Who has the right to grieve at this globalexchange of tears?
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Death is the same for every human being. But in
the international system, it is not.
In February 2022, Western media and political
institutions responded to the war in Ukraine with intense emotional energy.
They humanised the victims. Millions of children were shown crying in shelters. Capitals treated the suffering as an existential
crisis that demanded absolute support.
In Gaza, the response is different. Grief is
quieter.
Coverage often feels detached, stripped of the same urgency and human detail.
Victims lose their names and their dreams. They become numbers scrolling across the bottom of a screen.
The Arab world is left watching the familiar
pattern of normalising suffering, and the aesthetic of misery presented as routine.
However, this cannot be accidental. It reflects
what many call a hierarchy of human worth, an informal ranking of whose tears matter, managed by identity and geopolitics.
The selective humanisation of the victims
becomes a political tool. When a death serves a strategic purpose, as in Ukraine, the international conscience is activated. When the victim is Arab and the perpetrator is a close strategic ally, that conscience goes quiet.
Gaza is treated less as a society of people with
rights and more as a battlefield where civilian lives register as collateral
damage.
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s propaganda model helps explain this
pattern.
They distinguished between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims.
Careful language choices withhold sympathy.
Western victims are given names, faces, and full human stories.
Palestinian victims in Gaza are often described in vague, passive constructions: “they died after an explosion”, “they died following a raid”.
The killer is left unnamed, as if the death were
a natural disaster. Sources are routinely questioned – “according to the Health Ministry in Gaza” – in ways that cast doubt on the scale of the tragedy itself.
This selective sensitivity has deeper roots.
Edward Said’s work on Orientalism showed how colonial thinking and Eurocentrism long framed the Western self as civilised and worthy of sympathy, while the Eastern other was cast as chaotic or barbaric.
After September 11, that framing gained more
pace. Demonisation became normalised.
Palestinians are often forced to prove
their innocence before they are even allowed to be mourned, while Western victims receive immediate, unquestioned solidarity.
Cultural proximity plays a role too. People tend
to feel closer to those who look and live like them. Images of victims in Ukraine or France produce instant identification for many Western audiences.
The same media systems create psychological distance from Gaza. Suffering there can start to feel remote, almost virtual. Individual stories disappear into aggregates of numbers and statistics.
Judith Butler’s idea of “grievable lives” captures something essential. Some lives are socially recognised as fully human and therefore
mournable.
Others are not. Gaza has been stripped, in many international narratives, of that recognition. Death there is treated as expected rather than
tragic.
Digital systems reinforce the same pattern.
Algorithms, shadow-banning, and the attention economy treat certain kinds of grief as high-risk content that threatens commercial interests.
When Western values of human rights collide with the reality of governments funding or arming the violence, cognitive dissonance
sets in.
Moral displacement follows to include
generalisations, emotional numbness, and ready-made justifications (“human shields”, “complicated situation”) that let people look away while protecting their own moral self-image.
None of this is meant to diminish the deaths of
Ukrainians or Europeans. A child killed in Ukraine is no less a tragedy than a child killed in Gaza.
The point is not that one death deserves mourning and another does not. It is about how death is used within systems of power – who is protected, who is expendable, who is named a victim, and who is left responsible for their own
destruction.
Victims are not enemies of one another. A child
who dies in Gaza is not the enemy of a child who dies in Ukraine. A mother grieving in Kyiv is not the opponent of a mother grieving in Gaza. They are both people.
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Writer and an international relations scholar
[email protected]
