Gaza: A New Height in Western Hypocrisy — Intolerable in a Civilised World.

As Gaza endures systematic starvation and mass killings, it exposes the moral collapse of the West. This silence, broken only by a few voices like Spain, Ireland, and Brazil.

Even mainstream media no longer hides the reality unfolding in Gaza: starvation by design, provoked and orchestrated by Israel, constitutes a war crime. Deliberate killings of civilians are ongoing. As reported by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, Israeli soldiers have testified that they received direct orders from commanders to shoot unarmed, starving civilians attempting to reach food distribution points. These are not isolated incidents—they form part of a systematic pattern of extermination.

This situation fuels despair and fury among Palestinian youth. It also deepens the widespread loss of faith in international institutions, and in countries that once claimed to stand for human rights and international law, such as the European Union and the United States. Many Palestinians cannot comprehend how the so-called guardians of the international legal order have abandoned their principles and instead aligned themselves with a state that enforces apartheid, routinely employs state terror, and enables settler violence with the full support of its police and military. It is surreal to see Ursula van der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, the German leaders, Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, and sometimes Macron, among others, being proud in supporting a genocide. In Germany, they jail those who dare to criticise Israel, and scholars lose their positions. This also happened to me at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. And the genocide supporters (the Rector, head of Faculty, and today's rector, the head of the department, are not yet in prison).

In the West Bank, settler-colonial violence is a daily reality: homes, cars, and fields are set ablaze; livestock is stolen or killed; water sources are poisoned—all with impunity, with the support of the IDF. In Gaza, we are witnessing an unfolding genocide. And yet, no major international organisation, nor any leading democratic nation, has issued more than the faintest, timid words of condemnation—with the notable exceptions of Spain and Ireland. In stark contrast, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, and described what is happening in Gaza as a new Holocaust.

Extract of a CBS interview with Clarissa Ward of CNN:

Stephen: “You’ve done extensive reporting for the Middle East for years. Do you have a sense of how that region now views the United States?”

Clarissa: “They remember the invasion of Iraq, they remember the hundreds of thousands of people and the wave of terror and sectarianism and chaos that was unleashed as a result of that. Iran is not the big issue right now in this region with America — Gaza is what is tearing people apart, is what is fueling hatred. Every day people come up to me, Stephen, and they say ‘Are they not seeing what we’re seeing? Are they not seeing this moonscape? Are they not seeing tens of thousands killed, children starved, the largest cohort of child amputees in the history of modern warfare? Are they not seeing this?’ And it has eroded their faith in international institutions, in international humanitarian law, and any notion that the US is some kind of a guiding light, or a beacon of human rights — and that really is a far more animating issue to most people in the Middle East right now, than this latest round of hostitlies with Iran.”

Stephen: “I assume not simply because the United States is not living up to its principles of human rights but because we’re overtly supporting the Israeli military and given them the equipment to carry out this military action in Gaza.”

Clarissa: “We’re paying for the weapons, and we’re giving them cover. And that is something that people really in this region cannot get their head around, cannot forgive, and cannot fathom.”