On the hierarchy of empathy in the West

There are moments in which a civilization is judged not only by what it condemns, but above all by what it no longer appears capable of seeing. The mass murders committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 constituted such a moment. The murder of civilians, the abduction of children and elderly people, the systematic humiliation of bodies, and the increasingly documented acts of sexual violence belong among the most horrifying episodes of political brutality in the recent history of the Middle East. Yet around these crimes, large parts of the Western intellectual and cultural landscape descended into a peculiar silence, not a complete silence, but a silence marked by relativization, discomfort, and evasion.

While universities, media institutions, and civil society organizations mobilized with remarkable speed around Palestinian suffering in Gaza, a comparable moral mobilization surrounding the victims of Hamas remained strikingly limited. The recently published report Silenced No More, which assembles testimonies and forensic indications of sexual violence committed by Hamas, generated no weeks-long media cycle, no mass protest movement, and scarcely any intellectual self-reflection within academic institutions that ordinarily speak in the language of gender violence, intersectionality, and human rights. Television talkshows remained largely silent. Demonstration movements that present themselves as the moral conscience of society remained almost entirely silent regarding these victims. Even within political and cultural institutions, a fundamental confrontation with the nature of these crimes remained conspicuously absent.

At the same time, symbolic and political attention within many administrative circles remained directed almost exclusively towards Palestinian victimhood. This became visible in the ease with which Dutch public officials publicly aligned themselves with initiatives centered upon the Palestinian historical tragedy, while a comparable public moral recognition of Israeli victims remained largely absent. It was precisely this asymmetry that strengthened for many the impression that certain forms of collective suffering are culturally recognizable almost immediately, while others evoke primarily discomfort.

The debate surrounding the Nakba monument in Amsterdam and Utrecht made that tension visible. While the historical tragedy of Palestinian displacement received explicit public and administrative recognition, a comparable institutional acknowledgement of the traumas of 7 October remained strikingly absent. As a result, what emerged was not merely a political difference of perspective, but also a symbolic hierarchy of remembrance.

Far more revealing than the atrocities themselves, ultimately, was the manner in which sections of Western society responded to them — or deliberately refused to respond to them.

For where the atrocities committed by Hamas did receive attention, they were strikingly often immediately relativized, contextualized, or even implicitly legitimized. Before the bodies had even been recovered, statements appeared concerning “the context”, “the occupation”, and “the despair of oppressed peoples”, as though the nature of violence itself had become dependent upon the identity of the victims. It was precisely there that an uncomfortable truth revealed itself: some victims are permitted to remain victims only so long as they do not disturb the dominant moral narrative.

Why is it that some victims immediately become part of a universal human appeal, while others remain trapped within ideological hesitation? Why does empathy increasingly appear dependent upon whether a victim fits within a dominant political narrative?

Not every victim is granted the same human status. That is perhaps one of the most uncomfortable conclusions to emerge from the public debate since 7 October. Although modern Western societies prefer to regard themselves as universally humanistic — as civilizations in which every human life deserves equal protection and equal moral dignity — empathy in practice rarely functions in a truly universal manner. Some victims are immediately absorbed into a collective moral consciousness. Their names, faces, and stories become symbols of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)