Why the West can't see the genocide it enables

Photo: European Parliament/Flickr/EP © CC-BY-4.0. Composite: Ariana Yekrangi.

Are you watching? Or have the architects of this slaughter successfully dulled your senses? Israel is executing a mass murder of Palestinians before our eyes — an extermination campaign broadcast globally, yet met with the deliberate silence and material support of its European and American patrons. Executed by Israeli soldiers with the detachment of a video game, the assault has transformed the very texture of Gaza — entire neighbourhoods pulverised into vast fields of debris, visible even from space.

Children — children — are incinerated in tents. The population is systematically starved. The massacre proceeds openly, yet it is dismissed as an unavoidable static of “war” by those invested in the outcome.

Instead, we hear threadbare claims of “self-defence” from a Western political class steeped in imperial privilege, comfortable in the capitals that once looted the world. Observe their averted gazes, their incoherent justifications. This is not ignorance; it is cultivated blindness, a strategic opacity fostered over decades to conceal their own histories of conquest and atrocity behind a carefully constructed myth of inherent righteousness.

Let’s dispense with the spineless euphemisms: the world has failed to prevent genocide in Gaza. This isn’t a reckless accusation—it’s a grave, evidence-backed conclusion reached by some of the most authoritative voices on genocide, international law and the brutal facts on the ground.

“Israel is committing genocide and it must be stopped now,” declares the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, named after the very man who coined the term. Amnesty International’s detailed reporting reaches a similar finding, asserting “sufficient basis to conclude that Israel … committed and is committing genocide,” and calling on governments to abandon inaction for “strong and sustained international action.”

Further substantiating these conclusions is UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese’s report, Anatomy of Genocide. It dissects the methodology, finding Israel has “intentionally distorted jus in bello principles [the laws governing conduct within war] subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimise genocidal violence against the Palestinian people”.

Albanese’s findings reflect a broader consensus. Leading Palestinian human rights organisations like Al-Haq (alongside Al Mezan, PCHR and Addameer), prominent legal groups such as the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights and international bodies including the International Federation for Human Rights, have similarly concluded or formally asserted that Israel’s actions constitute genocide or meet the threshold under the Genocide Convention.

The basis for these stark conclusions lies in meticulous documentation of Israel’s specific methods. Human Rights Watch (HRW), for instance, details how Israeli authorities systematically deprived Palestinians of water essential for survival by cutting off piped water, destroying water and sanitation infrastructure, blocking electricity, fuel and critical supplies. HRW concludes that these deliberate actions, denying the minimum necessary for life, amount to the “crime against humanity of extermination” and “an act of genocide”.

In March 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry report corroborates this pattern of destruction, exposing Israel’s systematic deployment of sexual and gender-based violence “as a strategy of war… to dominate and destroy the Palestinian people”. The report identifies the deliberate “destruction… [of] reproductive capacity” as fulfilling criteria for “two categories of genocidal acts” under international law. Specific incidents documented by the Commission include targeted sniper killings of women and girls, rape and sexual torture of detainees (such as beatings of genitals or assaults with objects), the forced public stripping of Palestinian men and children filmed by soldiers and sexual assaults by settlers, sometimes occurring alongside Israeli soldiers.

Even leading Israeli scholars, including respected historians of the Holocaust and genocide, confront the unbearable truth, analysing the genocidal mania gripping Israeli society. Historian Omer Bartov writes: “The impression that I got [from Israel] was consistent … we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza.” Bartov himself acknowledges that genocide can no longer be denied. His colleague, Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, voices a similarly painful reckoning. “It’s so difficult and painful to admit it,” he says, “but… we can no longer avoid this conclusion… Jewish history will be henceforth stained. Israel is undoubtedly committing genocide.”

Long before many of these recent reports put the stark reality in black and white – and against the backdrop of decades of meticulously documented Israeli crimes detailed in countless human rights reports that gathered dust, wilfully ignored by the West – South Africa took the unprecedented step of dragging Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Their 80-page legal indictment, buttressed by a staggering 574 footnotes referencing primarily UN institutions and experts, laid bare the genocidal intent woven into Israeli state policy. As lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi stated bluntly to the court: “The language of systemic dehumanisation is evident here… Genocidal utterances are therefore not out in the fringes. They are embodied in [Israeli] state policy.”

Yet even this body, the UN’s highest court, often renders judgment only long after the facts on the ground have made the crime undeniable – acting too late to fulfil the primary, urgent purpose mandated by the very Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (known as the Genocide Convention): PREVENTION.

Despite this inherent institutional failing, the ICJ found South Africa’s case horrifyingly plausible, issuing binding provisional measures against Israel – a critical legal milestone confirming the terrifying reality. The evidence now forms an irrefutable indictment.

This is extermination executed with bureaucratic coldness, fuelled by racist bile and crucially, underwritten by the weapons, cash and diplomatic shields eagerly provided by Israel’s Western patrons — primarily the US, the UK, Canada and Germany. Is it mere coincidence that these nations, architects of their own genocides for which true accountability remains elusive, now stand as primary enablers of Israel’s?

Given their own legacies of unpunished mass violence, how hollow does their invocation of “never again” ring? Are Palestinians somehow unworthy of the universal condemnation once reserved — we were told — for the crimes of Nazis? The answer is found in a deliberately broken moral compass wielded by a Western political class whose sense of justice is pathologically selective.

Their own history is a meticulously curated, whitewashed highlight reel — a self-serving fantasy of benevolent intervention, ruthlessly scrubbed clean of the centuries of their actual record: industrial-scale slaughter, relentless land theft and rapacious resource plunder.

The blood-soaked foundations of the global order they command are conveniently airbrushed from memory, buried under hollow monuments to their imagined virtue. It’s a grotesque performance of morality, cynically staged directly atop the countless mass graves their empires dug across the globe — a stage built from bones, washed in denial.

However, the Global South’s unwavering, lived memory causes this meticulously produced ignorance to collapse. Ask Iranians about the CIA/MI6 coup in 1953 that strangled their democracy for oil. Ask them, too, about the cynical arming of Saddam Hussein, a ploy that bled a generation dry in a devastating war deliberately fuelled by Western interests.

Ask Iraqis, who are still sifting through the debris of an invasion founded on blatant lies, about the deliberate, systematic torture that took place inside Abu Ghraib’s walls and the flaming hellfire that rained down on Fallujah. Ask the Afghans, who have been viewed as nothing more than abandoned toys in decades of imperial power struggles. Ask the Vietnamese, whose elders still carry the eerie memory of My Lai, whose land still has the permanent, poisonous scars of Agent Orange. Ask the people of Chile, whose democratic aspirations were cruelly dashed by a dictatorship supported by the United States. Ask the Congolese, who have been left permanently scarred by Leopold’s reign of terror and the continuous theft of their riches, which Western capitals have approved.

Ask the Algerians. The Kenyans. The Indians. The list stretches across continents and generations. And above all, ask the Palestinians themselves, condemned to live the perpetual Nakba — the catastrophe of 1948, the rolling ethnic cleansing that inexorably paved the way for this very moment.

We recognise the blueprint instantly — the domination, the dispossession, the relentless dehumanisation — because this exact playbook was refined, again and again, on our lives and our lands.

This global reckoning with imperial history stands in stark contrast to the narrative crafted in the West, where history in the Middle East is often presented as beginning on October 7th, 2023. But that date was no genesis — it was a pretext, cynically seized by Israel in its ongoing campaign to solve the Gaza question once and for all. This exterminationist agenda drives the annihilation and ethnic cleansing of occupied Palestine.

It is articulated with chilling clarity by the Israeli political class – including President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant (the latter two now sought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for starvation and other crimes against humanity). It is justified by lurid, manufactured fictions about Hamas monstrosity and, most grotesquely, by ludicrously cynical invocations of a “repeated Holocaust”. It is, in essence, the cold, calculated execution of a genocide masked by the obscene pretence of preventing one.

The lever for this obscene pretence is rooted in a uniquely European horror: the Shoah, itself born from Europe’s own ancient, toxic antisemitism. Let’s be unequivocally clear: European guilt for the industrialised slaughter of its Jewish populations is Europe’s alone to bear. It is not a blank cheque for Israel, to be endlessly cashed in Palestinian lives and limbs.

Crucially, this pretence operates alongside the apparatus of complicity, supercharged by decades of Western support for Israeli atrocities, now operating with blatant political ferocity. While Western complicity has always provided cover and advanced weaponry for Israel’s crimes, the current support transcends mere facilitation.

Even as the stench of rotting flesh and cordite hung heavy over the ruins of Gaza, we watched the blatant pilgrimage of European leaders hurrying to kiss the ring of the butchers in Tel Aviv.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the Netherland’s Mark Rutte and Austria’s Karl Nehammer led the first wave, rushing to pledge allegiance.

High-level endorsements provided crucial political cover. At the ICJ, Israeli state attorneys eagerly cited European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s immediate, unconditional blank check for Israel’s “right to defend itself” to justify their genocidal onslaught. Her comments, harking back to colonial haughtiness, unmistakably provided an EU green light for the initial carpet-bombing and the engineered starvation. Symbolic gestures, like Austria prominently flying the Israeli flag from government buildings, amplified this message while Palestinian children were being systematically shot, blown apart, starved or crushed beneath rubble.

This political alignment translated directly into material support for the slaughter. Germany dramatically increased military sales to Israel after October 7th. The Netherlands continued supplying critical F-35 fighter jet parts despite court challenges. Finland’s President defiantly defended multi-billion euro deals for Israeli weapon systems, pointedly refusing alongside neighbours to recognise Palestine. The UK went further, deploying military surveillance flights over Gaza, directly embedding itself in the assault.

After 17 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the fact that the EU refuses to name Israel, condemn air strikes wiping out entire families or condemn Israel’s blocking of vital humanitarian aid is extraordinary. Eve Geddie, Director of Amnesty International EU

When the ICC prosecutor finally sought arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, the European reaction exposed deep-seated impunity. Greece’s Prime Minister Mitsotakis rushed to meet the wanted premier reaffirming their “strategic partnership” and fortifying military ties. In Hungary, Viktor Orban – whose government, along with the Czech Republic, consistently voted against UN ceasefire resolutions – hosted Netanyahu and announced withdrawal from the ICC to shield him from arrest. This brobdingnagian contempt for international law was met only with performative wrist-slaps from Brussels. Meanwhile, France repeatedly allowed Netanyahu’s private jet safe passage through its airspace, granting refuge to the architect of famine while Palestinians starved below.

The complicity extended to actively undermining vital aid and international bodies. Switzerland joined Germany, France, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and numerous others in suspending crucial funding to UNRWA based on unsubstantiated Israeli allegations, directly strangling the primary aid lifeline for starving Gazans at a critical moment. Simultaneously, UN bodies and human rights officials based in Geneva attempting to document Israeli war crimes faced coordinated smear campaigns and relentless diplomatic pressure, often spearheaded or amplified by these same European states desperate to suppress uncomfortable truths.

While European leaders offer diplomatic cover, they increasingly mirror the United States in repressing domestic dissent against genocide. In Germany — historically entangled in three genocides: the Herero and Namaqua, the Holocaust, and now its complicity in Gaza — peaceful protest is met with police violence, censorship and legal persecution. Activists, including German and other EU citizens, are harassed, beaten, dragged through the courts, and banned from public spaces simply for opposing mass murder, even as Berlin funnels arms to the perpetrators.

This grotesque pattern — shielding aggressors, criminalising solidarity and silencing dissent — is most brazenly exemplified by the US, where criticism of Israel is increasingly equated with hate speech, exposing a Western order deeply bound to colonial violence and committed to defending its client state at all costs.

This deadly choreography unfolds in lockstep with the establishment media — the echo chamber of empire — where power dictates the script and journalists play the role of courtiers. Watch as they obediently echo propaganda crafted by the architects of violence, describing Israeli assaults with clinically detached phrasing like “clashes, incidents or escalations”. They avoid calling these actions what mounting evidence suggests they are. Passive constructions — “people died,” “homes were destroyed” — abound, erasing the perpetrator. Israel vanishes from the narrative, while any form of Palestinian resistance is aggressively named and condemned.

Equally insidious is the systematic decontextualisation. Israeli violence is framed as “retaliation” for October 7th, divorced from decades of occupation, settler-colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the 17-year Gaza siege. This promotes a false equivalence — a “cycle of violence” — suggesting parity between coloniser and colonised.

As a result Palestinian histories are erased. Their humanity is rendered invisible, even in death. When the UN reports that Israeli forces executed paramedics and dumped their bodies into mass graves with hands bound those victims remain nameless, faceless and without a backstory. Contrast that with Western media’s treatment of an Israeli soldier captured in combat. Despite being a legitimate prisoner of war under international law, she is branded a “hostage,” and her story is told with empathy and detail. This is how you construct a false narrative that elevates the occupier’s suffering while diminishing the systemic extermination of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Palestinian children abducted, tortured and imprisoned by the IDF within Israel’s apartheid military court system are labelled “security detainees,” stripped even of basic recognition as prisoners deserving due process. Language itself becomes a weapon: Israeli children are children; Palestinian children become “teenagers” (Sky News), “minors” (NYT, BBC, CNN, Reuters), “persons under 18” (Guardian), “combatants, young lady or relatives of militants” (AP) – or mislabelled as adults to obscure their murder and imprisonment.

This is not journalism. It is, instead, the fulfilment of mainstream media’s true function: to maintain the fog of empire. Through selective language and omissions, they create a passive public, one that watches live-streamed slaughter with dulled senses, trained to perceive genocide as an unfortunate but necessary tragedy. Inconvenient truths are buried — the ICJ’s plausible genocide ruling, the ICC arrest warrents, UN evidence of genocide, the targeted killing of Palestinian journalists and the obliteration of Gaza’s universities, a campaign of scholasticide. To expect truth from billionaire-owned media, tied to empire and Zionist lobbying, isn’t just naive; it’s strategic delusion.

Let there be no mistake and no misplaced talk of reconciliation while the rubble still smokes and the mass graves are yet uncounted. The complicity roars too loudly. Across our societies, the architects of this horror — and the slimy apologists who gave Israeli propaganda credibility — must face a reckoning. Every politician who voted for arms shipments, every diplomat who wielded a veto, every journalist and media outlet that sanitised the slaughter, every academic who provided intellectual cover — their names belong etched onto the ledger of this genocide. For the Israeli perpetrators and the society that cheered them on, insulated by impunity and Western arms, there can be no escape from the verdict of history.

Israel’s security was built on extermination and their “nation” is defined by the erasure of another. So let Israeli genocidaires and their cheerleaders feel afraid abroad, let them feel the full, crushing weight of their crimes, the unbearable shame that history reserves for those who choose genocide. The global South demands nothing less than absolute justice. There is pride in this refusal, strength in this condemnation.

The crime screams, and we will not be silenced until accountability is absolute and undeniable.

This time, we owe it to humanity to never forgive and never forget.