A View from Istanbul: On the Savagery of the West’s Genocide in Gaza

It is 8AM here on the Asian side of Istanbul. It’s 6AM back home in Kent, England.

Last night I had gone to bed with, and woke up this morning thinking about, the image of Gaza, I saw at the Archaeological Museum. That is, the Gaza battle scene on the sarcophagus named Alexandar, yes, that Macedonian empire-builder remembered as Alexandar the Great.

The image is said to represent the Battle of Gaza (312 BCE), fought between the Emperor Alexander’s successors, after the Macedonian died at the unripe age of 33.

(See the photos of the sarcophagus and curatorial explanation below. All photos by Zarni, 23 Oct. 2025)

In fact, I am here to attend the final session of the Gaza Tribunal held in this great city of 20 million people, where not only the two continents – Asia and Europe – but also different civilizations of antiquity have interfaced over several millennia.

I decided to give a miss to the opening day of the Gaza Tribunal which was kicked off with the recap of the tribunal’s previous session held in Sarajevo, another great seat of different civilizations.

Instead, I headed to the Archaeological Museum at the foot of the Tokapi Sayari (or palace) where I have in my previous visits found little gems that give me fresh perspective on things I have been taught to be modern or post-modern – such as the ideas of liberal freedoms, welfare states, progress, empirical sciences, rationality, gender equality – and you get the drift.

For instance, in one of the great display rooms at the museum, I stumbled across an earthen tablet from Mesopotamia 3,500 years ago, that is, BC 1,500, where a woman leader stated that her efforts in governance would be devoted to addressing the needs of the welfare and protection of the population she ruled over.

Such material evidence displaces and decentres the prevailing dominant intellectual order rooted in the foundational distortion or delusion – that everything “progressive”, “high status”, “prestigious”, “scientific” “rationale” and so on is deemed to be “Western”. This western-centred world is in turn believed to be rooted in the ancient Greco-Romanic Civilization, where philosophy worthy of universalization was birthed.

I immediately recognized the tablet’s message as the Indic (atheistic Buddhist Indian) equivalent of a dozen fabled edicts, erected in the 3rd century Before Christ (or BC), across what is now Northern India, by Emperor Ashoka or Ashok, which convey a similarly enlightened ideology of governance. I saw them in their original at various archaeological sites in Northern Indian provinces such as Odissa state and Sarnath. Sarnath is within a short drive from Varanasi, the 5,000-years old birthplace of the creation-centred polytheistic Hinduism.

A word about Ashoka is in order. After a bloody – some might say genocidal, retroactively – campaign of what we would call genocidal wars of empire-building, Ashok was said to have repented and embraced the Buddhist philosophy of Impermanence and universal loving kindness or metta (in Pali, the principal spoken and scriptural language of the ancient Buddhists).

Two thousand years after the old genocidal warrior relinquished his mass murderous militarism and sought to pay for his crimes by spreading the message of peace, harmony and welfarism, another set of empire-builders or defenders in the West have been engaged in another round of bloodletting in the name of this fictitious Judeo-Christian Civilization.

For the last two years hundreds of millions of people around the world have been pained by Gaza’s images of death and destruction livestreamed by the Palestinians until they were literally wiped off the surface by the incoming drone bombs, or 1,000 lb bombs. Barking the empty mantra of the colonising occupier’s “self-defence”, British, American, German and other European patron-politicians and myriad supporters of apartheid Israel have in effect approved the war of mass extermination of 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza under vice-like medieval siege by relentless bombings and fire from the sky and on the ground.

As I juxtapose, in my mind’s eyes, the image of the Battle of Gaza nearly 2,300 years ago and today’s images of Gaza as the site of genocidal killings and destruction I realize how utterly meaningless and intellectually vacuous this Pavlovian idea of Progress and Rationality which what we call Global North or “The West” have sought to universalize as “the Gold Standard of Civilization and Culture” has been.

In his After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarkets, 2025), the renowned Iranian scholar and a lifelong supporter of Palestinian liberation struggle, Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabash demolished rather brilliantly “the West”, from its very ideological foundations rooted in the European Enlightenment philosophy, but built on the millions of corpses, and the countless enslaved labourers and stolen or “colonized” continents and sub-continents. Dabashi urges those who identify with categorically anti-colonialist thought to read Western philosophy – and anything that bears the label “Western” – anthropologically, rather than the universally valid truth claims.

The scene on the coffin in the museum of men fighting with their hands, chopping off heads or sticking their spears into an enemy’s back seem more humane and human than what the collective West has been doing to the largely defenceless population of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.

The unfolding savagery of the collective West in Gaza far exceeds what men in antiquity did to one another or inflicted on respective enemy populations. Over 3,700 years ago, men would pursue retributive justice guided by such principles as Hammurabi’s code, which spells out “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”.

Alas, no such “leniency” in thought or deeds, in Palestine where Israeli architects of genocide implement the kill ratio of 50 Palestinian lives for the life of 1 Israeli Jew.

Men who are in the driver’s seats of this savage war against largely unarmed Palestinians in Gaza, such as Donald J. Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and their courtier-investors, show absolutely no sign of self-reflection, capacity for repentance or, in short, humanity, despite the global majority, of states and people, screaming foul at multiple fora including people’s moral tribunals, UN resolutions, street rallies, civil disobedience acts, marches and voyages of symbolism.

This was the subject I discussed on South Africa’s humanitarian radio program, Salaam Media.

Watch the 20-minutes discussion aired yesterday below or here: Gaza Made Unlivable: Apartheid Israel’s Genocide on Palestine Turns Environmental Catastrophe – YouTube

Maung Zarni

Further reading: Israel’s Physical and Ecological Destruction of Gaza – FORSEA
Banner: A view of Istanbul at dusk, from European side overlooking the Asia side across the Sea of Mamara, with two magnificent landmarks, photo by Zarni, 23 Oct. 2025