Cometh the hour, cometh the politicians
Back in February, Canadian-American novelist and journalist Omar Al Akkad published a book titled One Day, Everyone WIll Have Always Been Against This. “This” was Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. That day seems to be getting closer by the minute.
While most have carefully avoided using the word genocide, the list of politicians who have been staunch defenders of Israel’s “right to defend itself” but are now condemning its actions in the strongest of words—but not doing very much more—is growing fast.
They include British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas; Canadian PM Mark Carney and Foreign Minister Anita Anand; and Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
Following the Israeli war cabinet’s decision on August 8 to launch a new offensive to recapture Gaza City—an action likely to cause thousands more deaths and certain to displace a million more starving Palestinians to the overcrowded “evacuation zones” in southern Gaza—Carney and Starmer condemned this “escalation.” But there is no sign of the “concrete actions” the UK, France, and Canada threatened on May 19 if Israel did not “cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.”
The foreign ministers of Australia, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (later joined by Austria, Canada, France, Norway, and the EU commission) got together to rush out a statement on August 9 “strongly rejecting” the Israeli decision to expand the war and urging “the parties and the international community to make all efforts to finally bring this terrible conflict to an end now.”
This was followed on August 12 with a statement signed by no less than 25 foreign ministers and two high representatives of the EU, lamenting that “humanitarian suffering in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels.”
The ministers complained that:
due to restrictive new registration requirements, essential international NGOs may be forced to leave the OPTs [Occupied Palestinian Territories] imminently which would worsen the humanitarian situation still further. We call on the government of Israel to provide authorisation for all international NGO aid shipments and to unblock essential humanitarian actors from operating. Immediate, permanent and concrete steps must be taken to facilitate safe, large-scale access for the UN, international NGOs and humanitarian partners. All crossings and routes must be used to allow a flood of aid into Gaza, including food, nutrition supplies, shelter, fuel, clean water, medicine and medical equipment. Lethal force must not be used at distribution sites, and civilians, humanitarians and medical workers must be protected.
Neither of these statements threatened any sanctions if Israel chose not to comply.
Surprisingly, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came closest to actually doing anything to restrain Israel when he announced that “Under these circumstances, the German government will not authorise any exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice.” Because of its past role in the Holocaust, Germany regards the security of Israel as a raison d’être of the German state (Staatsräson) and is Israel’s second-largest supplier of arms after the U.S.
Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, too, says it is contemplating sanctions on Israel “as a way to save its citizens from a government that has lost its reason and humanity.” “We are not facing a military operation with collateral damage,” Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said in an interview with La Stampa published on August 11, “but the pure denial of the law and the founding values of our civilization.”
France’s President Emmanuel Macron has spearheaded a move to get Western powers to join the 147 countries (out of 193 UN member states) that already recognize the state of Palestine. Britain, Canada, and Australia have undertaken to do so in September at the UN, albeit with conditions. Whether or not such recognition happens, in the absence of stronger measures this too will remain little more than an empty symbolic gesture.
The Trump administration in the U.S. has meantime doubled down on its support for Israel. But fractures are appearing in the Democratic Party, which provided the Israeli government with “ironclad” backing throughout the Biden-Harris administration.
Thirty Democratic members of Congress have signed onto Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs Act to block offensive weapons sales to Israel, while on July 31, in the words of Senator Bernie Sanders:
By a vote of 27-17, Senate Democrats voted to stop sending arms shipments to a Netanyahu government which has waged a horrific, immoral and illegal war against the Palestinian people. The tide is turning. Americans don’t want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza.
Even Trump’s MAGA ally Marjorie Taylor Greene has gone on record saying “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that October 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”
This is all way too little and way too late for the people of Gaza. Whether it is better than nothing at all remains to be seen. As of now, this performative Western outrage is little more than a sideshow that leaves the IDF free, as Donald Trump put it, to “finish the job.”
Seeing the light
Politicians are not the only ones claiming to have had their eyes recently opened to the full horror of Israel’s crimes. Many credit photos of famine victims for their conversion. We can now add the no less horrifying photographs and powerful video footage of the “wasteland of rubble, dust and graves” to which two years of Israeli bombardment have reduced Gaza, shot by journalists from Jordanian planes dropping aid packages.
It was with “immense pain and a broken heart,” Israel’s most celebrated living writer David Grossman told the Italian daily La Repubblica on August 1, that “For many years, I refused to use that term, ‘genocide.’ But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there, I can’t help but use it…” Quoting Grossman’s words later got left-wing lawmaker Ofer Cassif expelled from Israel’s Knesset chamber.
Grossman was one of over 2,300 cultural figures to sign two recent Israeli petitions denouncing the “killing of children and civilians, the starvation and displacement of the population, and the destruction of cities across the Gaza Strip” as “atrocities on a historic scale,” which are “currently taking place in our name against a population that is only several kilometers away, in an impossible reality and terrible suffering.”
Across the democratic world, hundreds of writers, artists, film makers and others in the cultural industries have signed petitions condemning Israel’s actions. In Canada, “500+ law professors, lawyers, academics, former ambassadors, and civil society, faith and labour leaders” sent Mark Carney an open letter prior to the June 15 Kananaskis G7 summit imploring him “to catalyze G7 action to end the genocide.” It has yet to receive an acknowledgment from the prime minister’s office, let alone an official response.
Something is clearly changing when Bob Geldof, of “Do They Know It’s Christmas (Feed the World)” fame, breaks his silence to accuse Israel of “lying. Netanyahu lies, is a liar. The [Israeli forces] are lying.” He added:
It enrages me to a point beyond comprehension when I see the images published by Sky News and what [former Gaza-based British surgeon] Dr [Nick] Maynard has been reporting from inside Gaza. And at that point, I thought, the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, my own past and history with this—I thought I should say something now.
Now? Where have you been for the last two years, Bob? Remember five-year-old Hind Rajab? Seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna, hanging dead from the wall of a bombed-out apartment building in Rafah, her legs shredded to ribbons of flesh in an Israeli air strike?
Remember Rafah, which Joe Biden once said was his “red line,” a city of 200,000 people that the IDF has now pulverized to unrecognizable ruins?
Purity and danger
In the U.S., Jewish Currents Editor-at-Large Peter Beinart has suggested that “a kind of dam has broken… in mainstream media discourse and public discourse more generally”:
people are much more willing to say things that they were reluctant to say in the past, that there is starvation in Gaza, that it is Israel’s fault, and that beyond that, that this slaughter and starvation, this assault on the people of Gaza, has to end, and that it’s immoral.
This applies even more in other Western countries, where popular support for Israel has never been as strong as in America and opinion polls indicate it is now in steep decline. Up to 300,000 people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge for Gaza on August 3, completely wrongfooting Australia’s government. These were not your usual suspects.
Nor were the 522 people arrested in Parliament Square in London on August 9 as they protested the UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act. The signs they were carrying—for which they can now be sentenced to up to 14 years in prison—read “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” This was the most arrests the Metropolitan Police had made in a single operation in at least the last decade. Half of those detained were over 60, nearly 100 were in their 70s, and 15 were in their 80s.
While Beinart welcomes latecomers and converts to the cause, “even if they come painfully late, and much, much later than one would like,” and counsels that “to gain the power to change policy, [you] have to swell beyond the initial group of activists and bring in people who may not be as morally pure as those people,” he is equally insistent that:
it’s also really, really important to remember and… elevate the voices of people who were correct initially, who said things early on that I think have turned out to be factually and morally correct. Because the danger is, if you don’t do that, then you… end up, you just replicate, you don’t change the… structure of discourse.
Among those voices, he instances Rabbis for Ceasefire; the student protestors who “were greeted… for being prematurely correct… with being suspended and being expelled and by beaten up by the police who were called in”; and “the writers, the intellectuals who said things about Israel’s attack that have proven to be correct.”
He name-checks several Palestinian writers and activists, including Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by Congress in 2023 for “representing the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust… as justified ‘resistance’ to the ‘apartheid state.’”
The danger now is that in our outrage at the awful images that are overwhelming our newsrooms and the pious statements proliferating from our politicians we will forget Beinart’s “prematurely correct” voices and reproduce the same discursive tropes that have enabled, sustained, and gaslit the Gaza slaughter even as we criticize Israel.
We need to face up to the conditions that produced these horrors—and this requires us to jettison some widespread liberal illusions not only about Israel, but also about the part played in this human calamity by the free, democratic, civilized West.
An ancestral homeland?
The congressional motion censuring Rashida Tlaib in November 2023 began “Whereas Israel has existed on its lands for millennia and the United States played a critical role in returning Israel to those lands in 1948… in recognition of its right to exist…”
Western politicians habitually frame the Israel-Palestine conflict in terms of “the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland” (I quote Justin Trudeau). But the modern connection between the Jewish people and Israel is tenuous. It is the Palestinians who have existed on this land for millennia—who are its Indigenous inhabitants—and the Israelis who are immigrants. Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that a majority of present-day Israeli Jews are in fact the descendants of converts.
Nobody disputes the existence of Jewish kingdoms in what is now Israel during the first millennium BCE. But Jews were never the only people living in the area—what was the Biblical Samson doing among the Philistines in Gaza? Many Jews were expelled by the Romans after defeat of rebellions in 70-71 and 132-36 CE. Most of those who remained converted to Christianity under the Byzantine Empire or Islam after the Muslim conquest in 635-7 CE, without the ethnic composition of the land being significantly altered.
Were we to apply the Zionists’ “ancestral homeland” logic and timeframe elsewhere in the modern world, we would have to return England to the Celts, kick the Hungarians and Slavs out of Central Europe, and expel everyone of European descent from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. It is a poor justification for a genocide.
Or a settler colony?
By any sane definition, present-day Israel is a settler colony, which was established and has since been maintained by often extreme violence against the indigenous population.
In 1878, according to Ottoman records, Palestine had 462,465 inhabitants, of whom 403,795 (87 percent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 percent) were Christians, and just 15,011 (three percent) were Jewish. Zionist-inspired Jewish immigration from Europe began in the 1890s, fuelled by pogroms in the Russian Empire. By the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up, Palestine’s population was still 90 per cent Palestinian.
Encouraged by Britain, which governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate from 1922, Jewish immigration snowballed, particularly after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. By 1944 Jews made up 30 percent of Palestine’s population. Tensions between Palestinians and Jewish incomers peaked in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-9.
Jewish numbers grew by 100,000 (including 70,000 Holocaust survivors) immediately after World War II. Seeking to establish a Jewish state, the Irgun (led by future Israeli PM Menachem Begin), and Lehi (led by future Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir) militias used terrorist tactics against the British, including hanging captured British soldiers held as hostages and bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with the loss of 91 lives.
Things came to a head in 1947, when Britain informed the UN of its intention to leave Palestine. A UN plan to partition the territory into two states, which would have given the minority Jewish community 56 percent of the land, was rejected by the Palestinians.
Civil war between Jews and Palestinians broke out at the end of November 1947, in which both sides committed atrocities. During the Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948, Irgun and Lehi slaughtered over 100 Palestinian villagers, including women and children.
On the day British forces withdrew, May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion unilaterally declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel.” Troops from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, later joined by units from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, poured across the borders. The Jewish militias were meanwhile absorbed into the newly-created IDF.
After ten months of fighting Israel not only held the land allotted to it by the UN partition plan but 60 percent of the land intended for the Arab state, as well as West Jerusalem.
Jaffa, Palestine, 1920.
The great replacement
The population of Gaza is largely made up descendants of at least 750,000 refugees driven out during the 1947-8 war in what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe), boosted by refugees from the 1967 Six Day War. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes that:
In a matter of seven months, 531 villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied. The mass expulsion was accompanied by massacres, rape, and the imprisonment of males over the age of ten in labor camps for periods of over a year. (Ten Myths About Israel, chapter 1)
The total population of Palestine fell from 1,970,000 in 1947 to 872,700 in 1948. In 1947, Jews made up 32 percent of that population; by 1948, 82.1 percent. If you want to know what a real demographic “great replacement” looks like, this is it.
Between 15 May 1948 and the end of 1951, more than 684,000 new Jewish immigrants—many, now, fleeing from Arab lands where they had lived for centuries—settled in Israel. According to the UN:
Of the 370 Jewish settlements established between 1948 and the beginning of 1953, 350 were established on land abandoned by the Palestinians. In 1954 more than one-third of Israel’s Jewish population, plus 250,000 new Jewish immigrants, settled in whole cities that had been completely deserted by the Palestinians as a result of the military operations of 1948.
The so-called Law of Return, granting every Jew in the world the right to settle in Israel, was passed by the Knesset on July 5, 1950. More than 3.25 million Jews have availed themselves of this right since 1948.
In flagrant violation of international law, Palestinians driven out in the Nakba have no right of return to the lands they and their forbears had lived in and cultivated for millennia.
The “war” didn’t start on October 7
Israel’s supporters insist that the present “war” in Gaza “began”—to quote the stock phrasing that has been repeated in hundreds of news articles over the last two years—”when Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the October 7 attack and abducted 251 hostages.” Not only is this inaccurate as regards the actual events of October 7. More importantly, it totally ignores their immediate context.
Gaza is part of the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) Israel seized from Egypt and Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War. After that war, the UN Security Council unanimously—that is, with American, British, and French support—adopted Resolution 242 mandating “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”
Despite further UN resolutions, Israel has not only failed to comply with this demand for 58 years, but has established Jewish settlements in the OPT in defiance of international law. The rate of settlement has increased hugely in recent years, with a 40 percent rise in the West Bank since the formation of Netanyahu’s government at the end of 2022.
In March 2025 there were 737,332 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, spread across 150 settlements and 128 outposts. Perhaps as many as 160,000 of these are American citizens, who have been at the “forefront of the rise of settler violence.” The IDF and settlers have killed at least 964 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023 and driven tens of thousands from their homes.
Within the OPT, the Palestinian population—numbering around 5.6 million, as compared with Israel’s population of 9.5 million—has been subjected to what among many others the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN human rights offic e (OHCHR), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Israel’s human rights organization B’Tselem all characterize (and comprehensively document) as an apartheid regime.
While this context cannot justify the war crimes and crimes against humanity that the ICC charged Hamas leaders with committing during the October 7 attack, it goes a long way toward explaining why Hamas launched such a desperate attack in the first place.
Hamas’s attack was not unprovoked
In a landmark ruling of July 19, 2024, the ICJ held not only that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” but also that Gaza remains part of the OPT because Israel:
continue[s] to exercise, certain key elements of authority… including control of the land, sea and air borders, restrictions on movement of people and goods, collection of import and export taxes, and military control over the buffer zone, despite the withdrawal of its military presence in 2005 […] This is even more so since October 7, 2023.
As B’Tselem summarized the situation in January 2021,
the military occupation has not ended: Palestinians in the West Bank remain its direct subjects, while in the Gaza Strip they live under its effective control, exerted from the outside.
Hamas narrowly won elections in 2006 and expelled its rival Fatah, which nominally governs in the West Bank, from the Gaza Strip the following year. Israel responded by imposing a tight land, sea and air blockade in June 2007, turning the beleagured enclave into what Human Rights Watch has described as the world’s largest open-air prison.
Conflict has flared intermittently ever since, with Hamas and other militias firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with periodic military operations the IDF derisively calls “mowing the lawn.”
This is not an equal contest. Between January 2008 and October 6, 2023, Israel killed 6,540 Palestinians (5,360 of them in Gaza). In the same period 309 Israelis were killed by Palestinian action—a fatality ratio of 21 to 1. The disproportion speaks for itself.
IDF snipers, firing through the perimeter fence, killed 266 people and injured 30,000 during the (peaceful) weekly Great March of Return demonstrations of 2018-19. In May 2022, Israeli forces shot and killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh—one of many more such killings to come (the most recent being the assassination of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and his crew in a targeted airstrike on their tent near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on August 10). Two days before Hamas’s October 7 attack, 832 Jewish settlers stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem—the third holiest site in Islam.
If these are not provocations, the word has lost all meaning.
Israel’s response was not self-defense
As the occupying power in the OPT—including Gaza—Israel’s responsibilities toward the Palestinians under international humanitarian law include:
the obligation to ensure humane treatment of the local population and to meet their needs, the respect of private properties, management of public properties, the functioning of educational establishments, ensuring the existence and functioning of medical services, allowing relief operations to take place as well as allowing impartial humanitarian organizations such as the ICRC [Red Cross] to carry out their activities.
Israel’s conduct toward Gaza’s civilian population since October 2023 flagrantly ignores any and all of these legal obligations.
Leaving aside for the moment Palestinian deaths and injuries, the IDF had damaged more than 190,000 buildings by early April 2025—roughly 70 percent of Gaza’s structures—of which 102,000 were destroyed. This translates to roughly 300,000 homes lost.
By August 6, 80 percent of Gaza’s commercial facilities, 88 percent of school buildings, and 68 percent of road networks had been destroyed or significantly damaged, and only 50 percent of Gaza’s hospitals were even partly functioning. According to the latest UN data, Palestinians now have access to only 1.5 percent of cropland suitable for cultivation. The IDF demolished Gaza’s only functioning cancer hospital on March 21. The same fate was suffered by Al Israa University—the last remaining university in Gaza—in January 2024.
In an appendix to the ICJ July 19, 2024 judgment, Justice Hilary Charlesworth explained that:
the population in the occupied territory does not owe allegiance to the occupying Power, and … is not precluded from using force in accordance with international law to resist the occupation.
“On the assumption that Israel is the victim of an armed attack triggering the right to self-defence,” she goes on:
The use of force in self-defence … is directed at restoring the situation as it was prior to the armed attack. This purpose distinguishes lawful self-defence from measures that aim to punish the aggressor for the harm inflicted. The latter measures constitute armed reprisals, which are prohibited under international law.
“Whether the use of force employed by the victim of an armed attack serves the purpose of self-defence,” she concludes,” is determined by “standards of necessity and proportionality.”
An existential threat?
As of August 6 at least 61,709 people, including 17,492 children, had been killed in Gaza a direct result of IDF military action; more than 111,588 people had been injured; and more than 14,222 are missing and presumed dead. These figures, which come from the Gazan health ministry, are widely believed to be a serious undercount. The IDF lost 454 soldiers in Gaza during the same period. This is disproportionate by any criteria.
But was this killing and destruction militarily necessary? In order to restore the status quo ante, which is all international law allows?
Or was it an armed reprisal—a collective punishment inflicted on Gaza’s civilians in order to demonstrate, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to Israelis at the outset of the present war, that “We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come”? A reprisal that also serves the Zionist longterm objective of ridding Eretz Israel, by one means or another, of its indigenous Palestinian population?
At the outset of hostilities the IDF estimated Hamas to have some 30,000 fighters. In contrast to Israel—a nuclear power with one of the strongest, most experienced, and technologically sophisticated militaries in the world—Hamas has no navy or air force, tanks or armoured vehicles. Its armoury is made up of light automatic weapons, grenades, mortars, explosives, improvised rockets, and anti-tank guided missiles and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. It is, we might say, a David to Israel’s Goliath.
“Brutal,” “savage,” and “barbaric” as Hamas’s October 7 attack may have been, it was in essence a DIY assault from paragliders, small boats, bulldozers, pickup trucks, and motorbikes. It revealed serious failures in Israel’s security (which Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to have investigated until after the “war” is over) but it hardly adds up to what Israel’s supporters have loudly proclaimed to be an existential threat.
Hamas is even less of a threat now, when Israel claims to have eliminated at least 20,000 of its fighters and destroyed its command structure. Much as it might wish to wipe Israel from the face of the earth and reestablish Islamic domination from the river to the sea, Hamas doesn’t remotely have the capacity to do so—either now, or in any foreseeable future.
At this point it must be asked—as it should have been long, long ago—if this has long ceased to be (and possibly never was) a war of self-defense, why is Israel still fighting?
It’s not a “humanitarian crisis,” it’s a genocide
For whatever reasons—geopolitics, economics, guilt at turning a blind eye to the Holocaust, Islamophobia, racism—for the last two years Western politicians, with the overwhelming support of the mainstream media, have supported Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and done their best to brand all opposition as “antisemitism.”
Not only have they provided Israel with arms and diplomatic cover at the UN and elsewhere, frustrating any coordinated international response to impose a ceasefire. They have repeatedly ignored orders from and sought to discredit the world’s two highest courts, the ICJ and the ICC. They have eroded their citizens’ civil liberties by criminalizing pro-Palestinian actions and vilifying pro-Palestinian speech.
They have gaslit their populations, requiring us to believe that when Israel destroys a hospital or a school in Gaza it is because Hamas has a tunnel underneath it; that the doctors, nurses, aid workers, and journalists it has killed, often with their whole families, are all Hamas operatives; and that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.”
Perhaps most insidiously—and here Islamophobia and racism do work their evil—they have tried to convince us that when Hamas commits war crimes they are the result of primitive, barbaric, fanatical religious hatred, but when Israel commits the same crimes on a massively greater scale, it is defending not only itself but “Western civilization.”
I predict that in the coming days and weeks we will see plenty of blame for the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza being laid at the door of Benjamin Netanyahu, who will seemingly do anything to survive in office (and keep out of jail). But the problems go far deeper than Bibi appeasing his extremist right-wing ministers to keep his coalition intact and his government in power.
The West may now be finally waking up to the full enormity of the horrors Israel has inflicted in Gaza. It needs also to wake up to the evils it has nurtured not just for the last two years, but for over a century, under the banner of “the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” It is time we started listening to Palestinian voices, while there are still Palestinians left alive to speak truth to power.
Derek Sayer is professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His most recent book, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in European History.