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This article confronts the genocide in Gaza not as an isolated humanitarian tragedy, but as a concentrated expression of a larger civilizational pathology. Drawing on Sahana Chattopadhyay’s symbolic diagram of the “Hegemonic Pyramid,” we trace how empire operates as an integrated system of ideological, economic, epistemic, and military domination. This system — founded on a story of separation and driven by extractive, supremacist, and expansionist logics — has evolved through successive historical phases, from territorial conquest to data colonialism. The Gaza genocide reveals the terminal phase of this system: its collapse of coherence, legitimacy, and symbolic control.
Key contributions of the paper include:
- A historical and structural genealogy of empire across four major phases: extractive, developmental, neoliberal, and surveillance–crisis.
- A close analysis of how Gaza functions within the empire not as anomaly but as symbolic flashpoint — where genocide, real estate speculation, and narrative engineering converge.
- A deconstruction of the dominant imperial monomyth, contrasted with regenerative paradigms grounded in relational ontology, interbeing, and life-value coherence.
- A reframing of the current global condition as a meta-crisis — a breakdown of meaning, sensemaking, and moral orientation.
- A proposal for symbolic reworlding through regenerative coherence, pluriversal ethics, and ontological humility.
The paper concludes that the empire is not only ending materially, but unraveling symbolically. What is needed now is not only resistance to its violence, but the collective courage to reweave meaning, repair coherence, and midwife a regenerative civilization. Gaza, in this framing, is not only a wound — it is a mirror and a summons.