One of the most remarkable—not to say shameful—features of the last 20 months of carnage in Gaza has been the near-unanimity of support for Israel’s assault from Western governments and political parties of otherwise sharply opposed persuasions, regardless of how criminally Israel has conducted its “war.”
Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poiliévre, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, not to mention Viktor Orban, Antony Albanese, Donald Tusk, Geert Wilders, Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas are unlikely bedfellows, but all have come together on Israel’s “right to defend itself” against Hamas “terrorism.”
In the name of this principle—whose legality is dubious, given that Gaza is not a foreign power but (according to the world’s highest court) a territory that Israel has de facto occupied since 1967, whose civilian population it therefore has a legal duty to protect—even the mildest Western expressions of “concern” over this or that IDF “excess” have invariably been prefaced (“balanced”) by obligatory ritualistic condemnations of Hamas.
With the partial exception of the Guardian, which has allowed its columnists like Arwa Mahdawi and Nesrine Malik to pen op-eds that were critical of Israel, the mainstream Western media from the BBC to the New York Times, CNN to the Washington Post, have all generally been content to toe this official line. While Israel’s justifications—and lies—have been amplified, its atrocities have been sidelined, minimized, or not reported at all.
Under the sign of October 7
Such partiality was perhaps comprehensible in the immediate aftermath of October 7, when images of the horror were fresh in people’s minds. But little changed either with revelations that what happened on October 7 was less clearcut than Israeli propaganda had presented it or with the mounting deaths, destruction, and undeniable evidence over the ensuing weeks and months that Israel was routinely committing war crimes in Gaza.
It mattered not that the final figure for deaths in Israel on October 7 was 1,139, not the 1,400 at first reported; nor that one-third of these were soldiers, police, or security guards—in other words, combatants—rather than “mostly civilians”; nor that most of the atrocity stories that did so much to mobilize Western opinion behind Israel in the ensuing weeks were either totally discredited, like the fairy tales of 40 beheaded babies, babies baked in ovens, and babies ripped from their mothers’ wombs, or, like the “mass rape” allegations, lacked any convincing supporting evidence. Politicians like Biden, Blinken, and Trudeau continued to repeat these myths long after they had been debunked in the Israeli press.
It mattered not that many of the Israelis who perished on October 7 were later shown to have died from IDF “friendly fire,” resulting either from the fog of war or implementation of Israel’s Hannibal Directive, which authorizes killing one’s own rather than letting them be taken prisoner. Many of the young people killed at the Nova music festival were likely casualties of fire from IDF helicopter gunships; the burned-out hulks of their cars, which could not have been produced by Hamas’s light weaponry, strongly suggest as much.
Nor did it matter that 18 months ago, on January 24, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was “a real and imminent risk” of genocide occurring in Gaza and mandated six provisional measures aimed at “preserving … the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide.” The court imposed further measures on March 28 and May 24. All were simply ignored by Israel, with the open or tacit support of the United States and Israel’s other Western allies, including Canada.
It is difficult to think of a more blatant snub to the international rule of law—unless it be the howls of Western outrage that greeted the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) last November 21 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” The U.S. has now instituted sanctions against the judges who authorized the arrest warrants.
Only one thing mattered. For 20 months it sufficed to invoke “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust” to forestall further debate. In democracies that pride themselves on their respect for freedom of expression and human rights, anyone who questioned Israel’s narrative, from journalists, artists, actors and novelists to sports commentators, children’s entertainers, and rap musicians, were vilified as “antisemites,” harassed by the agencies of the state, and “canceled” from the public domain.
If not now, when?
One of the first signs that this unholy consensus among the major Western powers might at long last be cracking was a striking shift in tone in some leading British newspapers.
What appears to have tipped the scales this time were warnings of imminent famine in Gaza resulting from the total blockade on supplies of food, water, power, and medicine Israel had imposed on the Strip since March 2, two weeks before it unilaterally broke the truce it had agreed with Hamas in January and resumed its full-scale military offensive.
On May 4, the Guardian ran a lead editorial titled “Israel’s aid blockade of Gaza: hunger as a weapon of war,” which concluded:
What is shameful is that almost half the children in Gaza questioned in a study said that they wished to die. What is shameful is that so many civilians have been killed, and so many more pushed to the brink of starvation. What is shameful is that this has, indeed, been allowed to happen.
The next day the Daily Mirror, historically the most left-wing of Britain’s tabloids, devoted its front page as well as two inside pages to a story by Defense Editor Chris Hughes titled “Horror in Gaza.” The headline read “OUR CHILDREN ARE STARVING.”
On May 6 the Financial Times—the most establishment of UK establishment papers—openly challenged Israel’s “self-defence” protestations in a powerful editorial headed “The west’s shameful silence on Gaza”:
Each new offensive makes it harder not to suspect that the ultimate goal of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is to ensure Gaza is uninhabitable and drive Palestinians from their land. For two months, Israel has blocked delivery of all aid into the strip. Child malnutrition rates are rising, the few functioning hospitals are running out of medicine, and warnings of starvation and disease are growing louder. Yet the U.S. and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.
Martin Sandbu’s June 2 op-ed, which argued that “it is in Europe’s interest to impose sanctions on Israel,” is something the FT would never have countenanced previously.
“End the deafening silence on Gaza—it is time to speak up,” proclaimed a lead editorial in The Independent on May 10, explaining that times had changed:
The world was stunned by the horrific Hamas atrocity of October 7, 2023, in southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 hostages seized—the youngest just nine months old. Despite its fierce retaliation raising immediate alarm, Israel found international backing for the right to defend itself…
But now any initial moral justification for continuing to prosecute the war 18 months on has been lost—and the disgust we once reserved for Hamas militants transferred to the brutal and relentless assaults by the Israel Defense Forces and the humanitarian disaster caused by its blockade.
Ramming its message home with a picture of hungry Palestinian children, the next day’s Independent devoted its entire front page to Gaza, calling upon “Britain and its allies to force Israel to end a cruel war that… has long since lost any moral justification.”
“The unfolding famine in Gaza is an obscenity the world must no longer tolerate,” the Independent again thundered on May 29.
It is an outrage that Israel, the occupying power ignoring its obligations to treat civilians properly, should behave in this manner; it is an even greater act of shame that the world should continue to tolerate it.
On May 8 the Economist published an article suggesting that the Gaza Health Ministry death toll was a significant undercount and that “between 77,000 and 109,000 Gazans have been killed, 4-5% of the territory’s pre-war population,” and the lead editorial demanded that “The war in Gaza must end.” Even Rupert Murdoch’s reliably pro-Israel Times carried an editorial titled “Israel’s friends cannot be blind to suffering in Palestine.”
On May 11, the Guardian broke the taboo on the dreaded G-word, whose application to Gaza by correspondents or interviewees the BBC, the New York Times, and CNN have all done their utmost to ban, asking:
Now [Israel] plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the U.S. and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?
The lawyers and the literati weigh in
On May 26, more than 800 UK legal professionals published a letter to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer asserting that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possible genocide. They went on to demand that the UK government honour the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, impose sanctions, and trigger the suspension of Israel’s UN membership by invoking Article 6 of the UN Charter.
These were not Donald Trump’s “radical left lunatic” judges and lawyers. Signatories included former Supreme Court justices Lady Hale, Lord Sumption, and Lord Wilson; former Court of Appeal judges Sir Stephen Sedley, Sir Anthony Hooper, and Sir Alan Moses; and more than 70 King’s Counsel, including former chairs of the Bar Council of England and Wales, the Criminal Bar Association, and the Bar of Northern Ireland.
Two days later, 380 writers from England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland issued a statement begging “the peoples of the world to join us in ending our collective silence and inaction in the face of horror.” Among the self-styled “Writers for Gaza” were Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureshi, Geoff Dyer, Jeannette Winterton, Pico Iyer, Russell T. Davis, and Zadie Smith, all eminent figures in British cultural life.
Pointing out that “The use of the words ‘genocide’ or ‘acts of genocide’ to describe what is happening in Gaza is no longer debated by international legal experts or human rights organizations”—the letter referenced Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the United Nations Human Rights Council—the writers’ condemnation of Israel was unequivocal:
The term “genocide” is not a slogan. It carries legal, political, and moral responsibilities. Just as it is true to call the atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent civilians on October 7, 2023 crimes of war and crimes against humanity, so today it is true to name the attack on the people of Gaza an atrocity of genocide, with crimes of war and crimes against humanity, committed daily by the Israel Defence Forces, at the command of the government of the State of Israel.
The writers went on to demand an immediate ceasefire and unrestricted distribution of aid to Gaza through the UN, with the imposition of sanctions if Israel refused to comply.
While musician Brian Eno and historian William Dalrymple have repeatedly called out Israeli crimes over the last 20 months, the same cannot be said for all of the letter’s signatories. Many had remained silent up to now, and some have shifted their positions.
Zadie Smith, for example, copped a lot of social media flak for having described the language of student protestors in a May 2024 New Yorker article as “weapons of mass destruction” while refusing to take sides on Gaza.
To be fair, she had hardly represented Hamas’s and Israel’s crimes as comparable in scale:
The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides…
Are these instances of better late than never? Or are they, as some have argued, efforts to launder reputations while there is still time, to escape charges of complicity in what is increasingly being recognized as a genocide? As Omar El Akkad grimly predicted in his book of the same title, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This.
One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this. https://t.co/lemZnLb44h
— Omar El Akkad (@omarelakkad) October 25, 2023
Bringing up in the rear, the politicians
Other public figures have also been having second thoughts on Gaza. UK broadcaster Piers Morgan recently told Mehdi Hasan:
Listen, you and I have talked about this war in Gaza ever since it started, this phase of the 75-year conflict. I have resisted going as far as you have done in your criticism of the Israeli government. I resist no more.
Former U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who made himself notorious for his smirking defense of Israeli actions under the Biden administration, admitted in a Sky News interview that “I don’t think it’s a genocide, but I think, I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes.”
Asked why he lied about this at the time, Miller responded:
When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion.
You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government. The United States government had not concluded that they committed war crimes, still have not concluded [that].
In other words, he was only following orders. This defence didn’t wash at the Nuremberg Trials, and is unlikely to wash today should Miller—or anybody else who has helped Israel carry out or cover up its crimes in Gaza—find themselves in the ICC dock in the Hague.
No doubt this consideration is beginning to weigh with the West’s political leaders, some of whom now appear to be in an unseemly rush to cover their asses.
In October 2024, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy—who like Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a long-standing members of Labour Friends of Israel—told Parliament that to speak of genocide in Gaza “undermines the seriousness of that term,” which he wanted to reserve for “when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War and the Holocaust.”
This is a definition that not only (willfully?) misinterprets international law but conflicts with the British government’s own stance on genocides in Srbenica and Myanmar.
Questioned as to whether Lammy spoke for the government, Keir Starmer responded with a characteristic deflection:
It would be wise to start a question like that by a reference to what happened in October of last year [2023]. I am well aware of the definition of genocide, and that is why I have never described this or referred to it as genocide.
He cannot do so, of course, without laying open both his government and his person to criminal charges of complicity in the most heinous of all crimes.
All the more significant then, that David Lammy told Parliament on March 17 that though Israel “quite rightly must defend its own security,” its latest blockade was a “breach of international law.” The next day Starmer publicly rebuked his foreign secretary for saying the quiet bit out loud (“The government is not an international court, and, therefore, it is up to courts to make judgments”), but nevertheless conceded that “Israel’s actions in Gaza are at clear risk of breaching international humanitarian law.”
Several senior British Conservative MPs are also seemingly having a change of heart on Gaza. On May 6 Kit Malthouse organized a letter to Keir Starmer signed by seven MPs and six members of the House of Lords calling upon the government to stand “against indefinite occupation” and “reinforce international law,” and recognize the state of Palestine “as a necessary step to reinforce international law and diplomacy.” That same day, Conservative MP Mark Pritchard told the House of Commons,
I have supported Israel, pretty much at all costs. But today, I want to say that I got it wrong.
Against this background, Keir Starmer for the UK, Emmanuel Macron for France, and Mark Carney for Canada issued an unusually strongly worded statement on May 19 threatening that “If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.”
Though the three leaders did not—for perhaps obvious reasons—use the word genocide, they left no doubt as to their disgust at Israel’s “egregious actions”:
The Israeli Government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law. We condemn the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate. Permanent forced displacement is a breach of international humanitarian law.
The statement went on to condemn “any attempt to expand settlements in the West Bank … which are illegal and undermine the viability of a Palestinian state and the security of both Israelis and Palestinians,” threatening that in this case, too,
We will not hesitate to take further action, including targeted sanctions.
The following day David Lammy addressed the Commons again. “We are now entering a dark new phase in this conflict,” he told MPs:
Netanyahu’s Government plan to drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the strip to the south and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need. Yesterday, Minister Smotrich even spoke of Israeli forces ‘cleansing’ Gaza, of ‘destroying what’s left’ and of resident Palestinians being ‘relocated to third countries’. We must call this what it is: it is extremism, it is dangerous, it is repellent, it is monstrous and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms… Israel’s plan is morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counterproductive, and whatever Israeli Ministers claim, it is not the way to bring the hostages safely home.
Though Lammy’s speech was passionate, the accompanying actions were modest: the suspension of trade talks with Israel, which were stalled anyway, and a largely symbolic imposition of sanctions on a handful of settler extremists in the West Bank.
Are these indications that the rats are finally preparing to abandon Israel’s sinking ship? Or are they just cosmetic gestures, designed to cover up Western complicity in the Gaza genocide while doing nothing serious to stop it? Only time will tell. Unfortunately time is a luxury the starving people of Gaza do not have.
The official death toll in Gaza—Israel’s payback for the 1,139 deaths on October 7—now stands at nearly 55,000, the majority of them women and children. Where are those “concrete actions,” Mr. Starmer, Mr. Macron—Mr. Carney? As you convene for your G7 summit in Kananaskis, the world awaits.
Are you prepared to face down Donald Trump, who has thrown his full support behind Israel and is salivating at the prospect of America rebuilding an ethnically cleansed Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East”?
Three weeks have now passed since your declaration of intent, and so far we have seen nothing but words.
It’s only words
In the contentious New Yorker article mentioned earlier, Zadie Smith’s intent was to draw attention to “the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so.”
Under other circumstances, I would be the first to agree that in this case as in others, “language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction”:
It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately.
But these are not other circumstances. And however belatedly, more people like Zadie Smith—and even a few politicians—may be waking up to that fact. This is not a time for nuance.
Ta-Nehisi Coates probably said it best when, commenting on the part played by Biden’s Gaza policy in Kamala Harris’s electoral defeat by Donald Trump, he argued:
We are at a moment right now where people are asking themselves why can’t the Democratic Party defend [Trump’s] assault on democracy… and I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.
The “labyrinthine” complexity of the Israel-Palestine conflict—whose century-long history includes plentiful atrocities on both sides—cannot be used to obscure the simple moral truth that lies at the foundation of all international humanitarian law.
It is necessary to condemn war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide wherever and whenever they occur—irrespective of the identity of their perpetrators or the justice of the causes in whose name they are committed.
If we forget this, the genocide in Gaza will point the way to a future without law for the whole of humanity, and Western democracies’ selfishness, cowardice, and indifference will have let it.
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.