The darkest hour?
For the last six months it's often felt to me like it's one of humanity's darkest hours. I mean there's only so much you can take of endless evidence of the worst atrocities, alongside the world's leadership enabling it, before you start to draw conclusions.
Many people have been rightly saying that Gaza is a litmus test. If Israel can get away with what they're doing there then the same thing can be done to anyone. Furthermore, allowing Israel to get away with what it has done requires dismantling with even the pretense of the "international rules-based order".
Now it could be a litmus test, but I actually think that it's entirely possible that the world's leaders would go back to their pre-Gaza reactions for any other conflict or atrocity that happens after this one. Not that this is a good thing, if anything it shows how much ignoring Palestinian death has become an axiom. But it may happen.
But then what to make of the "world's darkest hour" idea?
I definitely do believe that, because of our level of support this atrocity, this is is the darkest hour for the Jewish people in our entire history. And yes of course I include the Holocaust. To paraphrase Matt Lieb from Bad Hasbara, Israelis now think gallows humour is when the hangman makes a joke about the victim. Which would be a far cry from the gallows humour that someone during the Holocaust might have been making.
But the most optimistic thing is that this really isn't the darkest hour for humanity as a whole. After all, the vast majority of the world sees this for what it is. Opinion polls show that even in the countries that are providing Israel with its most significant material support (USA, UK, Australia), public opinion is squarely against Israel's actions. And at the country level, the vast majority of countries are the same.
So really it boils down to the leadership/political elite of like 12 countries in the world. For those people it's their darkest hour. And certainly it's a very dark hour for the notion of democracy, since the leaders of these 12 countries are allowed to lag behind public opinion by like 6 months (or tens of thousands of murdered civilians). Which sucks. But it's important to be clear that there is NOT a mass moral failure.
A failure of democracy to keep up with morality is a huge problem but it's not the same kind of problem as if the entire world was genuinely immoral.