HISTORY TEXTBOOK OF 2046
Global History of the First Quarter of the 21st Century
Gaza Genocide

This article by Lavinia Marchetti proposes a counterfactual historiographical writing experiment: imagining how the Gaza genocide might appear, in 2046, within a university textbook of global history dedicated to the first quarter of the 21st century. The entry reconstructs the events between 2023 and 2026 by adopting a future prospective distance, in which categories still contested today have become sedimented in the language of historical research, international law, and public memory.

The text analyzes Gaza as a limit-event in the crisis of the international order that emerged after 1945. The destruction of the Strip is examined through several interpretative axes: the political responsibility of the Netanyahu government; the structural role of the United States in providing diplomatic, military, and financial cover for Israel; European complicity through human rights rhetoric, arms trade, and continuity of economic exchanges; the Italian case under the Meloni government, taken as an example of institutional inertia, Atlantic alignment, and repression of internal dissent.

A central section is devoted to the media dimension of the genocide. Gaza is presented as the first mass crime observed in real time by a connected global population, where the visual evidence of atrocities coexisted with institutional paralysis. The concept of the “planetary bystander effect” allows us to question the gap between knowledge and political action, between the visibility of the massacre and the inability of states to intervene.

Finally, the chapter assigns a decisive role to the response of the peoples: public squares, students, workers, dockers, trade unions, boycott networks, and the Global Sumud Flotilla. From this fracture between governments and civil societies emerges the fundamental thesis of the text: the Gaza genocide, in future historical memory, could be studied as the moment when international law revealed its asymmetry and when moral legitimacy shifted from state institutions toward the material forms of popular opposition.

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