Defending the Indefensible

In a blistering parliamentary speech, MP Zarah Sultana — who subsequently resigned from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and is poised to form a new anti-war Left party alongside former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — denounced the criminalization of an activist network whose ​“true offense” was exposing ​“the blood-soaked ties between this government and the genocidal Israeli apartheid state.” Sultana also decried the fact that Palestine Action was banned alongside two far-right, white supremacist organizations explicitly committed to violence against civilians: the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement. In the House of Lords, Labour peer and former anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain condemned how the new ban equated pro-Palestine protesters with ISIS and Al-Qaida — a comparison he called ​“intellectually bankrupt, politically unprincipled and morally wrong.”

The British ban on Palestine Action is the latest demonstration of a sustained wave of repression against Palestine solidarity, from detentions and deportation proceedings in the United States to vicious policing of protest in Germany. These zero-tolerance policies against peaceful activism — or mere speech — convey a stark truth of contemporary politics: that in the face of the Gaza genocide, Western governments are treating any dissent as a threat to national security while granting Israel carte blanche, and unending material support, for its countless violations of international law. In the process, they have turned the already threadbare framework of the ​“rules-based international order” into a grim charade and created a vast gulf between foreign policy and public sentiment.

Notwithstanding mainstream media contortions to euphemize carnage and excuse Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, sympathy for Israel is cratering in Europe and even the U.S., where a majority of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel.

Roughly two weeks before Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran, the Financial Times remarked on the changing tides in Western support for Israel, citing the European Union reviewing its association agreement with Israel, Britain pausing trade talks, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund blacklisting an Israeli company and threats of sanctions from France, the UK and Canada. The FT even backed EU sanctions against Israel, modeled after those levied on Russia for its war on Ukraine. The UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway imposed additional sanctions this June, though only on far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, for their ​“incitements of violence against Palestinian communities” and ​“acts of violence by extremist Israeli settlers” in the West Bank — as if violence against Palestinians is the result of a few bad apples, rather than state policy and practice.

But while these gestures of censure were feeble at best — particularly coming, as they did, amid Israel’s ongoing bombing, forced starvation and ​“aid massacres” in Gaza — they were upended by Israel’s attack on Iran on June 13. Multiple Western leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, responded to the news with the familiar, robotic refrain that Israel has the ​“right to defend itself” (happily ignoring that ​“preventive attacks” are illegal under the United Nations Charter).

At their annual summit in Canada, the G7 countries released a similar statement, transmuting Israel’s crime of aggression into ​“self defense,” while adding, ​“Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror” — a claim easily refuted by international legal rulings, or by body counts alone.

As UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese bitingly observed: ​“On the day Israel, unprovoked, has attacked Iran, killing 80 people, the president of a major European power finally admits that in the Middle East, Israel, and only Israel, has the right to defend itself.” On July 9, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against Albanese for leading a ​“campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel.”

To explain the glaring double standards, it’s not enough to cite the West’s post-Holocaust commitment to Israeli security (which Germany treats as a foundational ​“reason of state”), solidarity between settler-colonial states or the civilizational narrative of Israel as the West’s spearhead in the Arab world. German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz gave some of the deeper rationale away when he declared that in attacking Iran, Israel was doing ​“our dirty work.” It’s a sentiment Joe Biden once voiced in a more imaginative vein, when he declared, ​“Were there no Israel, America would have to invent one.”

Notwithstanding occasional notes of concern, Western leaders show no sign of curbing Israel’s genocidal and expansionist designs. International Court of Justice rulings are treated as dead letter while politicians and mainstream media steadfastly ignore the fact that Netanyahu is a wanted war criminal. (Though it was heartening to see Zohran Mamdani, who vowed to arrest Netanyahu if he steps foot in New York City, trounce former New York state governor — and Netanyahu legal defense team member—Andrew Cuomo, in the city’s recent Democratic mayoral primary.) While in Gaza food distribution sites have been turned into kill zones and Likud ministers nonchalantly demand the full annexation of the West Bank, the EU, having finally declared Israel in breach of its human rights clause, is predictably sinking into a procedural morass as it discusses possible measures with no urgency or conviction whatsoever.

Similarly, Canada’s Liberal government, having nominally committed to supporting a ceasefire and pausing deals for weapons systems that could be used in Gaza, recently approved new military contracts with Israel for 37.2 million Canadian dollars. And Prime Minister Mark Carney, having caved to President Donald Trump’s demand that all NATO countries increase military spending, has one-upped his predecessor’s self-description as ​“a Zionist,” by declaring that lasting peace will only come with the emergence of ​“a Zionist, if you will, Palestinian state.”

Even in countries where leaders have voiced starker criticism, like Spain, very little concrete action has been taken to hamper the foundations of Israel’s genocidal violence, with socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government failing to enact a two-way arms embargo and Spanish ports still being used shipments to ship weapons to Israel.

From day one, the United States has been the key material and ideological backer of Israel’s genocide. Though the Biden administration quickly realized that Netanyahu’s government was committed to ​“killing and destroying for the sake of killing and destroying,” as senior Biden aide Ilan Goldenberg put it, all talk of ​“red lines” was ultimately empty pantomime. Trump’s ​“Gaza plan” has only added another garish dimension to a ghoulish continuation policy of total impunity.

But other Western powers have played a critical role in perpetuating Gaza’s destruction, not just by prioritizing Israel’s ​“self defense” over any legal and humanitarian considerations but also through toothless fact-finding inquiries, hollow invocations of the two-state solution and vacuous talk of future negotiated settlements.

Rather than offering a horizon of peace, ceasefire negotiations — such as those ongoing, again, right now — become merely another modality of perpetual war through which Israel hopes ​“to exhaust global outrage the way it hopes to exhaust Palestinian resistance: through delay, confusion, the normalization of collapse, and of course, through coercion by the weaponization of antisemitism,” as Palestinian political analyst Abdaljawad Omar has observed.

Or, as Knesset member Tzippy Scott boasted on Israeli television this May, ​“Everyone got used to the idea that you can kill 100 Gazans in one night … and nobody in the world cares.” 

By yoking themselves to a state that so enthusiastically celebrates its flouting of international law, Western governments have drastically undermined their moral legitimacy, not least among younger generations. As the legal scholar Brenna Bhandar has observed, the impunity that Israel enjoys presages a ​“new world (dis)order” which once again brings raw colonial and imperial violence to the forefront of international politics. 

In refusing to countenance any action that might actually mitigate Israel’s violence, Western powers are not only colluding in genocide, but have revealed the rotten foundations of a ​“liberal international order” for which ​“never again” is not a universal call to protect humanity, but the exclusive property of one state. In the process, language has been twisted beyond recognition: mercenaries slaughtering the starving call themselves the ​“Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”; wars of aggression become ​“self defense”; and the only acceptable form of Palestinian self-determination must call itself ​“Zionist.”

These days, it seems as if they can’t even be bothered to manufacture consent, resorting instead to censorship, legislative overreach and, increasingly, police repression. Everywhere, people are being asked not to believe their eyes and to accept, for instance, that Israel’s military should be protected by hate speech legislation, while octogenarian priests are dangerous terrorist sympathizers. 

As we know from the long aftermath of the Iraq war, such corruption and complicity by Western ​“democratic” elites will reverberate for years to come.