In Selective Empathy: The West Through the Gaze of Gaza, Roberto De Vogli takes you deep into the greatest moral crisis of our time: the Gaza genocide.
Blending sharp political critique with psychological insight, and filled with haunting testimonies, suppressed facts, and fearless indictments of Western leaders, journalists, and intellectuals, this book reveals a civilization that reserves compassion for some while ignoring others. Gaza has become the West’s mirror - and our moral litmus test. Will humanity survive its own indifference? De Vogli challenges prevailing assumptions and calls for a new global solidarity grounded in universal empathy, justice, and emotional decolonization.
Publication date: December 18, 2026
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Prologue 3
1 The Gaze of Gaza 7
1 A Denied Genocide 9
2 A Genocide Foretold 11
3 “Nowhere Is Safe” 13
4 The War on Children 15
4.1 “We Are All Complicit” 16
4.2 The Highest Number of Child Amputees Per Capita
in the World 17
5 History as if It Began on October 7 18
6 The West’s Heart of Darkness 20
2 Selectively Empathic 22
1 Empathy and Its Discontents 22
1.1 Crimes of Solidarity 25
1.2 The Dark Sides of Empathy 28
2 Compassion for Some 30
3 35 Minutes and 300 Hours of Silence 34
3 Why We Fail to Feel 37
1 State of Collective Psychopathology? 38
1.1 “The Most Moral Army in the World” 40
1.2 The Cabinet 44
1.3 The Public 48
2 Selectively Indifferent 51
2.1 Our Brain on Nationalism 52
2.2 The Long Shadow of the Holocaust 53
3 The Banality of Complicity 55
4 When the West Incites Genocide 57
4 The West and the Rest 59
1 Partners in War Crimes 59
2 Western Civiliesation 62
2.1 Genocidal Legacies 64
2.2 Year 533: the Conquest Continues 69
2.3 Superiority Complex 71
3 When the Perpetrator Plays the Victim 73
4 Emotional Decolonization 75
4.1 Pedagogy of the Oppressors 77
5 Manufacturing Exclusive Compassion 80
1 Israel’s 9/11: Hamas’s Crimes against Humanity 80
2 “Lied Into Genocide” 83
3 “Have You Condemned Hamas?” 84
4 The Engineering of Selective Indignation 85
4.1 Hostages and Prisoners 89
4.2 “They Look So Much Like Us” 92
4.3 The More You Read, the Less You Feel 92
5 When Will the Night End? 94
6 The Herd of Free Thinkers 97
1 “Inescapably Genocidal” 99
1.1 As if There Were No Humans 101
2 Believing the Unbelievable 103
2.1 Algorithmic Gaslighting 104
2.2 “Anti-Semitic” Evidence 106
3 Jewish Voices for Truth and Justice 107
4 Stenographers of Power 109
4.1 Selective Silence 111
5 When Your Enemy Is the Truth 112
7 The World’s Conscience 115
1 Conscientious Protesters 116
1.1 Not in My Name 117
1.2 US Elections 2024: “I Can’t Vote for Genocide” 119
2 Medics in Gaza’s Last Hospitals 121
3 “Stop the Genocide!” 125
3.1 Students Teaching the World a Lesson 125
3.2 The Academic Witch-Hunt 127
4 Just for a Cause 131
4.1 Poetic Injustice 133
8 On the Brink 135
1 A Crisis of Selective Humanitarianism 135
2 Vital Crossroads 137
2.1 89 Seconds to Midnight 137
2.2 No Environmentalism without Pacifism 140
2.3 War and Peace: Cooperation or Annihilation? 142
3 Between Good and Evil 143
3.1 Born To Be Selective 143
3.2 Fair Instincts 145
4 Imagine There Is No Other Land 148
4.1 We Are the World 150
4.2 Just Epiphanies 152
References 155
Index 195
“The original proposed publisher of this book provided a graphic illustration of its argument, when they refused to allow Roberto De Vogli to even use theword ‘genocide’. Since this is the only term which adequately captures whatIsrael has done to the Palestinians, we must be grateful that he refused and found a more principled publisher. Selective Empathy provides a passionate, incisive and scrupulously documented explanation of the West’s complicity,and deserves to be widely read.”
– Martin Shaw, Emeritus Professor of International Relations, Institute of International Studies, Barcelona, and author of The New Age of Genocide and What Is Genocide?
“Selective empathy is not our destiny is the ethico-political cry that emanates from Roberto De Vogli’s powerful and uncompromising book. Whereas Western political powers preach a (neo)colonial ethics of ideological resemblance – care only about Israeli Jewish lives, lives that look like yours – so as to obscure the horrors of the Gaza genocide, De Vogli carefully attends to the ways this message is thwarted by incredible acts of self-sacrifice (from doc-tors volunteering in Gaza, Israeli soldiers refusing to serve in an eliminationist war, university students protesting on their campuses, and faculty risking their careers for the cause of Palestinian liberation). In Selective Empathy, Gaza registers as a site of utter destruction and global resilience. Western leaders desperately want us to forget about the former and stop the latter. De Vogli courageously points us in the opposite direction.”
– Zahi Zalloua, Professor of Literature and Philosophy, Whitman College, and author of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality
“With great courage and meticulous research, this is a searing indictment of Western moral failure in the face of genocide. De Vogli’s unflinching analysis forces us to confront how, by reserving empathy for some but denying it to others, democracies have become complicit in mass atrocity. Essential, urgent, and profoundly necessary, this is a masterwork of extraordinary intellectual rigor and profound moral courage.”
– Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham, and author of The Spirit Level
“Mature democracies have entered a dystopia: the smaller the injustice, the more extreme the response; the greater the injustice, the deeper the bureaucratic indifference. De Vogli shows something that compounds the problem: one can easily strip people of empathy by manipulating their consciousness into believing that the victims belong to a different species.”
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan
“A brilliant, powerful, and essential book. It presents a moral challenge we are obliged to confront.”
– George Monbiot, columnist for The Guardian and author of The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism and Bring on The Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice
“Selective grievability and white unseeing are dissected in this thought- provoking book on how the genocide was sustained for over two years.”
– Ghassan Abu-Sittah, Rector of the University of Glasgow, Director of the Conflict Medicine Program, Global Health Institute, American University of Beirut
“In this extremely well researched and balanced volume, Roberto De Vogli provides updated and systematic knowledge on the horror of the Israeli genocide in Gaza – the killing, the starving, the dehumanizing, the scholasticide, the ecocide. The selective empathy and ensuing denial of solidarity with Palestinians among Western elites is linked to the powerful propaganda of Israeli and Western allies. At the same time, however, courageous acts by activists, doctors, and journalists testify to the emergence of universal empathy and global identification.”
– Donatella della Porta, Professor and Founding Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, and author of Social Movements: An Introduction
“This riveting must read offers a heart-rending but rigorous analysis of the systematic dehumanisation of the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond, the complicity of the international community and major Western powers – and a startling insight into the systemic, institutional and ultimately civilisational processes and values that have led us to a point where genocide becomes fully normalised. I strongly recommend it.”
– Nafeez Ahmed, investigative journalist, The Guardian blogger, and author of Alt Reich and Failing States, Collapsing System