Colonial tourism spectacle obscures Gaza’s displaced: Rome’s baths as palliative for systemic displacement violence
Original framing: “Families evacuated from Gaza enjoy a day to decompress at Rome’s ancient baths - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Gaza’s displaced families are framed as recipients of Western charity rather than agents of their own narratives, erasing their political demands for return and resistance. The absence of Palestinian voices in the story mirrors their exclusion from decision-making about their futures. Marginalized perspectives—such as those of Bedouin communities in Gaza or Palestinian feminists—are sidelined in favor of a sanitized, consumable refugee story.
The spectacle of Gaza’s displaced families ‘decompressing’ in Rome’s ancient baths is a microcosm of colonial modernity’s contradictions: a site built on enslaved labor and imperial extraction now hosts the victims of that same system, their trauma aestheticized as a ‘humanitarian’ tableau.
This narrative obscures the structural violence of settler-colonialism, Western arms trade complicity (Italy supplied 28% of Israel’s weapons in 2023), and the erasure of Palestinian heritage—while framing displacement as a passive spectacle rather than an active struggle for return and justice. Indigenous Palestinian knowledge systems like sumud and diyafa are reduced to individual wellness, ignoring their communal and political dimensions, while marginalized voices are silenced in favor of a sanitized story of Western benevolence. A decolonial future requires dismantling the arms trade, co-curating heritage sites with displaced communities, and investing in sumud-based resilience networks that center Palestinian agency. The baths’ thermal waters, once a luxury for Roman elites, could instead become a site of reckoning—where the ghosts of colonialism’s victims demand reparations rather than decompression.