Editor's note: This is Part Two of a two-part column by Marian Pastor Roces, originally published by BusinessWorld Online on Nov. 1, 2026.

Independent curator and institution critic Marian Pastor Roces continues her meditation on the Gaza Strip, testing the thesis of her first installment — the "simplicity of horror" — against the events of the past week. Since Part One, she writes, the complexity of the situation between the Gaza Strip and Israel has "increased exponentially." Her characterization of the war as genocide sits within a wider legal landscape: South Africa's case accusing Israel of genocide has been pending before the International Court of Justice since December 2023, and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024.

Whether or Not

Two elections frame the period, Roces argues: the Nov. 3 United States midterm congressional race, with all 435 House seats and roughly one-third of the Senate on the ballot, and the still-ongoing election for Israel's top job — political drama, in her view, of the highest possible scale.

The texture of the world's future, she writes, will be shaped by the possible removal of Benjamin Netanyahu after the 19 years — accumulated across non-consecutive terms since he first took office in 1996, longer than any premier in the country's history — he "allowed himself" to ultimately drive Israel into prosecuting what she calls an "über-Zionist Mad Max theater of war." Perhaps genocide in Gaza can stop — a line she concedes she pens "as almost wishful thinking."

That same future will also be affected, she continues, by the possible unseating of the Republican Party from a dominance that ironically presided over subservience — "Trumpian toadying to Putin's oligopoly," again framed as almost wishful thinking.

A Few Predictables

Nothing is certain, Roces acknowledges, but there is enough information to venture a couple of suppositions should Netanyahu and Trump maintain their rule.

Ukraine, she writes, will still win the war with Russia "out of sheer mettle," but at an enormously greater cost in blood and materiel. The Palestinians of Gaza, meanwhile, will still win their war over the dominant narrative: even if they cannot win the genocidal war being waged against them, the sheer horror of Israel's barbarism — her characterization — will exorcise whatever culpability they may have had in their own destruction. They will "speak from the grave," she writes, "and undermine the viability of the Israeli state for good."

Whether or not Trump and Netanyahu prevail in the coming weeks, she argues, neither will stand on a solidified extremist base any longer — at least for the immediate term. The simplicity of horror in Gaza, described in Part One as a field without the mercy of empathetic understanding, can now be seen as the absence of hope.

Irruption of Hope

Hope, Roces writes, is precisely what is being released during the current electoral contests — fragile hope, to be sure, but hope that cannot be dismissed. The growing disgust, even among Trump's base, with the scale of their leader's corruption, ineptitude, and cruelty is real. So is the growing number of Israelis, including soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, who are now against the war and the reasons they serve.

Also real, she notes: the unexpectedly high number of votes — 19 — won by the Arab Israeli parties (Hadash, Balad, and Ta'al) in the current Knesset elections, a combined figure that would surpass the 15-seat high-water mark ever reached by the Arab-led Joint List, in 2020, in the 120-seat chamber; and the extraordinary turnout in the American elections long before in-person voting for the midterms, through early and mail-in options available in most states.

It would be folly, she contends, to feign indifference to these developments, and more so to foreclose the very idea of hope. Such foreclosure, she writes, is the definition of horror. Reasonable skepticism is wise, but outright blindness to hope is nihilism. Gaza, on her reading, is simple enough to understand through a lens that detects the presence or absence of cause for some optimism.

Limits of Hope

That is not to say the word Gaza is shedding its character as a sign of horror — not by a long shot. Yet.

Roces observes that while Netanyahu and his rival Gadi Eisenkot — a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces who left Likud to enter politics in 2022 — must each form a coalition in order to rule, in a parliamentary system where no Israeli party has ever secured a governing majority on its own, and while all possible votes must still be counted — neither man will talk to any of the Arab-led Israeli parties for consolidation. This impossibility of a political merger shows the present limits of hope and exposes, she writes, the pervasiveness of the same racism and right-wing ideology that Netanyahu drives. Eisenkot and Netanyahu, she suggests, may be cut of the same cloth entirely.

A Democratic win for both the American Congress and Senate, she continues, would not necessarily resurrect liberal democracy. Even granting the impressive progressive credentials of the presumptive winners, the damage wrought by Trump on the American economy, judiciary, military, foreign relations, civil service, human rights, and the capacity to believe in democracy is severe and may take generations to course-correct. It is realistic, she adds, to wonder whether liberal democracy can thrive in the United States at all, given the ascendance of the "alpha tech bros" — her shorthand for the concentrated clout of Silicon Valley's dominant founders — as the financial and political elite of the world.

To recognize the near impossibility of hope is, she reiterates, horror. That resorts for the world's rich — a vision echoing the "Riviera of the Middle East" redevelopment scheme the Trump administration floated for Gaza in early 2025 — can be envisioned as a possibility for a Gaza vacated of its rubble and "rubble-people" is, in her view, a horrific face of humanity. That IDF soldiers who have willfully burned children, journalists, mothers, and other civilians — that collateral damage can be permitted both a high number and a cold justification for that number — can be imagined returning to being human again: this, too, shows the simplicity of horror.

And that Iran will surrender to the United States, and Ukraine to Russia, as though these conflicts had nothing to do with the Gaza genocide, can only recall the lines of Colonel Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "The horror. The horror."

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic of institutions. Her body of work addresses the intersection of culture and politics.