Gaza and the Inverted Mirror of Whiteness
“Every empire tells itself the story of its innocence.”
— Arundhati Roy
In the West, Gaza is often perceived not as a tragedy but as a threat, a site of moral confusion, political fatigue, and symbolic inversion. Here, victimhood dons the uniform of an army. Occupation articulates the language of self-defence. And an open-air prison is depicted as a battleground between equals.
How did we arrive here?
To answer this, we must move beyond geopolitics and enter into the realm of perception, into the predictive mind of the modern nation-state. Gaza is not merely a location; it serves as a mirror. What it reflects is the unresolved trauma, racial anxiety, and historical denial embedded in the Western political psyche, particularly in the United States and Europe, and most acutely within Israel itself.
The Ghost of History
The founding of Israel is inseparable from the trauma of the Holocaust. The images of Auschwitz—stacked bodies, shaved heads, gas chambers—remain ingrained in the global subconscious. They have shaped the predictive models not only of Jewish identity but also of the moral framework of the Western world. “Never again,” we swore. “Never again.”
However, trauma, as we understand in psychotherapy, is not solely about memory. It also involves expectation. The traumatised system does not merely recall the past; it anticipates its return. It perceives danger where none exists, interprets aggression in ambiguity, and defends itself pre-emptively, sometimes even violently, against what it cannot bear to re-experience.
In Israel, this logic is not abstract. It is national policy. It is the Iron Dome. It is targeted killing. It is the demolition of homes and the denial of water and electricity. It is the response to rock-throwing with missiles. It is trauma as strategy.
However, this trauma is not solely Israeli. It is also European and American exported, reframed, and projected onto the figure of the Palestinian, particularly the Palestinian in Gaza.
October 7th and the Demand for Coherence
On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israeli civilians. The scale and brutality of the violence—affecting men, women, children, and the elderly—pierced the surface of the Israeli psyche and the global public imagination. It was sudden, disorganised, and horrifying, leaving deep grief and rage in its wake.
But almost instantly, it was treated not as a rupture in a long history, but as the beginning of one.
The date itself became a psychic landmark. “October 7th” was spoken not as an event, but as a justification, a moral absolute that suspended context, history, and complexity. The decades-long siege of Gaza became irrelevant. The Nakba was erased. Settlements, checkpoints, and demolitions all evaporated in the white heat of terror.
The Western media, influenced by the predictive model of Israeli innocence and Palestinian threat, complied. October 7th was not simply part of the narrative; it became the narrative itself.
From the perspective of a predictive mind, this is entirely understandable. A traumatised system interprets new data through old priors:
We are under attack.
They want to destroy us.
We must act decisively to survive.
The horror of 7 October didn’t challenge the model; it confirmed it. The violence was not framed as a symptom of prolonged occupation, of hopelessness, or intergenerational trauma. It was presented as an origin point, a return to the Holocaust, to pogroms, to annihilation.
In the days that followed, Israel launched the most devastating bombardment of Gaza in its history. Civilian infrastructure was flattened. Journalists were killed. Aid was obstructed. Thousands of children lost their lives. And the West, for the most part, turned a blind eye, or justified the slaughter in the name of security, revenge, or the sacredness of Jewish grief.
This signalled a return to moral splitting: the division of the world into pure good and pure evil. In this context:
Israel is the ultimate victim.
Gaza is the ultimate threat.
Mourning for Israelis is humane.
Mourning for Palestinians is suspect.
Even progressive voices were silenced or shamed for expressing grief on both sides. Palestinian suffering was not only overlooked; it was rendered morally illegible. This represents a deeper violence: not merely the killing of bodies, but the erasure of the grief that could humanise them.
October 7th shattered the mirror. For a moment, the fragility and brutality of the system were laid bare. But rather than revising the model, the system doubled down. In predictive terms:
A massive prediction error occurred.
Instead of integrating it, the system escalated violence to restore internal coherence.
Gaza was bombed not only in retaliation but also to eliminate the contradiction: that power had always been the occupier, not the victim.
Gaza as the New Native
In American history, Native Americans were portrayed as both a threat and an obstacle, a wild, ungovernable presence obstructing civilisation. Genocide was justified not as conquest but as a necessary defence. The settler, paradoxically, was perpetually under siege.
This pattern has replayed across settler colonial systems — from the British in Kenya to the Dutch in South Africa to the Israelis in Palestine. Gaza, like the reservation or the bantustan, serves as a site of containment. Its people are demonised not despite their dispossession, but because of it. Their continued existence contradicts the founding myth.
And so, they must be framed as dangerous.
This is the inversion. Gaza is weak, yet it is treated as powerful. It is stateless, yet it is referred to as a regime. Its fighters are irregular, yet they are labelled an army. Its children are collateral.
Whiteness, Victimhood, and the Moral Lens
The Israeli state is predominantly led by Ashkenazi Jews, many of whom have been racially incorporated into whiteness, particularly in the perception of Western allies. This whiteness is not a biological concept; rather, it is a political one. It concerns alignment with power, capital, and the prevailing moral order.
In this context, Jewishness is no longer the racialised other of Europe’s past. It serves as a proxy for Western civilisation — a “shining democracy in the Middle East,” as American politicians often refer to it. And, like all empires, it must safeguard its narrative of innocence.
But here lies the psychological conundrum: how can a people both dominate and maintain their innocence?
The answer is victimhood.
Victimhood becomes a strategic identity, not as performance, but as a predictive structure. Trauma insists we are always at risk. Even while holding the gun. Even while commanding the drones.
Palestinian resistance, regardless of how symbolic or disorganised it may be, is interpreted through this lens of existential threat. A child wielding a stone becomes a terrorist. A humanitarian convoy turns into a front. The only acceptable Palestinian remains silent.
Predictive Processing and the Inversion of Threat
This is not just ideology; it is neurology.
From the perspective of predictive mind theory:
We are vulnerable. Adversaries surround us. We must survive.
Input: A protest. Teenagers are throwing rocks. A cry for help.
Prediction error: This does not match our model. It suggests our power is causing suffering.
Resolution: Reject the input. Reinforce the model. Attack to restore coherence.
This is how predictive systems safeguard themselves: by denying contradiction. Gaza’s suffering is not merely politically inconvenient — it is also cognitively dissonant. It cannot be acknowledged; otherwise, the model must be updated. And the model is sacrosanct.
America’s Role: Projection and Reward
The United States plays a crucial role in this loop. It not only funds and arms Israel, but also narrates it. American politicians echo the language of defence, innocence, and exceptionalism. The U.S., like Israel, was founded on settler violence and relies on the denial of Indigenous suffering to maintain its self-image.
In this sense, support for Israeli militarism is not a deviation from American values; it is their logical extension.
Gaza becomes a screen onto which America projects its history, disavowed and inverted. The Palestinians, like African Americans, Native Americans, and the colonised everywhere, are framed as inherently dangerous. Their suffering is their fault. Their rage is irrational. Their very presence is an affront.
Towards a New Frame
To break this loop, we must do more than shift policy. We must shift perception. That means acknowledging:
That trauma, when unintegrated, becomes a weapon.
That not all victimhood is innocent.
That moral clarity requires moral risk: to look, to feel, to revise the model.
In psychotherapy, healing begins not when the story is perfected, but when it is disrupted. When the client says, "Maybe I am not who I thought I was." When defence softens into doubt. When grief is permitted to surface.
What if nations could do the same?
(Rory Singer)