 2001 conference in Tehran. Let's start with where that script came from.

The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

Mara: The central question here is whether the language of "apartheid," "settler colonialism," and "genocide" applied to Israel emerged organically from events on the ground — or whether it was a pre-built ideological framework deployed strategically.

Pip: The post answers that directly. Here is the setup: this was February 2001 — Hamas had not yet seized Gaza, Israel had not disengaged, October 7 was over two decades away — and yet the declaration from Iran's UN preparatory conference already described Israeli policy as "a new kind of apartheid," "a crime against humanity," and "a form of genocide."

Mara: The upshot is that the vocabulary was not a reaction to events. The moral categories were assigned before the events now routinely cited to justify them existed.

Pip: And the post walks through exactly what that vocabulary contained: apartheid, settler colonialism, genocide, racial supremacy, alien domination, decolonization. The full lexicon, complete, in 2001.

Mara: What the post argues is that Iran understood something many Western governments did not — that narratives outlast battlefields. The framing is precise: "Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations."

Pip: The mechanism described is a kind of moral laundering. Traditional antisemitism had been discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was repackaged in the language of anti-racism and liberation. The old demand that Jews disappear became "decolonization."

Mara: The post traces how that vocabulary migrated — from the Tehran declaration into NGO reports, university syllabi, newsroom style guides, and eventually street protests. Students repeating those phrases today are, as the post puts it, echoing a script written by regimes that openly sought Israel's destruction.

Pip: The inversion the post identifies is the sharpest part: a regime animated by eliminationist antisemitism repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority, while recasting the Jewish state as the great racist evil of the modern era.

Mara: And the asymmetry in the Tehran document itself is telling — exhaustive attention to portraying Israel as racist, and nothing on antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, or the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries. That imbalance was not accidental.

Pip: The post's conclusion is blunt: October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.

Mara: Which raises the harder question — what it means to engage with that vocabulary now, knowing where it was built.

Pip: When the moral framework precedes the facts it claims to describe, the facts stop doing the work.

Mara: That is the thread worth pulling — how political language gets built, distributed, and eventually treated as self-evident. More on that next time.

The Great Return to Sender

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For years, the world was told the “Great March of Return” was peaceful theater. Demonstration. Symbolism. Political performance staged at Israel’s border fence. The real outrage, activists insisted, was not thousands of Gazans converging on a sovereign frontier controlled by a terrorist regime openly committed to Israel’s destruction. The outrage was that Israel refused to let them through.

Every breach attempt became a morality play. The fence itself was cast as villainous. Hamas was downgraded from genocidal jihadist organization to stage manager for a humanitarian spectacle. Foreign correspondents photographed smoke, flags, and crowds surging toward the barrier while carefully avoiding the central question: what exactly did “return” mean in practice?

A picture taken on March 30, 2018 from the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz across the border from the Gaza strip shows tear gas grenades falling during a Palestinian tent city protest commemorating Land Day, with Israeli soldiers seen below in the foreground.
(Photo credit JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

October 7 answered it.

The world spent years romanticizing the idea of border penetration into Israel. Then Hamas finally achieved it. The infiltrators entered and what followed was not symbolic “resistance,” not coexistence, not liberation theology with subtitles for Western consumption. It was slaughter. Torture. Kidnapping. Burning families alive. Mass rape. Entire communities transformed into killing fields within hours.

The “Great March of Return” was not a protest but a rehearsal for an invasion.

The flotilla theatrics now replay the same script at sea.

Once again, activists sail toward a Hamas-controlled enclave insisting their mission is humanitarian symbolism. Once again, cameras arrive before facts. Once again, Israel is expected to participate in a choreographed morality play where interception itself becomes the crime. The activists want confrontation because confrontation produces images, and images produce headlines, and headlines produce another cycle in which Israel defending its borders is treated as inherently suspicious.

But after October 7, Israel no longer has the luxury of indulging symbolic breaches.

A blockade around a terrorist enclave is not abstract political philosophy. It is a security perimeter. Every intercepted vessel is being measured against the memory of what happened when infiltrators were not stopped. The Israeli Navy does not have the privilege enjoyed by European activists thousands of miles away who can romanticize “breaking barriers” while knowing they will never personally absorb the consequences if those barriers collapse.

That is why the flotilla activists are ultimately engaged in theater. They know they will be intercepted. Israel knows it must intercept them. The performance depends on the interception itself. Their goal is not to deliver aid more efficiently than established channels. Their goal is to create imagery in which Israeli enforcement appears oppressive by definition.

Sumud flotilla

The irony is impossible to miss. For years, activists treated Israel’s insistence on secure borders as paranoia. Then October 7 became the bloodiest validation imaginable of exactly why those borders existed.

And so the boats are seized and returned to port. The activists call it repression. Israel calls it survival.

Perhaps the flotillas deserve a more honest name: the Great Return to Sender.

Doctors Without Borders Is Coming For Israel

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Every modern humanitarian organization insists the same thing: suffering is not a business. The starving child is not a marketing asset. The bombed hospital is not a fundraising funnel. The crying mother under rubble is not a revenue generator.

Then the annual reports arrive.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders crossed roughly €2.3 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Then roughly €2.35 billion in 2023 and €2.36 billion in 2024. Three consecutive years above €2 billion. Ninety-eight percent of funding came from private donors. More than seven million donors worldwide.

The organization presents this as proof of global compassion. It is also evidence of something else: misery has become one of the most effective fundraising products on earth. Especially if loaded with charges: “Genocide.” “Starvation.” “Ethnic cleansing.”

The humanitarian industry now operates inside the same emotional attention economy that drives political campaigns, cable news, and social media outrage. The more horrifying the imagery, the more morally charged the narrative, the more emotionally shattered the audience becomes, the faster the money moves.

And nobody understands this dynamic better than MSF.

MSF’s public communications increasingly fused emotionally maximalist language with direct fundraising infrastructure. A visitor no longer encountered merely medical updates. They encountered emotional conversion architecture.

The modern humanitarian sector has discovered what every digital platform already knows: emotionally devastating content converts. A dusty child under rubble produces more engagement than a policy paper. A charge of genocide and starvation moves directly into emotional reflex.

The uglier the images and explosive the charges, the healthier the fundraising pipeline becomes.

Doctors Without Borders is very selective in its explosive terminology regarding Israel. For MSF, Israel is the cause of all the ills in Gaza, not Hamas. Israel is directly called out, not the genocidal terrorist group that launched the war and hides in tunnels without letting civilians use them for protection. No excuse proffered by Israel will satisfy.

Doctors Without Borders doesn’t do this in other conflicts. Not in Sudan nor Somalia. Not in Syria nor Haiti. In those wars, either no one is called out or “all sides” are vilified.

And MSF takes its anti-Israel campaign on the road. Wherever Israel is dragged into a defensive war against those determined to annihilate it, like Lebanon and Iran, MSF is standing guard and pointing fingers.

MSF does not limit itself to smear campaigns against Israel. It is a full lobbying shop, taking out full page ads in newspapers to rally the public against Israel. It pushes governments to stop supporting Israel in its defensive war.

So it is no surprise that MSF has officially backed the entire Iranian proxy war against Israel, telling the world that it rushes to protect “Gaza, Lebanon and Iran” from Israel.

Doctors Without Borders: 1) runs to assist jihadists in their active war against Israel; 2) raises money claiming the belligerent parties are the victims; 3) lobbies to have governments stop supporting Israel and 4) calls for the masses to protest the Jewish State. It does all of this, uniquely in Israel’s war.

Doctors Without Borders is not a humanitarian organization but an active instrument in the war to destroy Israel.

The Most Important Debris To Clear in Gaza is Ideological

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The world now knows what Gaza costs to rebuild: $71.4 billion. What it still does not know is what Gaza is supposed to become.

That is the number in the 2026 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA), produced by the United Nations with the World Bank and the European Union in April 2026. It is a vast and meticulous ledger of destruction, broken into sectors, sub-sectors, losses, and needs. It is also a revealing document, because the table tells you what the world thinks Gaza is.

A physical problem.

  • Housing: $16.21 billion.
  • Health: $10.03 billion.
  • Agriculture: $10.49 billion.
  • Commerce and industry: $8.99 billion.
  • Social protection: $5.78 billion.
  • Education: $4.71 billion.
  • Water and sanitation: $4.24 billion.
  • Energy: $2.73 billion.
  • Transport: $1.54 billion.

Total direct damages: $35.2 billion.
Total economic losses: $22.7 billion.
Total reconstruction needs: $71.4 billion.

RDNA assessment of cost to rebuild Gaza, April 2026

It is a complete inventory of physical devastation. Buildings crushed into powder. Water systems ruptured. Hospitals crippled. Roads fractured. Farms destroyed. Markets emptied.

The UN has priced the debris.

It has even priced the removal of the debris: $1.7 billion just to clear more than 68 million metric tons of wreckage.

But the table reveals something else.

There is no line item for civic reconstruction. That is the missing category. There is something for “social protection” and even calls to improve “gender equality, and social inclusion,” but a refocus on building a healthy culture is absent.

RDNA report on rebuilding Gaza, April 2026

Not because it is unimportant. Because it is the hard. And the public may still be unwilling to accept it.

Civic reconstruction is the rebuilding of the political and social architecture of a society: education, norms, legitimacy, coexistence, rule of law, pluralism, and the delegitimization of political violence as a governing method.

Without it, reconstruction is replacement. There will be new buildings but the same “deformity” of ideology, to quote James Zogby in his testimony to the United Nations in June 2023.

Civic reconstruction requires power. And commitment. The UN has frameworks, funding channels, and institutional tools. It does not have sovereignty. It cannot rewrite a society by decree.

And that only makes the omission more consequential.

The UN report itself hints at the deeper crisis. It states that Gaza’s human development has been pushed back 77 years, with the Human Development Index projected to collapse to 0.339, the lowest level ever recorded.

Human development is not just electricity and sewage. It is the civic conditions that make human flourishing possible.

The report includes gender equality. Social inclusion. Employment. Governance.

All necessary.

But governance itself is budgeted at just $530 million, and that is administrative. Municipal function, institutional capacity and service delivery. Not civic transformation.

That distinction matters.

There is no budget line for:

  • coexistence education
  • curriculum reform
  • dismantling political incitement
  • independent civil society
  • women’s civic and legal empowerment beyond emergency protection
  • minority rights
  • ideological deradicalization

That is not a technical omission. It is the central question.

Postwar Germany was rebuilt through more than roads and housing. It went through total defeat, disarmament, a state monopoly on force, educational overhaul, and the systematic delegitimization of the ideology that had led it into catastrophe.

Postwar Japan followed the same path: constitutional redesign, political restructuring, educational transformation, and a new civic contract.

The physical debris mattered. But so did the ideological debris.

And ideological debris is harder to clear.

It does not sit in the streets. It lives in textbooks, political institutions, media ecosystems, religious messaging, and the stories a society tells itself about violence and legitimacy.

That debris remains.

The UN has measured Gaza’s physical debris. It has priced the roads, the hospitals, the pipes, the farms, the power grid. What it has not priced is the ideological wreckage underneath them.

That is the danger.

Physical reconstruction without civic reconstruction does not produce peace. It produces restoration.

And restoration means returning to the conditions that made destruction inevitable.

Schools can teach coexistence or sanctify martyrdom.
Hospitals can preserve life or sustain armed rule.
Roads can carry commerce or carry war.

A rebuilt Gaza can become the foundation of peace or the staging ground for the next war.

You can clear 68 million tons of rubble and still leave the most dangerous ruins standing.

No Hashtag for Khartoum or Mogadishu

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Before October 7 reordered the world’s attention, a war in Sudan had already begun killing at scale. April 15 marked the three year anniversary of the latest incarnation of war. It has since produced one of the largest humanitarian crises on earth—millions displaced, famine conditions spreading, entire cities shattered. Over 2,000 healthcare workers killed. And yet it has generated almost none of the global mobilization that defines our era of outrage.

No encampments. No slogans. No sustained moral urgency that travels.

Two forces—the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—fight for control. Civilians are not incidental to the conflict; they are its terrain. Hospitals are looted, neighborhoods erased, aid convoys blocked. Darfur, a name once synonymous with “never again,” has quietly returned to the same vocabulary of mass killing.

The scale should compel attention. It doesn’t.

For years, much of the global discourse—across media, universities, and international institutions—has sorted conflict through a particular lens: Global North and Global South. The North is cast as inherently evil, colonial and imperial. The South as perpetual victim.

Sudan does not fit neatly inside such lens. There is no clear external oppressor to anchor outrage, no simple narrative that translates easily into the moral shorthand of our time. The violence is internal, complex, resistant to reduction. And so the system hesitates. Attention drifts. Outrage never organizes.

Look at the response architecture. The United Nations convenes, issues appeals, and struggles to convert urgency into action. Funding remains short of need. Access remains constrained. The gap between rhetoric and relief is not marginal—it is structural. Mechanisms that elsewhere become focal points of accountability have not galvanized comparable pressure here. Even institutions like the International Court of Justice sit far from the center of global attention on Sudan, not because the crimes are lesser, but because the political energy that drives action is missing.

Attention follows narrative. Narrative follows familiarity. Sudan offers neither.

The victims do not map cleanly onto categories that travel well. There is no easy compression into a slogan or a symbol. And in a world that increasingly organizes around moral shorthand, what cannot be simplified is often ignored.

This is not only about Sudan. Or Somalia where war has also ravaged the landscape. It is about how the past is taught—and how its lessons travel.

Holocaust education stands as a cornerstone of moral instruction across much of the Global North. Its lessons are intended to be universal. But when it is absorbed as a contained European tragedy, rather than a case study in how societies turn inward, weaponize identity, and destroy their own, its warning loses portability. It becomes history, not instruction. The Global South doesn’t bother to listen to the lesson, and the Global North is focused elsewhere.

In Sudan, mass violence is just statistics without racism and a colonial script. Here is a catastrophe that should activate every alarm built in the twentieth century—and does not. An estimated 400,000 killed in Sudan. Over 500,000 killed in nearby Somalia.

Reducing these to “internal conflicts” explains nothing. It does something worse. It lowers the urgency. It signals, quietly, that this is a tragedy the world can observe rather than confront.

Universities that mobilize rapidly around conflicts that fit prevailing frameworks struggle to sustain engagement here. Media cycles that can fixate for months elsewhere let Sudan and Somalia slip into the margins. International bodies calibrated to respond to pressure find little of it applied.

Sudan is a statistic. Somalia is a statistic. Yet Gaza has a narrative.

Victims should not need a more compelling narrative. They need corridors that function, aid that arrives, and accountability that does not wait for a more convenient story. They need a world capable of responding to human suffering even when it does not fit the frameworks that dominate discourse.

Gazans who launched a genocidal jihadi war never deserved particular sympathy. Especially compared to nearly a million killed in Sudan and Somalia.