The Hierarchy of Human Suffering: Why Gaza Isn’t Treated Like Ukraine

 “The colonised is forgotten except as a silhouette on the landscape of the coloniser’s narrative.” ~ Frantz Fanon

When Russian troops crossed into Ukraine in February 2022, the West responded with clarity and speed. Daily headlines carried images of bombed-out cities and desperate civilians. Zelensky became a household name. #StandWithUkraine flooded social media. Billions in military and humanitarian aid were mobilised almost overnight.

Now compare that to Gaza. Nearly eighteen months into Israel’s assault, more than 50,000 Palestinians are dead; 70% women and children, 90% of the population is displaced, and the UN’s highest court has warned that Israel’s actions may amount to genocide. The Western response? Hesitant. Measured. In many cases, actively complicit.

This difference is not just a matter of foreign policy - it’s a mirror held up to the values we claim to hold. Walter Benjamin called it “the aestheticisation of politics”: a process where power determines not just policy, but perception - whose pain is visible, whose story is told, and whose life is allowed to matter.

From the beginning, Ukraine’s resistance was framed as morally unambiguous. Zelensky’s speeches were carried live; his olive-green t-shirt became a global symbol of democratic defiance. Headlines called Russia’s invasion “unprovoked” and its actions “war crimes” without hesitation.

Palestinians, on the other hand, rarely receive the dignity of clarity. When Israeli airstrikes level apartment buildings, the headlines often read “Israel strikes Hamas targets,” while civilian deaths are buried in subordinate clauses or caveated with “according to the Hamas-run health ministry.” It’s a framing that implicitly casts doubt on Palestinian lives. As Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, once said: the reduction of victims to mere statistics is already a form of denial.

Language is one of the first battlegrounds. Ukrainian civilians “resist”; Palestinians “clash.” Russia commits “aggression”; Israel “responds.” In one case, the invader is an international pariah; in the other, a partner in security cooperation.

This distortion extends even to death. As Edward Said wrote, “When Palestinians are killed, they are killed twice: first by the bombs, and second by the obituaries that call them militants.”

Such language is not accidental - it’s part of a broader machinery of dehumanisation. Israeli officials have called Gazans “human animals.” Drone footage is used to abstract the destruction, turning the obliteration of homes and lives into distant pixels. Government-funded hasbara campaigns flood platforms with selective footage, slander dissenters, and frame criticism as antisemitism.

Albert Memmi observed that the settler always constructs the native as a permanent threat - and that threat justifies violence. In Gaza, that construction is institutionalised. It provides the ideological framework for a military campaign that treats civilian infrastructure as a battlefield and Palestinian civilians as collateral, or worse, as targets.

Yet in liberal democracies, genocide cannot be sold wholesale. It must be marketed. And so, as Noam Chomsky put it, the “spectrum of acceptable opinion” is carefully managed. There’s fierce debate about whether Israel’s bombing is “proportionate,” but near silence on whether ongoing occupation, blockade, and mass displacement constitute crimes against humanity.

We are told that Israel has a right to self-defence. Rarely are Palestinians granted the same. When Israeli officials describe Gazans as “Nazis” or openly call for Gaza to be “flattened,” the words are absorbed into a discursive ecosystem designed to neutralise outrage and manufacture consent.

What breaks this frame? Clear language. Consistent standards. A refusal to treat Palestinian lives as conditional or expendable.

Elie Wiesel wrote that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” The current narrative isn’t neutral - it’s curated. To confront it, we must do three things: describe atrocities accurately, amplify Palestinian voices without filtering them through official Israeli narratives, and stop enabling the machinery that sustains this violence - militarily, diplomatically, rhetorically.

As Walter Benjamin reminded us, “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The bombs falling on Gaza today are not just acts of war - they are a test of whether we still believe in universal human worth. History will remember how we answered.