Gaza has long been a warning of a new world order, now it is a blueprint—a testing ground, genocide laboratory, space of exception. The smaller of the two Palestinian territories has exposed how the limits of permissible bloodshed are tested, refined, and exported into broader global practice.
What has unfolded in Gaza over almost three years is a humanitarian catastrophe, a rupture that exposes the limits of the liberal international order, including Canada’s role within it. Institutions tasked with upholding international law have failed to act in any meaningful way, revealing a system that operates selectively.
In her 2015 work Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, the inimitable Angela Davis drew connections between the U.S. Black liberation movement and Palestine, tracing how struggles against state violence are linked across geography. In 2025, reflecting on the current moment, Davis returned to the thread she laid years earlier: “Palestine is really the center of the world.”
The scale of violence is staggering, but so too is its visibility—a genocide witnessed in real time on our phones and televisions has forced a confrontation not only with the brutality itself, but with the conditions that make it possible.
As Jewish Voice for Peace wrote following October 7, 2023, “[r]eality is shaped by when you start the clock.” What appears as sudden to some is the continuation of a much longer violent structure. In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi lays out the century-long project of dispossession.
What feels unprecedented today is not only the scale of Israel’s violence, but the clarity with which its underlying logic is laid bare. Gaza makes plain that the “rules-based order” is enforced unevenly and shaped by imperial power. Gaza is where the institutions of that “order” have most visibly failed in their stated mandate to prevent mass atrocity and protect humanity.
The result is not the breakdown of the system, but its selective operation. What Gaza suggests is not the collapse of a rules-based order but the limits of a world order that was never actually universal. Canada’s response demonstrates that extreme violence can proceed without consequence when the perpetrators align with the interests of empire. Diplomatic cover, continued military support, and the absence of enforceable sanctions have created an environment in which accountability appears optional even in the face of unprecedented global protest.
In Canada alone, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have taken place in at least two dozen cities and towns since October 2023, with sustained mobilizations in larger cities—over 1,000 protests in Montreal alone. These actions span both major urban centres and smaller cities, and signal a significant level of public opposition that has yet to meaningfully shift Canadian policy.
Gaza is not only a site of unprecedented human devastation, it is where the limits of permissible violence are being actively expanded every day that the genocide continues. What is normalized in Gaza proceeds to travel beyond Gaza, and growing ranks of subjugated populations can be subjected to extreme forms of violence without consequence.
We witness this with sanctions regimes in places like Cuba and Iran, where U.S.-led economic strangulation and political isolation operate not as temporary measures but as enduring tools of imperial governance. We see it in the expansion of surveillance technologies and military systems developed and tested in Gaza normalized elsewhere, marketed and integrated into global security infrastructure. We see it in the language of security itself, which increasingly justifies collective punishment and the erosion of civilian protections.
This governing logic normalizes state violence and diminishes international law. Gustavo Petro, President of Colombia described Gaza as “the rehearsal of the future” at a UN climate summit, warning that mass displacement and militarized violence will shape how wealthy nations respond to climate migration. Gaza is not only a catastrophe in the present but a preview of how global inequality will be enforced in an era of ecological crisis.
This raises urgent questions for countries like Canada, which has long positioned itself as a defender of human rights and multilateral norms, despite material relationships that contradict the narrative. Despite a 2024 parliamentary motion imposing limits on certain military exports to Israel, Canada continues to maintain procurement and military relationships with Israeli arms and security companies, some of which explicitly market their products as “battle-tested” on Palestinians. These relationships are enabled by loopholes in Canada’s arms export regime, including one that allows the transfer of Canadian-made military goods and components through third countries, particularly the United States, to countries such as Israel that would otherwise be banned under Canada’s export rules.
This pattern is not unique to Gaza. Canada’s arms exports to Saudi Arabia during the war in Yemen similarly sit in tension with our nation’s carefully cultivated peacekeeping reputation—a contradiction already exposed since at least the 1993 “Somalia Affair,” where gangs of white supremacist soldiers led a culture of violence so entrenched inside Canada’s “humanitarian mission” that the government fully disbanded the Canadian Airborne Regiment. Such violence stems from ongoing settler colonial practices within Canada itself, and points to a broader disjuncture between stated commitments to human rights and the material realities of Canadian foreign policy.
Canadian-made military goods continue to move through global supply chains connected to the genocide in Palestine. This is not simply policy inconsistency, it reflects a deeper entanglement that Gaza makes visible. Understanding Gaza in this way shifts the analysis—it is not only a humanitarian crisis, but a place where new forms of governance, control, and violence are refined and normalized. The question is not whether these practices will appear elsewhere but how they seemingly exist everywhere.
We are witnessing the emergence of a more openly authoritarian and fascistic world order. It is an evident shift toward more overtly coercive forms of governance, in which the distinction between civilian and combatant is blurred, and where entire populations can be rendered disposable under the logic of security.The selective application of international law, the expansion of militarized governance, and the normalization of large-scale civilian harm is the program of the future. These patterns will not be isolated events, they are the template.
If Gaza is a warning, the question is whether we will recognize it as such. What it reveals is not only the fragility of the existing order, but the terms on which a new one may be taking shape: a world in which states deploy violence more openly, accountability is increasingly conditional, and the language of human rights persists even as its guarantees recede. The Gaza model is now being reproduced in Southern Lebanon—entire villages and worlds reduced to rubble, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, devastation with a scale and repetition that recalls the patterns in Gaza. What once appeared exceptional reveals itself as a method.
To understand Gaza, then, is not only to witness atrocity, but to recognize a blueprint that is already shaping the terms of the world to come.
About the author
Nashwa Lina Khan
Nashwa Lina Khan is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator whose work engages culture, political critique, media, and liberation movements. She is the host of the Habibti Please.
