The ongoing Gaza episode is not a case on the sidelines of human activity, rather it needs to be identified as a pivotal issue that perhaps defines politics, history, religion and human society in many ways.

Unbound by time, it feels like a tumour, the malignancy of which keeps hitting the wider human conscience and keeps subsiding into collective apathy all the time. Historically it is connected to the antiquity where Noah and Abraham are placed, and with Israel's growing imperial lust, it seems to be a case that will persist to the end of times.

The case hammers on the idea that 'morality' is not just a person-to-person societal matter, rather it is also a communal matter that judges the collective behaviours of human societies. And it gives a clarity to the argument of morality having a secular nature verses morality being grounded in religion and divinity.

The secular argument – that morality can be grounded in reason, common sense empathy and scientific understanding and that the more we get learned and civilised and the more we understand consequentialism and utilitarianism, we will inevitably become more understanding towards each other, more responsible, more civic – has utterly failed in human societies and is completely laid bare in the case of Palestine and Gaza.

Rather, humanity as a whole has shown that accumulation of knowledge and sciences and the enhancement of wealths, freedoms, technologies and cultures, has practically proven to be inversely proportional to human welfare, global justice or decrease in poverty and disease.

For instance, in the case of global wealth distribution, 55% of humanity lives in the lower income and extreme........

© The Express Tribune