Author: Ahmet Said Aydil
Published in 2016 and edited by Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, Gaza as Metaphor approaches Gaza not merely as a geographical place or the scene of a humanitarian catastrophe, but as a lens through which the wider contradictions of the modern world become visible.
Through concepts such as the “open-air prison,” siege, occupation, poverty, resistance, trauma, and deprivation, the book brings Gaza into focus. Contributors ranging from journalists and doctors to academics and writers discuss everyday life in Gaza, its isolation, and the images through which it is represented to the outside world.
The book’s central idea is this: Gaza is not some distant and incomprehensible tragedy. It is a metaphor for where inequality, dispossession, states of exception, and domination over human life can ultimately lead.
Ten years have passed. In the autumn of 2026, after three years marked by bombs and destruction, Gaza remains a metaphor.
Yet the meaning it carries today is broader, and more unsettling, than it was in 2016. For Gaza now reveals not only the catastrophe endured by Palestinians, but also the fragility of the world we have long been told to believe in. In America and Europe, many people who grew up surrounded by dominant narratives are now confronted with the gulf between the values they were taught and what they see on their screens. In Muslim societies where the Palestinian question had gradually faded from public consciousness, Gaza has not only brought a forgotten cause back to the conscience; it has also exposed a degree of powerlessness that is difficult to accept.
For many people today, particularly those between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, Gaza has also become a metaphor for another kind of confinement in their own lives. Of course, I am not suggesting that these experiences are equivalent. Gaza’s suffering is of its own kind and of such magnitude that it cannot meaningfully be compared with ordinary hardship. But this is precisely what metaphors do: they allow a truth found in one place to resonate with feelings experienced elsewhere.
Young people today may not live under bombardment, yet they can still feel crushed beneath other forms of brute force in their own lives: widening income inequality, the growing impossibility of owning a home, more labour in return for less security…
Our age, which promises freedom, has meanwhile fallen into a strange contradiction. Freedom does not mean unleashing every desire of the self, treating every whim as a right, or recognising no limits whatsoever. True freedom means neither dominating another person nor submitting to the domination of others. Yet today, when people are told to “be yourself,” what is often really meant is: “Be yourself, so long as you conform to the acceptable ideas, lifestyles, and tastes of the age.” Freedom, instead of liberating the individual from moulds, becomes the name given to a new set of moulds.
Perhaps this is one reason Gaza has become such a powerful symbol, particularly among the young. It reminds us that brute force does not rule only through bombs; it can also rule through money, status, fear, exclusion, and necessity. The fact that people may feel compelled to consider their education, their employment, or their future before raising their voices for Gaza forms part of this sentiment.
And yet, against all this destruction, the steadfastness, sacrifice, and dignity of the Palestinian people bear witness to something else: to the human being who, even after losing home, loved ones, and livelihood, refuses to surrender their land, identity, and will to exist.
“Despair is the obstacle to every perfection,” Bediüzzaman says. For perhaps the greatest victory of domination is to convince people that no other world is possible. Gaza says otherwise. It shows us the human being who preserves their dignity despite every form of coercion.
For this reason, Gaza is not only a metaphor for oppression, but also a metaphor for the hope that oppression is never eternal.
Yeni Asya English