“A good Gazan is a dead Gazan” is a phrase attributed to Israel’s extreme right, but one that has now circulated widely across social media. It reflects the deep frustration many feel toward the way large segments of the so-called “supportive public” deal with the suffering, pain, hopes, and choices of people in Gaza especially when those political views don’t align with the symbolic imaginary charged with images of resistance, victory, and the mythical steadfastness of a “people of giants.” For much of this audience, genocide is consumed the way one watches a football match.
This poor engagement from the “cause’s public” may sometimes take the form of ignoring the diversity, divisions, and hardships of Gazans while celebrating the heroism of the resistance. At other times, it goes further into preaching patience, resignation to God’s will, and the need to remain steadfast and unyielding in the face of Israeli projects. The matter can escalate still further into organized campaigns of slander and accusations of betrayal directed against individuals living under genocide, or those who have survived it after losing many of their loved ones.
When it comes to public or prominent figures, the attacks often take on a systematic form, carried out through multiple networks and media channels linked to and funded by known groups. Motaz Azaiza, the Gazan photographer and journalist who gained prominence at the start of the war/genocide for his efforts to convey and document the truth of Gaza’s catastrophe, has become a prime target for this type of treatment.
Organized campaigns are waged against Palestinian figures who do not conform to the official discourse of “resistance,” “the nation,” or “the cause.” Influencers aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, including Abdullah El-Sherif, have been at the forefront. El-Sherif, for example, went so far as to fabricate a crude comparison between Motaz Azaiza and journalist Anas El-Sharif, who was killed by Israel on August 10, 2025. He accused Motaz of “choosing survival,” of “adopting the Zionist narrative that resistance is the cause of our plight,” and of “cheering for criminals,” while portraying Anas as the one who held firm to resistance and the land.
This recurring behavior reveals how the Palestinian cause is transformed into something closer to a religion than a political matter—a religion with its official creed, its rituals, symbols, sacred figures, and a full code of “halal and haram.” In such a framework, material, worldly, and political considerations become secondary. The discourse of the cause turns lofty and detached from the people it claims to represent—their interests, emotions, and lived realities. Instead, it becomes a stage for one-upmanship and posturing.
Mohamed Salah: The “Pride of the Arabs” Who Betrayed the Arabs
After signing with Liverpool FC and rising to global stardom in a way no other Arab player had before him, Mohamed Salah was celebrated by much of the Arab world. He was crowned “The Pride of the Arabs,” with many seeing his success as proof of self-worth and recognition from a decadent, “immoral” West.
At first, Salah tried to go along with these feelings. But the moment he deviated from expectations—by posing with his family next to a Christmas tree, offering condolences for Queen Elizabeth’s death, or most notably releasing a video after October 7 in which he said, “All lives are sacred and must be protected”—a significant part of that same public turned against him. He became the target of smearing, vilification, and hate.
Often, Salah is compared with Mohamed Aboutrika in order to disparage the former and elevate the latter as the ideal Muslim Arab star: proud of his religion, defiant of the West’s “moral corruption,” holding up the Palestinian flag against international law, and embodying the moral values of the “ummah.”
Salah, as both an Arab and a Muslim, is expected to faithfully represent the collective where the individual self is erased for the sake of the symbolic role. Any deviation from the “consensus of the nation” is branded as betrayal.
The Individual and Arab Modernity
What’s missing from the consciousness of this hostile public is the very concept of an independent individual self: something absent in societies that have entered modernity only partially. Some attribute this absence to Islam as a religion or as a cultural system, arguing that Islamic societies never fully integrated the modern notion of individuality.
Yet beyond such sweeping philosophical analyses of religious texts, Islam—like any other religion—is not merely text. Its texts themselves are open to multiple humanist interpretations. The deeper problem is not the scripture nor even its interpretive possibilities, as important as those are. So where does the real problem lie?
The French historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet speaks of the “exit of religion from the world.” By this, he doesn’t mean the decline of faith, but the transformation of religion’s role within society and its relation to politics. With modernity, authority shifted from religious structures to the modern state, which governs through law, identity, and sovereignty. Meanwhile, religion in Western democracies became largely a personal, individual bond.
Religious fundamentalisms, by contrast, seek to restore religion to a position of political authority, dominating public space by using the state, coercive apparatuses, and even modern technologies to reassert control over society.
The problem in our region does not stem from religion itself, but from a distorted modernization wrapped in nationalism and romanticism. Here, the “Arab and Islamic nation” becomes an imposed cultural bond, where any deviation from the supposed “orthodoxy of the nation” is seen as treason. This makes the targeting of individuals and dissenting groups not only culturally acceptable, but almost expected—as we see playing out today.
