“The Sacred Man”: Gaza and the Collapse of Moral Order
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Written by #FrazerMacdonaldHay
On bare life, sovereignty, and the slow death of our humanity
An image: blistering heat, metal fencing, and families—women, children, elders—queued, corralled, dehumanised. Waiting for food. Stripped of shelter, citizenship, dignity, they wait in the burning sun for a plastic tray of calories. And the world watches.
This is not a dystopian fiction, nor the aftermath of a natural disaster. It is Gaza. Today. And this image—grotesque in its banality—is not simply a scene of suffering. It is a mirror. It shows us who we are.
Across Gaza, what was once a society is being reduced to bare life—what Agamben calls the life that is politically excluded but biologically included, alive but rightless, human but unprotected. It is life lived in a state of exception—a permanent suspension of rights under the false premise of emergency, where humanitarian need becomes weaponised and survival becomes the new resistance.
Refugees, already displaced, find themselves in what anthropologists and legal theorists call a threshold space. Neither inside nor outside of the law. Neither protected nor abandoned. Simply managed. Strip-managed, drone-managed, food-managed.
As Zygmunt Bauman puts it, the refugee becomes a "social zombie"—a person stripped of identity, rights, and community. A body waiting. For food. For rescue. For silence to be broken.
Gaza is no longer a war zone. It is a prison camp. A massive, sprawling, open-air experiment in sovereign cruelty, where humanitarianism is rationed and dignity is optional. We are watching the production of homo sacer in real time—the person whom anyone may kill without consequence, and no one may mourn without being accused of complicity.
We must stop pretending this is a regrettable side-effect of war. This is not collateral damage. This is cultural erasure through architecture, starvation, displacement, and dismemberment. And it will stain not only the perpetrators, but the enablers. The onlookers. The silent.
Let us be clear: what is happening in Gaza is not simply a geopolitical crisis. It is a moral event horizon.
An irreversible breakdown of global moral order. A warning to every culture, every discipline, every citizen, that sovereignty without accountability will always seek new camps, new exceptions, new fences.
Gaza is not the past. It is the prototype.
And so the question is no longer "Where is the law?" or "Where is the humanity?" It is: Where are we?
