The Gaza war has become the most searing mirror of our century’s political and moral contradictions.

It is, at once, a war of annihilation and a struggle for survival, a humanitarian catastrophe and a geopolitical chessboard, a theatre of memory and a failure of imagination. It also reveals, with startling clarity, how much the United States and, in particular, Donald Trump’s renewed presidency remains both a maker and prisoner of world disorder.

What unfolds between Gaza and Washington today is not only a regional tragedy but a civilisational reckoning with the varieties of war and the meaning of peace.

Gaza: A world condensed

The Gaza Strip, only 40 kilometres long, has become a world condensed into a crucible of suffering and symbolism. Since Hamas’s brutal 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel and Israel’s overwhelming military response, the region has endured one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed; nearly two million displaced. Schools, hospitals, universities and entire neighbourhoods have been obliterated. International law, once invoked as a brake on atrocity, has been reduced to a vocabulary of protest.

Israel’s stated aims of destroying Hamas, freeing hostages and restoring deterrence have collided with an emerging reality of humanitarian collapse and international isolation. The asymmetry of the war has exposed the moral vacuum of “proportionate response” rhetoric. When the instruments of precision destroy everything, precision itself becomes meaningless. What has been called a “war on terror” is in truth a war of structure: the enforcement of occupation and the perpetuation of statelessness.

Yet Hamas, too, has made Gaza hostage to a politics of death. Its resistance has fused national liberation with theological absolutism, blurring the line between martyrdom and militarism. In such a setting, neither victory nor defeat has meaning, only the multiplication of graves.

The mirage of peace

The ceasefire announced in October 2025, brokered under US supervision, is less a peace than a pause. It involves hostage exchanges, partial withdrawals, humanitarian corridors and a vague promise of reconstruction. But like many of the post–Cold War “peace processes”, it is a fragile choreography performed atop ruins.

The theoretical distinction between negative peace (the absence of violence) and positive peace (the presence of justice) has never been more relevant. The Gaza ceasefire achieves the former only barely and the latter not at all. Real peace requires political recognition, economic reconstruction and psychological repair. None of these are visible. Instead, Gaza risks becoming another “postwar protectorate” administered by external powers, pacified by dependency, and rebuilt in the image of its destruction.

Trump’s calculus: Power as performance

In Washington, the conflict has been folded into Trump’s performance of presidential omnipotence. Having reclaimed office in a fractured US, he has sought to cast himself as the “peace president,” unveiling a 20-point plan to “end the Gaza war” and “rebuild stability”. The plan promises US oversight of Gaza’s reconstruction, disarmament of Hamas and Arab investment under American supervision.

But Trump’s mediation is not born of empathy or justice. It is the latest manifestation of his transactional worldview. For him, diplomacy is theatre, and peace a brand extension. The Gaza deal is designed less to solve a crisis than to reposition the US as the indispensable empire. In his rhetoric, peace is not mutual understanding but management: a form of containment dressed as benevolence.

Yet this too reveals a deeper truth. The US remains trapped between two self-images: the guardian of order and the author of disorder. It arms Israel while lamenting civilian deaths, vetoes UN resolutions while preaching humanitarianism and funds reconstruction while enforcing sanctions. Trump has amplified this contradiction rather than resolved it, turning geopolitics into a stage for domestic projection. His “peace plan” appeals to voters fatigued by war abroad but exhilarated by displays of dominance.

America’s mirror: War abroad, division at home

The Gaza war has also deepened fissures within the US. Protest movements on campuses, in churches and across communities have revived an older American struggle over race, empire and moral responsibility. For many young Americans, Gaza evokes the injustices of racialised policing, inequality and global double standards.

For Trump’s base, it reinforces a narrative of civilisation under siege and a Christian-Zionist front against chaos. The US has always fought its internal wars through its external ones. The Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan each reflected a domestic identity crisis refracted through violence. Gaza is no exception. The polarisation over Israel’s conduct and Trump’s role is not simply about foreign policy. It is about what kind of nation America imagines itself to be: a democracy of conscience or a fortress of interests.

The varieties of war and the poverty of peace

Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Gaza suggests war has become the substitute for politics altogether. The structural conditions that generate conflict-occupation, inequality, trauma and exclusion are left untouched, while “security operations” multiply. The war system sustains itself: industries profit, leaders rally, analysts predict, diplomats convene. Peace, by contrast, lacks an economy, a lobby, or a doctrine.

Trump’s vision of peace belongs to what scholars call illiberal peace: order imposed through hierarchy, discipline, and selective reconstruction. It is a peace without democracy, a reconstruction without repentance. It reflects a global drift toward authoritarian stabilisation with strong states policing weak societies, humanitarianism subcontracted to militaries and moral vocabulary hollowed out by realpolitik.

After the fire: What remains

And yet, amid the ruins, the arts and voices of ordinary people persist: Gazan poets writing from tents, Israeli mothers of hostages refusing vengeance, Jewish and Arab peace groups demanding accountability. They remind us that the varieties of peace are not confined to treaties and summits. They live in gestures of solidarity, in truth commissions yet to come, in the stubborn belief that justice can be imagined before it is achieved.

The Gaza war may end, but its meanings will echo through the moral geography of the 21st century. It tests whether humanity can still distinguish between security and survival, between domination and dignity. In this, America’s own crisis is inseparable: the empire’s inward decay mirrors the world’s outward conflagration.

A real peace will require more than a deal. It will demand a transformation in the very structure of how power defines safety and how justice defines victory. Until then, Gaza will remain a wound on the conscience of the world, and America a nation unsure and torn between whether it is treating that wound or deepening it.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.