لحظة ادراك

 

Selfishness — Ignorance — Cruelty

In a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2026, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez chose three words to describe what he regarded as a political current threatening the international order: selfishness, ignorance, and cruelty. In the passage in which he addressed these qualities, he did not name specific countries, but he spoke of forces that question international rules, violate them while knowing that holding them accountable may be difficult, and deal with the world according to the logic of power and unilateral interest.

Three short words, yet they seem like three doors opening onto a long world of crises.

Selfishness, first: when the world becomes a deal rather than a community, and international relations are measured by what one side gains and what the other loses. Sánchez described this logic as viewing the world as a zero-sum game, in which one side’s gain must necessarily be another side’s loss.

Here, the politics of the United States under Donald Trump, in some of his public rhetoric and declared approaches, provide an important example for examining this transformation, without reducing all of American policy to the president himself or to a single description. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2026, Trump emphasized the return of American power, the protection of American interests and sovereignty, confrontation with the adversaries of the United States, and rejection of what he described as global domination.

This is a language different from that of the international order that emerged after the Second World War; a language that places the powerful state once again at the center of the scene, treating power as the instrument that gives a state the ability to impose its will.

But the problem begins when power becomes a substitute for rules.

Then comes ignorance—not the absence of information, but the disregard of facts that do not fit political desire.

The Middle East is not a chessboard on which pieces can be moved and the player can simply wait for the desired outcome. History here is not merely a backdrop to the scene, geography is not simply a collection of lines on a map, and people are not numbers in security reports.

Every war leaves behind a memory.
Every destroyed city leaves behind generations carrying the rubble in their memories.
And every child who loses a home does not disappear from history when the press conferences come to an end.

Therefore, ignoring these realities does not erase them.

In Israel, this logic has also appeared in the political rhetoric of Benjamin Netanyahu. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024, he presented the war as an existential battle for Israel, saying that ending the war required Hamas to surrender, hand over its weapons, and release the hostages, while speaking of the need to achieve “total victory.” He also rejected accusations that Israel was committing genocide, using starvation as a weapon, or deliberately targeting civilians, and defended the Israeli military’s conduct and its efforts to reduce civilian casualties.

Here, the distance between the narrative and reality becomes visible.

A government can present its narrative.
An army can present its narrative.
An adversary can present a counter-narrative.

But rubble has no political narrative.

And a hungry child does not need a translator.

And a hospital reduced to ruins cannot enter a television debate to defend itself.

That is why the most dangerous form of political ignorance is not failing to know the truth, but knowing it and then acting as though it does not exist.

Then comes the third word, and the harshest in Sánchez’s speech: cruelty.

He described it as a condition in which some powers are no longer moved even by the sight of a hungry child or a hospital being reduced to rubble.

Here, the Palestinian scene becomes a mirror that cannot be concealed.

The United Nations documented the continued killing of children in Gaza even during the declared ceasefire period, and in August 2026 reported that at least 300 children had been killed over 300 days, while humanitarian needs, displacement, and the destruction of infrastructure continued.

In September, the United Nations reported the deaths of four children in separate attacks, the destruction of food aid, and damage to water infrastructure, while medical evacuations from the Gaza Strip continued amid enormous medical needs.

These are not numbers at the end of a report.

They are names that could have been sitting in school classrooms.

But cruelty does not always begin with a missile.

Sometimes it begins when a human being becomes a number.

Then a target.

Then collateral damage.

Then merely a detail in a long political speech.

And here lies the tragedy of the Middle East: the very language that is supposed to explain reality has sometimes become a means of concealing it.

They say: security.

And the human being disappears.

They say: deterrence.

And the child disappears.

They say: victory.

And the graves appear.

They say: strategic necessity.

And hospitals are destroyed.

And they say: the international order.

Then people search for that order and find it only in books.

Perhaps the greatest paradox is that Trump and Netanyahu do not need to agree on everything in order to converge on this point: both speak extensively in the language of power, even if their motives, objectives, and political styles differ.

Trump speaks of American power, interests, and sovereignty.

Netanyahu speaks of Israel’s security and of the war as an existential battle.

Between these two narratives, the Middle East finds itself trapped between two grand visions of power.

But power, no matter how great, cannot by itself make history.

It may be able to bring down a city.

It may be able to change a government.

It may be able to impose a ceasefire.

And it may be able to open a road or close a crossing.

But it cannot order memory to forget.

Perhaps that is why Sánchez’s three words are more than a mere political description.

Selfishness: when the world becomes a playground for the powerful.

Ignorance: when facts become obstacles to be ignored rather than foundations upon which decisions are made.

Cruelty: when the human being becomes the last thing considered after security, interests, influence, and victory.

In such a world, the problem is not only war.

The problem is the transformation of war into a way of thinking.

At that point, peace becomes merely a pause between two wars, negotiations become nothing more than the rearrangement of ammunition, and a ceasefire becomes a postponed appointment with the next battle.

And this is precisely what the Middle East needs to break.

Gaza cannot live forever beneath the rubble, nor can Israel find lasting security in a regional environment without a political horizon, nor can the United States manage the region forever through the logic of deals and power alone.

A policy that produces no solution will produce another crisis.

And power that opens no door to a settlement will require greater power each time.

Greater power will require a greater war.

And so the region becomes trapped in a closed circle.

Therefore, “selfishness — ignorance — cruelty” are not merely three words spoken by a European prime minister in the hall of the United Nations.

They are three warning signals.

If selfishness governs international relations, the other becomes a permanent adversary.

If ignorance governs decision-making, history becomes something that can be ignored.

And if cruelty governs the battlefields, the hungry child becomes a number, the hospital a potential target, and the city merely an operational zone.

But history does not end there.

The alternative always exists: knowledge instead of denial, law instead of unrestrained power, and the human being instead of zero-sum calculations.

And here perhaps lies the final paradox.

Sánchez, despite his sharp criticism of these forces, ended his speech by emphasizing that he had not lost hope and by calling for the defense of multilateralism and international institutions.

As if the deeper message were:

The world has not reached its end.

But it must decide what kind of world it wants to be.

A world governed by selfishness, ignorance, and cruelty...

Or a world that remembers, after all this bloodshed, that the human being was never a marginal detail in history.