Category: politics

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Canadian Dimension, Oct 2, 2025

United States envoy Morgan Ortagus casts the lone veto against a UN Security Council draft resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire, aid access, and hostage release. The measure, supported by 14 members, failed due to the US veto. Photo by Laura Jarriel/United Nations.

It will soon be two years since Hamas launched its “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack on southern Israel. Israel’s retaliatory “war” has since reduced Gaza to an uninhabitable wasteland and caused—at a very conservative minimum—more than 66,000 Palestinian deaths, with some 83 percent of them, according to Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) data, being civilians. Since Israel broke its January ceasefire agreement and resumed its offensive in March, 15 of every 16 out of the 16,000 Palestinians the IDF has killed have been civilians.

In the aftermath of October 7 there was enormous support for Israel, especially in the West. But as the “war” ground on, with no apparent end in sight and ever-mounting civilian casualties, the tide of Western public opinion turned. Recent pressure led several Western governments to reluctantly berate Israel for its “intolerable and unacceptable” and “utterly reckless and appalling” actions—while doing precious little to stop them.

Despite the chorus of condemnation, we have seen nothing approaching the battery of sanctions that played such a large part in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa, not to mention the swingeing economic, political, and cultural sanctions imposed on Vladimir Putin’s Russia immediately following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

This paralysis on the part of the “international community” is remarkable, given that what is at issue is increasingly being recognized as a genocide—the worst of all crimes under international humanitarian law. But it is not, perhaps, surprising. Given their previous support for Israel, not to mention their vulnerability to economic bullying by Trump’s US, Western leaders found themselves tossed on the horns of an impossible dilemma.

The genocide dilemma

As far back as January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a “plausible risk” of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take several measures to avert this outcome. At that point the official death toll stood at 27,500—less than half of what it is now. Israel ignored these and further ICJ orders of March and May 2024.

It will likely be years before the ICJ reaches a final verdict on whether or not Israel is guilty of genocide. The world’s highest court on war crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has however already issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for using “starvation as a method of warfare” and other war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On September 16, 2025, an authoritative new report by a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, based on two years of investigation, concluded that:

Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.


Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights, the University Network for Human Rights, Médecins Sans Frontières, the Israeli groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, as well as some of the world’s leading genocide and Holocaust historians like Israeli scholars Raz Segal and Omer Bartov, have all come to the same conclusion.

It takes some chutzpah to contend that all of these are part of some global antisemitic conspiracy to discredit Israel. Denying the genocide—the US position—is becoming less and less credible, while refusing to take a stance until the final ICJ verdict is in, which the British and Canadian governments are doing, simply looks evasive.

The problem for Western politicians is that the 1948 Genocide Convention—to which all members of the G7 apart from Japan are parties, as is Israel—requires them not only to refrain from committing genocide themselves, but “to prevent and to punish” genocide “whether [its perpetrators] are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”

The argument made by Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, and others against the ICC warrants that “there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas“ has no standing in international law. A war crime is a war crime and a genocide is a genocide, no matter who is committing it, guerrilla “terrorists” or the elected leaders of a democratic nation state.

Complicating things further, “complicity in genocide” is also a punishable offense. If Israel is committing genocide, then it is a genocide in which Western governments have been complicit throughout the last two years, by supplying arms, providing diplomatic cover, ignoring their own intelligence assessments that Israel has been obstructing aid, and suppressing protest. No wonder some politicians are beginning to get cold feet.

A rift in the West?

On September 18 all members of the UN Security Council except the United States voted to adopt a resolution calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, and for Israel to immediately and unconditionally lift all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid. The US vetoed the measure. This is the sixth time in the last two years that the US has (ab)used its veto power to block a ceasefire in Gaza.

Though France and the UK voted for the resolution, no Western government has yet been prepared to defy America and trigger the nuclear option, which would be to put a United for Peace resolution to the General Assembly. If passed by a two-thirds majority, this would override any Security Council veto and could pave the way for armed UN intervention in Gaza. This procedure was invoked 13 times between 1951 and 2022.

There were nevertheless straws in the wind suggesting that some Western governments were more prepared to risk Israeli and (more importantly) US wrath and take baby steps toward pressuring Israel to end its genocide than at any time during the present “war”—if only to retrospectively cover their collective asses and avoid indictments from the ICC.

The EU Commission has finally proposed to strip Israeli goods of privileged access to European markets, with new tariffs imposed on billions of euros of exports, as well as sanctioning extremist individual Israeli ministers—though such a measure may still not pass, given continuing support for Israel by Germany and some other EU states.

Recognition of Palestine—an empty gesture?

Canada, the UK, Australia, France, and several other Western countries announced with great fanfare at the 80th UN General Assembly session in September in New York—or the day before it, “out of respect for the Jewish new year”—that they were recognizing the State of Palestine. They were very late to the party. One hundred and forty seven states had recognized Palestine prior to their move, including Spain, Ireland, Norway, and Slovenia in 2024.

While it would be wrong to dismiss the legal significance of recognition out of hand, in the absence of other measures it will likely have limited practical impact on the ground. That does not mean it is insignificant. It underlines the tensions between the US and some of its most important Western allies (as well as splits within Europe itself).

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was refreshingly candid about why his government was changing tack:

The current Israeli government is working methodically to prevent the prospect of a Palestinian state from ever being established. It has pursued an unrelenting policy of settlement expansion in the West Bank, which is illegal under international law. Its sustained assault in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced well over one million people, and caused a devastating and preventable famine in violation of international law. It is now the avowed policy of the current Israeli government that ‘there will be no Palestinian state’.


Netanyahu responded with predictable fury—and in the process confirmed that Carney’s charges were amply justified:

I have a clear message to those leaders who are recognizing a Palestinian state after the horrendous October 7 massacre: You are rewarding terror with an enormous prize.

And I have another message for you: It’s not going to happen. There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River.

For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad.

We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank], and we will continue on this path.


In the face of such clarity on the part of Israel, we have to ask why Western leaders are still peddling the fantasy of a “two-state solution” at all. The suspicion must be that it is yet another evasion, designed to cover up their unwillingness to tackle the role played by ethnic cleansing and genocide in Israel’s Zionist project head on.

Trumpery at the UN

The US, by contrast, has made its opposition to recognizing Palestine at this point in time crystal clear. Interviewed recently by Tony Dokoupil of CBS Mornings, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio insultingly dismissed recognition as “almost a vanity project for a couple of these world leaders who want to be relevant, but it really makes no difference.”

In between gratuitously insulting America’s Western allies (“I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law”) and trumpeting his own imaginary achievements (“I have ended seven unendable wars… Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements”), Trump found time to briefly mention Gaza in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 23.

His concern was not the ongoing genocide:

Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body [the UN] is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities. This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including October 7th…


Three days later, in his own address to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu accused Carney and company of capitulating “under pressure of a biased media, radical Islamist constituencies, and antisemitic mobs.”

The Israeli prime minister said little that did not repeat what he had told the same body in 2023 and 2024. What was different this time was that Netanyahu’s plane was forced to take a circuitous route to New York in order to avoid the airspace of countries that were legally bound to enforce the ICC arrest warrant. And he spoke to a largely empty hall.

On his entry, over 100 delegates from over 50 countries walked out in protest. Of those that remained, the UK and even the US filled their seats with junior staff instead of senior diplomats. The majority of those who left were from the Global South.

Sadly, Canada’s Ambassador Bob Rae remained seated. It was, he explained to CTV News, his job.

Trump’s “peace plan”

This is the background against which, on September 29, Trump and Netanyahu jointly unveiled the latest US “peace plan” at a White House press conference. Netanyahu had reportedly made several last-minute changes to the draft drawn up by Trump’s team, all to Israel’s advantage.

The 20-point plan calls for immediate suspension of all military operations, followed by the release of all Israeli captives within a 72-hour period. Israel will then release “250 life sentence prisoners plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after Oct. 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context.”

This is only a fraction of more than 10,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails, 3,600 of whom are held without charge or trial in “administrative detention”—many more hostages, as they are, than the 251 Israelis captured by Hamas in the October 7 attack.

It is grim testimony to the disproportionality of this “war” that “For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.”

After the hostages are released, an amnesty will be extended to Hamas members who “commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons,” while any who wish to leave Gaza “will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.” Hamas will disarm and “all military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt.” Hamas and other factions “agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.”

Once the agreement has been accepted, full aid “will proceed without interference from the two parties through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent,” as well as unspecified third parties (likely a reference to the US-based private so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians queuing for food).

Though this provision is likely to play badly in Israel, which has banned the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA from operating within its boundaries, this is is the only role envisaged for the UN in the entire document.

The plan stipulates that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza” and promises that “No one will be forced to leave Gaza,” while “those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.” As “a temporary International Stabilization Force” put together by “The United States… with Arab and international partners” trains “vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza,” the IDF will gradually withdraw from the Strip to a perimeter “security zone.”

Gaza will meantime be governed by “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee… of qualified Palestinians and international experts, with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body… headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of State… including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.”

This “Board of Peace” will “set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program… and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”

As Patrick Wintour has perceptively noted in the Guardian, though it is not explicitly stated in the document, this “reform program” requires that the Palestinian Authority ends its participation in legal proceedings against Israel at the ICJ and ICC. (The text refers to the reform programme “as outlined in various proposals, including president Trump’s peace plan in 2020,” and the latter demands this.)

The Board of Peace will oversee a “Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza”—is Trump’s dream of a “Riviera of the Middle East” about to come true?—and “A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.”

Surrender or annihilation

It is significant that Hamas—whose negotiators Israel had attempted to assassinate in a September 9 air strike on Qatar—was not involved in drafting the plan or even provided with an advance copy. Palestinians are being presented with an ultimatum reminiscent of the one the Germans gave Rotterdam in 1940: surrender or your city will be destroyed.

And indeed, even while Hamas is considering the plan—for which Trump has demanded their answer “within three or four days”—Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz has issued a “final warning” on October 1 that “This is the last opportunity for Gaza residents who wish to do so to move south and leave Hamas operatives isolated in Gaza City,” making clear that “Those who remain… will be considered terrorists and terrorist supporters.”

If the Palestinians reject the plan, then in Donald Trump’s words at the White House press conference:

Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas.

But I hope that we’re going to have a deal for peace, and if Hamas rejects the deal… Bibi, you’d have our full backing to do what you would have to do.


Netanyahu added: “If Hamas rejects your plan, Mr President, or if they supposedly accept it and then do everything to counter it, then Israel will finish the job by itself. This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way, but it will be done.”

The only positives in the Trump plan for the Palestinians are that it offers a possible road to ending the genocide—as is desperately needed—without Israel annexing Gaza or expelling its people, as the extreme rightwing ministers in Netanyahu’s government have demanded. In his earlier musings on a “Riviera of the Middle East” Trump too had envisaged “cleaning out” all of the Palestinians.

But even these modest consolations for the loss of Palestinian lives, homes, and hopes over the last two years are very far from guaranteed.

The plan requires Hamas to hand over all of the Israeli hostages before any Palestinian prisoners are released and to disarm on the basis of promises of amnesty while the IDF remains in Gaza. The timetable for withdrawal, by contrast, is vague and dependent on transfer of power to new security forces whose composition remains undetermined.

Once Hamas has given up its hostages and its weapons, there is nothing to stop Israel from reneging on the agreement—as it previously did with the January 2025 ceasefire—and “finishing the job” of genocide and ethnic cleansing against a defenceless Gazan population.

It is scarcely reassuring that after his return from Washington, Netanyahu put out a video reassuring Israelis that “the IDF stays in the majority of the Strip.”

Asked in the same video whether he had agreed to a Palestinian state, the Israeli prime minister replied: “Not at all, and it is not written in the agreement. One thing was made clear: We will strongly oppose a Palestinian state.”

This gives the lie to Emmanuel Macron’s claim—echoed by among others Antony Albanese and Mark Carney—that the Trump plan provides a foundation “to build a lasting peace in the region, based on the two-state solution.”

If Bibi has anything to do with it, there will be no such thing. Ever.

The plan does in fact mention Palestinian statehood, only to locate it firmly in the realms of the never-never:

While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the P.A. [Palestinian Authority] reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people. (My emphasis)

A week is a long time in politics

Little more than a week ago, Canada, Australia, Britain, France, and other Western allies broke ranks with Israel and the US and recognized a Palestinian state. Mark Carney and others made it clear that they were taking this step, in part, to forestall Israel’s attempts—about which Benjamin Netanyahu has been quite open—to sabotage any possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Today, those same states are falling over backwards to lean on Hamas to accept a deal that disarms the Palestinian resistance, requires it to forgo any legal recourse for Israeli war crimes and/or genocide through the ICJ and ICC, hands Gaza over to an unelected foreign junta headed by Donald Trump and Tony Blair—onetime cheerleader of the Iraq War that left over a million Iraqis dead—to “redevelop,” and indefinitely postpones any prospect of Palestinian statehood. The word for this is betrayal.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen, and EU Foreign Minister Kaja Kallas, have all hastened to issue statements lauding “President Trump’s leadership” (Starmer) and hailing the plan as “the best immediate chance to end the war” (Kallas). “Elbows up” Mark Carney was the most sycophantic of them all, welcoming the deal as “historic.”

All agree that “Hamas has no choice but to immediately release all hostages and follow this plan,” with only Macron adding “I expect Israel to engage resolutely on this basis.”

One can almost hear the huge collective sigh of relief that went up in Western capitals as soon as the Trump plan was announced. The cracks are papered over, the delinquent allies are back in the US fold, and our craven leaders are off the genocide hook.

If Hamas fails to “seize this opportunity” (von der Leyen), we must infer, it has only itself to blame for the consequences.

The rewards of terror

Hamas senior leader Mahmoud Mardawi is bang on when he characterizes the Trump plan as offering “an end to this criminal war in exchange for ending the Palestinian people’s right to their state and their rights to their land, homeland, and holy sites.”

Mardawi is adamant that “no Palestinian will accept that,” but genocide is a powerful persuader.

Whether, out of desperation, Palestinians will buy this sordid “deal” remains to be seen. If they do, Israel gets its hostages back and it’s game over for the Palestinian resistance.

If they don’t, Israel will “finish the job” with full US backing and blame Hamas for forcing it to kill yet more Palestinian babies in order to ensure its security. Either way this is a win–win situation for Israel.

If, as Netanyahu says, a purely symbolic recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state is “an enormous prize” for the terror of Hamas’s October 7 attack, then how much greater are the rewards for the IDF’s two years of live-streamed genocide in Gaza?

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It’s elbows down as Mark Carney and Anita Anand throw Canadian ICC judge Kimberly Prost under the American bus

Canadian Dimension / August 31, 2025 

The flag of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Photo by Tony Webster/Wikimedia Commons.

A long time ago

“It was an extraordinary moment,” remembered Stephen Lewis, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988. “I was at the UN for four glorious years. I had never seen anything like it before, and I never saw anything like it afterwards…”

On October 23, 1985, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney gave an “electrifying” speech to the UN General Assembly, in which he not only denounced the evil of South African apartheid but promised Canada would to do everything in its power to end it:

Canada is ready, if there are no fundamental changes in South Africa, to invoke total sanctions against that country and its repressive regime. More than that, if there is no progress in the dismantling of apartheid, relations with South Africa may have to be severed absolutely.


At the next year’s Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver, Mulroney famously faced down British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over her opposition to sanctions, pointedly asking her whether she would respond in the same way “if she was dealing with a country with a population of 25 million whites that was ruled by four million blacks.”

Less than four years after Mulroney threw down the gauntlet at the UN, South African President F.W. de Klerk, under heavy international pressure from sanctions, began to dismantle the odious edifice of apartheid, legalizing the African National Congress and releasing its leader Nelson Mandela after 27 years imprisonment on February 11, 1990.

Mandela and de Klerk jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and Mandela went on to become South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994. That did not stop the US listing him as a “terrorist” until a few days before his 90th birthday in 2013, weeks before his death.

“On the 10th anniversary of our democracy,” Mandela wrote in a personal letter to Brian Mulroney in 2004:

one recalls the momentous time of our transition and remembers the people involved both within and outside South Africa. As prime minister of Canada and within the Commonwealth, you provided strong and principled leadership in the battle against apartheid. This was not a popular position in all quarters, but South Africans today acknowledge the importance of your contribution to our eventual liberation and success.

In a galaxy far, far away

A few months after his release, Mandela addressed the Canadian Parliament. Introducing his guest, Mulroney recalled “with pride, the stand taken by Canada’s prime minister, John Diefenbaker, at the Commonwealth Conference of 1961, which resulted in South Africa’s withdrawal from that body”:

Prime Minister Diefenbaker brought the Commonwealth to declare unequivocally that racial discrimination was totally contrary to its fundamental principles and that, if South Africa did not change, Mr. Diefenbaker said then South Africa must leave. He did so against some considerable opposition, but with the strong conviction and the certain knowledge that it was right. Mr. Diefenbaker’s action marked the beginning of international pressure on the apartheid regime.


The opposition came principally from the UK, together with Australia and New Zealand—countries that were once collectively referred to, alongside South Africa, Canada, and Newfoundland, as the British Empire’s “White Dominions.” The US was also not happy with Canada rocking the apartheid boat, since it saw South Africa as an important ally in the global fight against communism and the ANC as dangerously pro-communist. Not for the first or the last time in American history, geopolitics trumped any moral concerns.

Both Diefenbaker and Mulroney were Conservative politicians, and Mulroney had campaigned on a platform of improving relations with the US after the tensions of the Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau years—a promise that was to give us NAFTA. But this did not stop either of them from defying the United States when they believed it was necessary. They did not regard Canada’s membership of NATO (or the “Free World”) as requiring automatic deference to Washington’s priorities, or overlooking palpable evils like apartheid in the interests of maintaining a united Western front in the Cold War.

Canada’s Liberal governments, too, agreed on the need for an independent Canadian foreign policy, and were not afraid to break with the “elephant to the south” (as Pierre Trudeau characterized the US) when called for either. This might even be seen as a hallmark of Canadian identity—an essential one, if we must sleep next to the beast.

Diefenbaker refused to station US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil and gave only lukewarm backing to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. Lester Pearson criticized America’s Vietnam War (allegedly leading Lyndon B. Johnson to grab him by the lapels and yell “Don’t you come into my house and piss on my rug!”) and Pierre Trudeau provided sanctuary to American draft dodgers. Jean Chrétien declined to follow the US-led “Coalition of the Willing” into the Iraq War without approval by the UN.

This is not to say that Canada’s conduct on the world stage was above criticism. As Yves Engler and others have pointed out, Canada is a settler colony whose treatment of its Indigenous population—now as well as then—leaves much to be desired. Canada’s pivot to opposing apartheid in South Africa came late in the day, and its enforcement of sanctions was half-hearted. Thousands of Canadians were allowed to enlist in the US military and fought in Vietnam, while Canadian governments of both parties provided the US with multiple forms of covert support even while not officially joining the war effort.

All the same, there is a yawning moral gulf between Canadian policies then and now.

Canada and the ICC—then

The guiding principle of Canadian foreign policy during the latter part of the twentieth century was multilateralism. Governments of both parties portrayed Canada’s role in the world as advancing universal human rights rather than defending narrowly conceived national interests. Their preferred self-image was of Canada as a global peacemaker.

At times—as in the case of apartheid—the human rights agenda called for intervention, and the proper vehicle for this was international organizations like the UN, because they alone could alone provide legitimacy for such actions. The corollary was solid Canadian support for the institutional and legal framework established after the Second World War, above all the UN and its agencies, the Geneva Conventions, and international humanitarian law.

An important addition to this legal framework was the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established by the Rome Statute in 1998, in part in response to the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. The ICC was intended to be “an independent, permanent court of last resort with jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression.”

Canada played a “pivotal role”—I quote the Canadian government official website here—in the ICC’s foundation.

Canada chaired the “Like-Minded Group,” a coalition of states “that helped to motivate the wider international community to adopt the Rome Statute.” A senior Canadian diplomat, Philippe Kirsch, was chosen to chair the conference in Rome that negotiated and drafted the statute “under Canada’s leadership.” Kirsch was subsequently elected as an ICC judge in February 2003 and served as the ICC’s first president until 2009.

Canada became “the first country in the world to adopt comprehensive legislation implementing the Rome Statute” in the form of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act passed by the Canadian parliament in June 2002. This law for the first time “officially criminalizes genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes based on customary and conventional international law, including the Rome Statute.”

In December 2017 a second Canadian, Kimberly Prost, was elected an ICC judge for a nine-year term. Prost’s previous experience had included 18 years at Canada’s justice department and positions with the Commonwealth Secretariat and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. In 2006, she was appointed as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in a major trial related to the Srebrenica genocide.

Opposition to the ICC

Not all states welcomed the establishment of the ICC. At the end of the 1998 Rome conference, 120 countries (including almost all of the United States’ allies) voted in favor of the treaty. Seven countries opposed it—the US, China, Libya, Iraq, Qatar, Yemen, and Israel. Twenty-one countries abstained.

One hundred and twenty-five countries have signed and ratified the Rome Statute and as such are legally bound to co-operate with the court, including in arresting and transferring indicted persons or providing evidence and witnesses for ICC prosecutions.

All member states of the EU are ICC members (though Hungary has now signalled its intention to withdraw from the court), as are Australia, New Zealand, and all G7 members—apart from the United States. The US signed but did not ratify the Rome Statute under Bill Clinton, and John Bolton informed the UN in May 2003 on behalf of the George W. Bush administration that “the United States does not intend to become a party to the treaty,” and “has no legal obligations arising from its signature on December 31, 2000.”

Other states that have never signed up to and/or ratified the Rome Statute include Russia, China, and India—existing or aspiring regional superpowers who, like the US, are unwilling to let a multilateral court intrude on their sovereignty—and Israel. Among the reasons Israel gives for opting out is the ICC’s definition of “the transfer of parts of the civilian population of an occupying power into occupied territory” as a war crime.

Bush, Obama and Trump

US relations with the ICC remained fractious during the Bush administration. The American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA) passed in January 2002 prohibited US cooperation with the ICC, blocked US funding of the ICC, and required the US “to enter into agreements with all ICC signatory states to shield American citizens abroad from ICC jurisdiction” under pain of sanctions if they did not comply.

That same year, the US threatened to veto renewal of all UN peacekeeping missions unless its troops were granted immunity from ICC prosecution. It withdrew this demand in 2004, after pictures emerged of US troops abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

The Obama administration cooperated with the ICC in various ways, including supporting the UN Security Council’s referral of Libya to the court in 2011 and sharing intelligence on ICC-indicted fugitives. But it never ratified the treaty—or repealed ASPA.

The first Trump administration reverted to hostility. When the ICC prosecutor’s office requested in March 2019 to open a probe into possible war crimes in Afghanistan, the US responded by threatening to revoke visas for any ICC staff seeking to investigate not only Americans, but also Israelis and other US allies.

The ICC wished to “look into methods that the US military and CIA used to interrogate detainees” in Afghanistan, because:

There is reasonable basis to believe that, since May 2003, members of the US armed forces and the CIA have committed the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape and other forms of sexual violence pursuant to a policy approved by US authorities.


The US responded by taking the unprecedented step of individually sanctioning two top ICC officials, prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and head of jurisdiction Phakiso Monochoko.

Biden and the ICJ

On April 2, 2021, US President Joe Biden wrote to Congress announcing that he was ending Trump’s visa restrictions and sanctions on ICC officials. When the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin in March 2023 for war crimes in Ukraine, Biden commented “Well, I think it’s justified… I think it makes a very strong point.”

Despite these signs of détente, the Biden administration’s “ironclad” defense of Israeli actions in Gaza increasingly brought the US into open conflict again with both the ICC and the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, which is regarded as world’s highest court in matters of international law.

On December 29, 2023 South Africa brought an application to the ICJ charging the State of Israel with committing genocide in Gaza, and requested the court to order provisional measures to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention.”

On January 26, 2024 the court ruled that the risk of genocide in Gaza was “plausible,” and ordered Israel to take immediate steps to prevent the situation deteriorating further. These and further measures ordered by the ICJ on March 28 and May 24 were flouted by Israel and essentially ignored in Washington and other Western capitals. The US meantime used its UN Security Council veto to forestall any binding ceasefire motion.

Responding to the January 26 judgment, the US State Department emphasized that “Israel has the right to take action to ensure the terrorist attacks of October 7 cannot be repeated” and reasserted its belief that “allegations of genocide are unfounded.”

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly issued a statement that paid lip service to “the ICJ’s critical role in the peaceful settlement of disputes and its work in upholding the international rules-based order,” while emphasizing that “Our support for the ICJ does not mean that we accept the premise of the case brought by South Africa.” Like the US, Joly spent more time discussing “Israel’s right to exist and defend itself” and Hamas’s brutalities on October 7 than addressing the ICJ orders, on which she had little to say.

The ICC arrest warrants

Relations between the international courts and the US reached their nadir on November 21, when the ICC issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense 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.”

Western politicians erupted. “The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” thundered Biden. “Let me be clear once again: whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”1  

Though he undertook to abide by the ICC ruling, Justin Trudeau found “the sense of an equivalency between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the bloodthirsty terrorists that lead up Hamas” “troubling.”

The point both seem to have missed was that the equivalency lay in the war crimes both sides were alleged to have committed, which were equally contrary to international law.

0n February 6, 2025, just two weeks after he began his second term as US president, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.”   

The first person to be individually sanctioned was ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan, the man who was responsible for preparing the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Four more judges were sanctioned on June 5. Two more judges and two ICC assistant prosecutors were sanctioned on August 20. One of them was Canadian Kimberly Prost.

Canada and the ICC—now

The ICC denounced this latest US move as “a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates under the mandate from 125 States Parties from all regions.” Belgium, Denmark, France, Finland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Senegal, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden all condemned the US sanctions, as did Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Bar Association, and the European Parliament Subcommittee on Human Rights.   

But from Canada—crickets. Well, to be precise, on August 20 Canada’s UN ambassador Bob Rae, responding to a CTV News report on the sanctions, angrily posted on X:

This US attack on the International Criminal Court and its judges is disgraceful. Judge Kim Prost are [sic] carrying out their public duties. Attacks on them by Russia, Israel and the US are intended to weaken and intimidate the international legal system. They must not succeed.

But for whatever reason—some have suggested that he was pressurized into doing so by the Canadian government—Rae quickly deleted the post. And that was that.  

Ten days have passed since the US sanctioned Canada’s senior international judge, and there has been no official response from the Government of Canada.

Mark Carney supposedly had “a productive and wide-ranging conversation” with Trump on August 21 in which “We focused on trade challenges, opportunities, building a new economic and security relationship between Canada and the US, and supporting long-term peace and security for Ukraine and Europe.” Neither his post on X nor the official readout from the call contains any reference to Kimberly Prost. Carney has since made public pronouncements on the economy, Canada–US trade, Ukraine, and a new Canada–Poland Strategic Partnership, but he has remained silent on the issue of the ICC.  

Foreign minister Anita Anand, whose brief this surely is, was reported to have expressed disquiet about Prost’s sanctioning in her meeting with Marco Rubio on August 21, but her own account of the meeting makes no mention of it. Her brief X post reads, “Today, I had a productive meeting with Secretary @SecRubio in Washington. We discussed collaboration on shared priorities, including: supporting Ukraine, advancing Arctic security, addressing the security crisis in Haiti and continuing to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza.”

So far as I am aware, no other statement regarding American strongarming of the ICC—the court Canada worked so hard to establish back in the day—or the sanctioning of Kimberly Prost has been issued by any Canadian government agency or senior officials.

Elbows down

On Friday August 22, two days after Marco Rubio sanctioned Kimberly Prost, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world’s hunger watchdog, declared a state of famine in and around Gaza City. Its report emphasized that “This famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed.”

This seems highly unlikely since Israel is now in the early stages of a new offensive to recapture Gaza City, and is in the process of clearing out an estimated 1m inhabitants.

If not yet a truth universally acknowledged, it is certainly a truth that is increasingly recognized that since 1967, Israel has enforced a cruel apartheid regime within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and that since October 8, 2023, the IDF has been engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and probable genocide in Gaza.

Many Palestinians would argue that the genocide is merely the culmination of a Zionist program of ethnic cleansing that began with the establishment of the state of Israel and the attendant Nakba in wars of 1947-8.

It would be nice, even at this very late stage in the day, if some Western leader were to electrify the UN with a speech calling for total sanctions against Israel and its repressive regime and threatening absolute severance of relations with Israel—or even a UN-led peacekeeping military intervention—if there is no progress in dismantling the apartheid regime or halting the ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Of one thing we can be sure. That leader will not be Mark Carney. We can be equally confident that Anita Anand will not emulate Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp and several of his cabinet colleagues in quitting the government in protest at its refusal to implement stronger sanctions against Israel.

I hold no particular brief for Brian Mulroney—or John Diefenbaker, or Lester Pearson, or Pierre Elliott Trudeau, or Jean Chrétien. They all had their faults. But they were Titans compared with the moral Lilliputians who govern Canada today. I can’t imagine any of them would have thrown Kim Prost under the bus to get “the best trade deal with the United States… better than that of any country.” Even the language echoes Trump.

Nor, I suspect, would they have stood by for two years while Israel obliterated Gaza and bombed, shelled, and finally starved hundreds of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children to death—whatever the reason. Never again means never again.

By on

Published in Canadian Dimension, August 13, 2025 

An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah, Gaza. Photo by Ashraf Amra/UNWRA.

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 US.

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 Stampapublished 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 US 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 US, 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 modernconnection 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 across150 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 office (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 recentbeing 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.

By on

Derek Sayer / Canadian Dimension / July 29, 2025 

Girl in Gaza on her way to get food. Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan/Wikimedia Commons.

After reneging on its January ceasefire agreement with Hamas, Israel imposed a total blockade on aid into Gaza on March 2 and cut off remaining electricity supplies a week later. It resumed its military assault on March 18. Since then, Gaza’s health authorities have recorded a further 8,196 fatalities and 30,094 injuries. The death toll from IDF actions since the present “war” began on October 7, 2023 has now passed 60,000.

United Nations data show that throughout July the IDF has been killing one person every 12 minutes. “An average of 119 Palestinians are being killed daily so far in July—the highest rate since January 2024. More than 401 Palestinians a day are being wounded, the highest figure since December 2023.”

To put this in perspective, this means that in the last month Israel has killed, on average, more people in Gaza every week than the 736 Israeli civilians who died during Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel (many of them casualties of Israeli “friendly fire”)—the event that triggered, and has repeatedly been used to justify, Israel’s present “war.”

For Pity’s Sake, Stop This Now!

Aid agencies have been warning of imminent famine for months, threatening the lives of Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants—or whatever portion of them have survived nearly two years of IDF bombardment—who have no means of escape from the besieged enclave. Deaths from hunger are now rising exponentially, beginning with the most vulnerable.

As Nesrine Malik explains:

The children die first. In conditions of starvation, their growing bodies’ nutritional needs are higher than those of adults, and so their reserves are depleted faster. Their immune systems, not yet fully developed, become weaker, more susceptible to disease and infection. A bout of diarrhoea is lethal. Their wounds don’t heal. The babies cannot be breastfed as their mothers have not eaten. They die at double the rate of adults.


On July 29, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC—the world’s official famine watchdog—for the first time issued a famine alert, as distinct from a warning, for Gaza, stating that:

The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. Conflict and displacement have intensified, and access to food and other essential items and services has plummeted to unprecedented levels.

Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths. Latest data indicates that Famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.

Immediate action must be taken to end the hostilities and allow for unimpeded, large-scale, life-saving humanitarian response. This is the only path to stopping further deaths and catastrophic human suffering.


Recent days have seen a tsunami of horrific headlines, illustrated by graphic photos of starving children. In the UK, the Guardian’s July 23 lead story blared: “‘We faced hunger before, but never like this’: skeletal children fill hospital wards as starvation grips Gaza.” The article was illustrated with a mother-and-dying-child image that seems destined to become as iconic as Nick Ut’s famous Vietnam War photo “Napalm Girl.”

The front page of the Daily Express—a right-wing populist tabloid—carried the same photo, captioning the image “For Pity’s Sake, Stop This Now.” The accompanying article was headlined “The suffering of little Muhammad clinging on to life in Gaza hell shames us all.” The paper’s head of news Callum Hoare posted on X:

The brutal suffering in Gaza must end. The shocking image shows Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, one, who weighs the same as [a] three-month old baby due to the humanitarian crisis following the continued blocking of basic aid to civilians by Israel.


Spain’s El País showed a child’s outstretched hand holding a crust of bread under the headline, “Hunger in Gaza sparks global outcry to stop the war.” India’s Economic Times paired a front-page editorial calling Israel’s actions “genocidal” with a photo of empty cooking pots outside a damaged building. The Washington Post led with “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza” and a photo of a another Palestinian woman holding another emaciated infant.

Is “balance” finally giving way to truth?

Western newsrooms are no longer taken in by IDF propaganda videos purportedly showing “senior Hamas terrorists boasting about their meals in underground terror tunnels” while gorging on fresh fruit—a tall order, since Israel has been blockading the Strip since March 2. Nor are they uncritically accepting Israeli official statements as statements of fact, as most of them have shamefully done for the last two years.

BBC News—which has repeatedly, and justifiably, been accused of systematically downplayingPalestinian sufferings and whitewashing Israeli war crimes—issued a joint statement on July 24 with AFP, AP, and Reuters, which backhandedly conceded that the IDF indeed is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. It began:

We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families. For many months, these independent journalists have been the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza. They are now facing the same dire circumstances as those they are covering.

Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in warzones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them.


The statement neglected to mention that in the interests of keeping the genocidal truth under wraps, Israel has banned international media from Gaza and so far killed 232 local journalists in the course of its current “war”—more than the number of journalists killed in the US Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan combined.

Even the New York Times, which has been steadfast in its support for Israel throughout its “war” on Gaza, carried a long and damning essay by the renowned Israeli Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov headlined “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It when I See It.” To be fair, the paper carried an op-ed by Bret Stephens a few days later arguing “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” in the interests not of truth but of “balance.”

Despite Israel’s increasingly implausible attempts to deny that there is famine in Gaza—or to shift the blame to Hamas (which a recent USAID investigation found is not “stealing aid,” a conclusion that was repeated later by IDF senior officers interviewed by the New York Times) or the UN (ignoring Israel’s own ban on UNRWA in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and refusal of visas to UN agency personnel)—the dam has broken.

When “aid distribution centres” become killing fields

In late May, under international pressure, Israel permitted the US-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to distribute meagre and inappropriate aid packages through four centres set up to replace the 400-plus distribution points previously run by UNRWA and other international aid agencies. The GHF is a private body, staffed largely by US contractors, with no prior experience of supplying humanitarian aid in war zones.

Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that allowing this “minimal” aid was only done to keep US politicians onside. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir denounced the change in policy as “a grave mistake,” while Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu argued that “letting humanitarian aid in now directly harms the war effort to achieve victory.”

On July 8, following the death of five Israeli soldiers in a Hamas ambush—a drop in the ocean compared with the daily Palestinian civilian casualties—Ben Gvir demanded “a total siege, a military crushing, encouraging immigration and settlements” and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Netanyahu to “immediately halt” aid for Gaza. They could hardly have made it clearer that Israeli combatants’ deaths will be paid for many times over by Palestinian civilian lives, whatever the Geneva Conventions might say.

Outside of the so-called “humanitarian zones,” to which over 90 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants have been compulsorily evacuated and now live in squalid tents—which the IDF still regularly hits, claiming to target “Hamas militants” but killing and maiming many more civilians with every strike—82.6 percent of the Gaza Strip is now within the Israeli-militarized zone or under displacement orders. Three of the GHF centres are located in the ruins of Rafah in the south, the other in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been massacred when lining up for food at GHF centres or trying to reach them. As of July 15, per the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 875 people had been killed trying to access food for their families, 674 of them in the vicinity of GHF sites. That number has now passed 1,000.

Interviewed for the BBC World Service on July 25, retired US special forces officer Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, a former Green Beret, explained why he had quit his job with GHF:

I witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians… Without question I witnessed war crimes by the [IDF], using artillery rounds, mortar rounds, and tank rounds against unarmed civilians… I have never witnessed such a level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population—an unarmed, starving population.

Lies, damned lies, and hasbara

Charging that “Today, Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families,” on June 30 more than 240 international charities and NGOs, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and Amnesty International, issued a joint statement calling for “immediate action to end the deadly Israeli distribution scheme (including the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation) in Gaza, revert to the existing UN-led coordination mechanisms, and lift the Israeli government’s blockade on aid and commercial supplies.”

Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, former Republican governor of Arkansas, knows better. On July 24 he posted on X two photographs, which we are to assume were shot in Gaza though no date or location is given, with the comment:

Here are photos of UN trucks & enough food to feed all of Gaza but it sits rotting! UN is a tool of Hamas! US based GHF is actually delivering food FOR FREE and SAFELY. UN food is either looted by Hamas or rots in the sun! Photos from yesterday.

Huckabee, whose “evangelical Christian beliefs,” per the official US embassy website, “include support for Israeli control over their ancient and indigenous homeland,” clearly believes his responsibilities including shilling for hasbara (Israeli public diplomacy aimed at explaining and promoting Israel’s policies and image internationally). It would be nice to see him apply the same argument about ancestral homelands to the Indigenous inhabitants of the United States, but let that pass. Israel’s rights are judged by different standards.

Huckabee also believes that “There is no such thing as a Palestinian” and “no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.” This is of course music to Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and Netanyahu’s ears.

UN spokesperson Farhan Haq has cited “a number of interdependent factors” that have stopped UN aid being delivered even when it has reached Gaza, including “bureaucratic, logistical, administrative, and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities”—something former British Foreign Secretary and one-time Prime Minister David Cameron complained about back in March 2024—and “shooting incidents that have killed and injured people gathering to offload aid supplies along convoy routes.”

One recent shooting incident is related by Cindy McCain, the widow of US Senator John McCain and head of the World Food Program:

Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies… As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire. We are deeply concerned and saddened by this tragic incident resulting in the loss of countless lives.

Today’s violent incident comes despite assurances from Israeli authorities that humanitarian operational conditions would improve; including that armed forces will not be present nor engage at any stage along humanitarian convoy routes. There should never, ever, be armed groups near or on our aid convoys, as reiterated on many occasions to all parties to the conflict.

Without these fundamental conditions in place, we cannot continue providing life-saving support across the Gaza strip.

The politicians react

If key sections of the Western media are now changing their tune on Gaza, disgust with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is even more pronounced among the wider public.

A survey carried out by Pew Research Center published on June 3 found that in 20 of 24 countries surveyed, half of adults or more have a negative view of Israel. Among Western or Western-aligned nations, Israel was viewed “very” or “somewhat unfavourably” by 79 percent of respondents in Japan, 78 percent in the Netherlands, 75 percent in Spain and Sweden, 74 percent in Australia, 72 percent in Greece, 66 percent in Italy, 64 percent in Germany, 63 percent in France, 62 percent in Poland, 61 percent in the UK, 60 percent in Canada and South Korea, and even—remarkably, in view of bipartisan support for Israel among both Republican and Democrat party leaderships—53 percent in the US.

This was before the recent blanket press coverage of the growing famine and almost daily massacres of Palestinians seeking food at the GHF distribution centres.

Wrong-footed by events, and under immense pressure from their respective publics, Western politicians have been falling over themselves to take back the narrative.

On July 21, Canada joined 24 other Western nations and the EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management in a statement that firmly rapped Israel over the knuckles for its most recent transgressions in Gaza:

The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food. It is horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid. The Israeli Government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.


On July 25 the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany issued another statement reminding Israel that “withholding essential humanitarian assistance” is “unacceptable” and describing the situation in Gaza as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” They added that they “stand ready to take further action to support an immediate ceasefire and a political process that leads to lasting security and peace for Israelis, Palestinians and the entire region,” without saying what that action might comprise.

No doubt Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron would rather we forgot that they had signed a joint statement with Canada’s Mark Carney calling on the Israeli government “to stop its military operations in Gaza and immediately allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza,” and threatening “If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response,” two months ago, on May 19. Needless to say no actions of any consequence were taken.

The time for covering asses is at hand

Aware, perhaps, of their potential liability under the Geneva Conventions for not doing everything within their power to prevent genocide—or at least war crimes and crimes against humanity—in Gaza, individual Western politicians have meantime been lining up to put their immense sympathy for the Palestinian people on record.

Keir Starmer proclaims “The suffering and starvation unfolding in Gaza is unspeakable and indefensible. While the situation has been grave for some time, it has reached new depths and continues to worsen. We are witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe.”

Starmer’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy says he is he is “appalled, sickened” by the “grotesque” targeting of starving Palestinians. “These are not words that are usually used by a foreign secretary who is attempting to be diplomatic,” he adds, “but when you see innocent children holding out their hand for food, and you see them shot and killed in the way that we have seen in the last few days, of course Britain must call it out.”

Australia’s PM Antony Albanese laments that “The situation in Gaza has gone beyond the world’s worst fears… Gaza is in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe. Israel’s denial of aid and the killing of civilians, including children, seeking access to water and food cannot be defended or ignored.”

EU foreign policy supremo Kaja Kallas (who stated on July 15 that “the EU will not move forward with sanctions against Israel”) protests that “The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible.” “The images from Gaza are unbearable,” posts Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, “Israel must deliver on its pledges.”

Canadian government representatives have been more reticent in their condemnations—a good deal more reticent than when they denounce instances of alleged “antisemitism.”

But noting on July 24 that “denial of humanitarian aid is a violation of international law,” Mark Carney stated that “Canada condemns the Israeli government’s failure to prevent the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian disaster in Gaza.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand echoed her boss, posting on X the same day:

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens by the day. Women and children are starving, without adequate access to food and water, the most basic of needs. It is inexcusable and must end… the Israeli government must allow the uninhibited flow of humanitarian aid to reach Palestinians civilians, who are in urgent need.


New Democrat Party MP (and candidate for NDP leader) Heather McPherson asks, not altogether unreasonably:

For nearly 21 months @NDP has urged action from Canada: recognize Palestinian statehood, impose sanctions, suspend CIFTA, implement arms embargo. In a caucus of 169 MPs only a handful of Liberals have spoken out for Palestine. Why the Liberal silence? Cowardice? Racism?

It’s only words

Several things need to be said about this belated outpouring of sympathy for innocent Palestinians on the part of politicians who have been arming, diplomatically supporting, and repressing domestic criticism of Israel’s genocide for the last two years.

First, however tough their language, they never use the word genocide—or the terms war crimes and crimes against humanity. The reason is pretty clear. To do so would not only acknowledge these governments’ past complicity in the worst crimes known to the law, but legally require them to act immediately to end that complicity in the future.

The preferred term is always “humanitarian catastrophe,” which naturalizes the event—equating it with other things that cause famine, like crop failures, floods or drought—and shifts the focus away from the human actors and actions that have caused it.

Second, there is a systematic attempt to suggest that it is only now that the situation has become catastrophic. The implication is that it was legitimate to support Israel’s assault on Gaza previously. As one puzzled comment on X put it:

I have been wondering why the Zionists’ stepped up use of hunger as a mass murder weapon has suddenly triggered a Western outcry, but two years of pre-announced, and equally vile, mass murder via bombs and bullets did not generate the same outcry.


Third—and most importantly—none of these statements, however strongly worded, have been followed by any action that would put real pressure on Israel to change its behaviour. And knowing this, Israel continues to largely ignore Western protests.

Even Emmanuel Macron’s historic promise to recognize a Palestinian state—a largely symbolic gesture, albeit a significant one—has been attacked by Donald Trump, and Britain and Canada, who at one time looked prepared to join him, are now reportedly getting cold feet for fear of angering the US.

It is not as if the international community doesn’t have plenty of weapons at its disposal to force compliance on rogue states.

Apartheid South Africa was kicked out of the UN and subjected to stringent economic, sporting, and cultural sanctions and boycotts that eventually brought the system to its knees. The first Gulf War against Iraq was fought under UN auspices, and the second by a US-led “coalition of the willing.”

The most obvious contemporary example of such international action—which contrasts sharply with the West’s pusillanimous avoidance of any meaningful action to stop Israel’s carnage in Gaza—was the coordinated response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has been met with wave after wave of sanctions.

For whatever reasons—be they geopolitical, economic, or racist—not to take comparable action against Israel is a choice. Our choice.

Our genocide

Faced with widespread Western condemnation, Netanyahu has now agreed to allow air drops of aid into Gaza and daily 10-hour “humanitarian pauses” in three areas of the Strip to enable UN convoys and other aid organizations to safely distribute food and medicine. As in his earlier pivot in May, he explained that given the international reaction, Israel “needs to continue to allow the entry of a minimum amount of humanitarian aid.”

I see this as a purely tactical retreat, like Netanyahu’s earlier acceptance under US pressure of two ceasefire deals which he subsequently broke. He went on to reassure Israelis that “We will continue to fight, we will continue to act until we achieve all of our war goals—until complete victory.” His fundamental objectives have not changed.

On July 28, the day after Netanyahu’s announcement, Israel’s leading human rights organization B’Tselem announced the publication of a report titled Our Genocide on social media. They did not pull their punches or mince their words:

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

It sounds inconceivable. But it’s the truth.

Israel is taking deliberate, coordinated action to destroy the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Explicit statements by Israeli officials, combined with a consistent policy of destructive attacks and other practices of annihilation, prove beyond a doubt that Israel’s target is the entire population of Gaza.

Entire cities razed to the ground; medical, educational, religious and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed; 2 million Palestinians forcibly displaced with the aim of expelling them from Gaza; and, of course, mass starvation and killing—all this amounts to an explicit attempt to destroy the population of Gaza and impose living conditions so catastrophic that Palestinian society cannot continue to exist there.

That is the exact definition of genocide.


They continued:

The international community has not only failed in its duty to stop the atrocities, but the leaders of the Western world, particularly the United States and Europe, also share responsibility by providing support that enables Israel’s acts of destruction. It is the duty of the international community to stop the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza…

This is our genocide, and we need to stop it.


Israel’s genocide. And the West’s.

By on

Canadian Dimension / July 9, 2025 / 17 min read

Displaced Palestinians roam the shattered streets of the Gaza Strip. Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan.

As I write this, the press are reporting that a third ceasefire in Gaza is imminent, with Donald Trump committing to “ensuring negotiations continue until a final agreement is reached.” Whether this will end Israel’s “war,” which began on October 7, 2023 and has now raged for 21 months, killing a documented 57,012 Palestinians (as of July 2) and in all likelihood many thousands more, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, a stocktaking of some of the key events of the last momentous month seems in order.

The “12-Day War”

Israel launched what it called a “pre-emptive strike” against Iran during the night of June 13. More than 200 IDF fighter jets hit more than 100 nuclear and military facilities and residential neighbourhoods in Tehran and other cities, and Israel assassinated 30 of Iran’s top military commanders and 11 of its nuclear scientists in targeted individual strikes.

Between June 12 and June 23 Israel carried out at least 146 air strikes on Iran. By the time the “12-Day War” ended with the US-brokered ceasefire of June 24, the Israeli air force had hit over 900 targets.

Iran retaliated by attacking Israel with successive barrages of ballistic missiles. As of June 24, the IDF had killed 610 people in Iran, including 49 women and 13 children, and injured 4,746. Iran’s missiles killed 28 people in Israel and injured 3,238.

The excuse for Israel’s unprovoked attack—for which, as has become customary for Israel, no evidence was ever provided—was that Iran was “on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon.” Benjamin Netanyahu has periodically made this claim since 1992.

Though US National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March that Iran “was not building a nuclear weapon, and its supreme leader had not reauthorized the dormant program even though it had enriched uranium to higher levels,” Donald Trump chose to disregard his intelligence agencies’ assessment. “I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters on June 17. Heknew Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear bomb.

The US entered the conflict directly on June 22, dropping big, beautiful™ bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. Trump claimed that the strike had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, but the US’s own intelligence assessments (which the White House soon trashed) suggested the program had maybe been set back at best by a few months. For whatever it is worth, the latest Pentagon assessment is that “We have degraded their program by one to two years.”

At the point when Israel attacked, Iran was engaged in ongoing talks with the US to renew the nuclear agreement Donald Trump torpedoed in 2018. One of those targeted in Israel’s first strike was the lead Iranian negotiator, Ali Shamkhani. The IDF bombed his Tehran home, leaving him buried under the rubble with serious injuries. Three weeks earlier Trump boasted of “real progress, serious progress” in the talks, describing them as “very, very good.”

None of this inspires confidence in Israel or the US as trustworthy negotiating partners in any future peace process. Why should Iran—or anyone else—believe a word they say?

Circling the wagons

After Israel reneged on its ceasefire agreement with Hamas and launched a renewed Gaza offensive on March 18, killing over 400 people in one single night of terror, and imposed a complete blockade on power, food, and medical aid to the Strip, sections of the press and other influential opinion in the West had increasingly challenged its “self-defence” narrative. For a time at least, political leaders appeared to be listening.

This changed abruptly after June 13. Despite the fact that Israel, not Iran, was the clear aggressor—and notwithstanding the well established principle that pre-emptive actions are permissible under international law only “if the threat is imminent, overwhelming, and leaves no alternative but to act”—most Western states swallowed whatever misgivings they had previously expressed about Gaza and once again fell in line behind Israel.

The calls for “all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate” (Emmanuel Macron) were invariably accompanied by reiterations of “Israel’s right to defend itself”—which is not, on any reasonable view, what it was doing—and an insistence that (in the words of Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand) “Iran cannot obtain nuclear weapons.”

Nothing was said about Iran’s right to defend itself, even though it was the attacked party. Nor did it seem to matter that unlike Iran, Israel does possess nuclear weapons, has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and refuses to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IATA) to inspect its nuclear facilities.

Despite Israel carrying out what international organizations, leading Israeli academics and genocide scholars agree is a genocide in Gaza for nearly two years—during which time it has also invaded Lebanon and southern Syria and bombed Yemen—the West portrays Iran as (to quote Anand again) the “persistent threat to regional stability.”

Absurdly, the politicians took the fact that Iran responded militarily to Israel’s aggression—which is to say, defended itself—as confirmation of this alleged threat.

Writing on behalf of the EU on June 18, Kaja Kallas insisted that “Israel has the right to protect its security and people, in line with international law,” while “Iran must take decisive steps to return to negotiations and pave the way for a diplomatic solution.” What law she had in mind she didn’t say. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter only recognizes the “right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs.”

“Canada condemns Iran’s attack on Israel” began Anand’s June 13 post, without any mention of the Israeli strikes that provoked it. Germany, too, “strongly condemn[ed] the indiscriminate Iranian attack on Israeli territory,” adding that “Iran’s nuclear program violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty and poses a threat to the entire region—especially to Israel.” Once again there was silence on the threat posed by Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the quiet bit out loud during the G7 summit on June 17, letting slip to a journalist: “This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.”

A “Zionist Palestinian state”

On June 24 Mark Carney told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour the Iran-Israel ceasefire offered an “opportunity” not only to end the war in Gaza but for “lasting peace in the Middle East” built around—wait for it—“a Zionist, if you will, Palestinian state.”

This goes beyond anything ventured by Carney’s predecessors Justin Trudeau (who proudly declared “I am a Zionist” on March 3, the same day as Israel cut off Gaza’s electricity supply and blockaded all aid for 11 weeks), and Stephen Harper. At the least, it is tone deaf. Worse, as the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council (CMPAC) put it:

By suggesting that Palestinians must be a “Zionist” state as the condition for their own statehood, Carney denies them the basic right to define their own national character and political future. Self-determination is a core principle of international law, affirmed in the UN Charter and multiple human rights treaties, and it cannot be made contingent on adopting the ideological identity of their occupier.


The UN General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and “strongly condemning the use of starvation as a weapon of war, demanding a full lifting of the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid, and insisting on the protection of civilians under international law,” which passed with an overwhelming majority of 149 to 12 on June 12—the day before Israel’s attack on Iran—with the backing of the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, was quietly forgotten.

So was an international conference co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia scheduled to take place on June 17-20 at the United Nations in New York, at which, it was suggested, all parties should accept that “Palestinian statehood should not be a result of peace, but rather its prerequisite.” It was even briefly hinted that France might recognize Palestine at the conference pour encourager les autres. But after June 13 all bets were off.

The conference has now been indefinitely postponed. As Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has written, this “has left a critical void in multilateral leadership, precisely when it is needed most.” The only Palestinian statehood still left on the table seems to be Mark Carney’s “Zionist Palestine.”

Shifting public opinion

Notwithstanding this backtracking to business as usual on the part of Western leaders, Western publics seem less and less willing to overlook the continuing genocide in Gaza. The genie is out of the bottle, and the gaslighting isn’t working any more.

A YouGov EuroTrack survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain published on June 3 found that while there was little evidence of support for Hamas (only five to nine percent of respondents believed the October 7 attack on Israel was justified), just six to 16 percent believed Israel was “right to send troops into Gaza” and “responded in a proportionate way to the Hamas attacks.” Between seven and 18 percent said they sympathized with Israel, while 18–33 percent said their sympathies lay with the Palestinians. Germany was the only country where the results were evenly matched (17 percent for Israel, 18 percent for Palestine).

In Britain, in a poll conducted on June 18 by YouGov for Action For Humanity and the International Centre for Justice for Palestinians, over half of respondents opposed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza (55 percent) and only 15 percent supported it. A large proportion of those opposed to the campaign thought Israel was committing genocide (82 percent).

Even in the US, where support for Israel has long been an item of faith for both major political parties, the landscape seems to be shifting. A Quinnipiac University poll in early June showed 37 percent of Americans sided with and 32 percent opposed the Israelis—which is a historically narrow margin. This is consistent with several other polls earlier in 2025. 

A Harris-Harvard poll commissioned by the Israeli Knesset reported in the Jerusalem Post on June 26 showed a drop from 53 percent to 41 percent in the percentage of Americans who view Israel favourably, and—most worryingly for Israel’s supporters—found young people were closely split (53 to 47 percent) between supporting Israel and supporting Hamas.

An upset in New York

Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory over establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo in the June 24 Democratic primary election for mayor of New York City has been universally described as a major upset not only because he is a member of Democratic Socialists of America campaigning on an avowedly progressive platform, but—above all—because of his unequivocal support for the Palestinian cause.

Despite refusing to back down on his criticism of Israel’s “genocidal” conduct of its Gaza campaign and being comprehensively vilified as a Muslim (which he is) and a jihadist supporter of Hamas (which he is not), Mamdani won 56 percent of the vote to Cuomo’s 44 percent. His 545,000 votes are the most in a Democratic mayoral New York City primary since David Dinkins beat incumbent Ed Koch in 1989.

Nobody is suggesting that Mamdani’s stance on Gaza is the only reason he won—though his victory does lend weight to the argument that Kamala Harris’s refusal to deviate from Joe Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel played a significant part in the Democrats’ loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

But that a candidate who supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, called for the release of detained Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, and promised to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he ever sit foot in New York, could win so emphatic a victory in the most Jewish city in America, attracting broad-based support across different ethnic groups—including large numbers of Jews—testifies to just how out of touch with the public the official narratives have become.

Predictably, Republicans responded to Mamdani’s win with outraged pearl clutching and unconcealed Islamophobia. But what is most concerning is that while the success of Mamdani’s campaign might point to a road back to power for a Democratic Party still reeling from its 2024 defeat, establishment Democrats were no more enthusiastic.

“Top Democratic donors” are quoted as finding the primary outcome “disgusting,” and Barack Obama has declined to congratulate Mamdani. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, and New York Congressman Tom Suozzi are all holding backon endorsing Mamdani in the mayoral election.

They prefer to confine their “resistance,” it seems, to the gestural theatrics of renaming Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and making marathon speeches to which nobody listens. Just as in November’s presidential election, they would rather lose than antagonize Israel.

The protests grow

In Britain, judges, lawyers, and legal academics and prominent writers have issued open letters condemning the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide and government and media attempts to quash dissent. Even the august British Medical Association voted by large majorities at its annual conference on July 3 to break off relations with the Israel Medical Association and seek its suspension from the World Medical Association over Gaza.

On the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, more than 370 actors and filmmakers proclaimed that “As artists and cultural players, we cannot remain silent while genocide is taking place in Gaza,” condemning “propaganda that constantly colonizes our imaginations.” The signatories included Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Juliette Binoche, Rooney Mara, Omar Sy, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Gere, Mark Ruffalo, Guy Pearce, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Moore, David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodovar, and Guillermo del Toro.

On June 9 “532 Canadians, including academics, lawyers, former and retired ambassadors (including to the United Nations), ministers and public servants, UN human rights experts, and civil society, labour and faith leaders,” wrote to Mark Carney urging “decisive action to end genocide in Gaza.” On July 5 the Anglican Church of Canada adopted a resolution “calling on the Canadian government to uphold their moral responsibilities and impose full and immediate arms embargo on Israel.”

Protest marches continue across the world.  From London and Paris to Sydney and Melbourne, from Athens and Barcelona to Dublin and Toronto, hundreds of thousands have hit the streets. This year’s bull-running San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain, turned into a massive show of solidarity with Palestine. On June 15, in one of the biggest demonstrations ever seen in the Netherlands, 150,000 people dressed in red and marched for Gaza in The Hague. On June 21, for the first time on such a scale, 50,000 people marched for Gaza in Berlin.

Revulsion at Israel’s genocide in Gaza is no longer confined to student activists and “lunatic left” professors at Columbia and Harvard, and it can no longer be dismissed as the result of “antisemitism.” The chasm between Western political establishments and the people they claim to represent grows wider by the day.

This is a pervasive crisis of legitimacy.

Ructions at the BBC

Nowhere is that crisis better illustrated than in recent events at the British Broadcasting Corporation.

A recent report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, based on analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content, found that despite Palestinians suffering 34 times as many deaths as Israelis since the present Gaza “war” began, Israeli deaths were given 33 times more coverage and described in much more emotive language. The BBC interviewed significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis, and presenters shut down interviewees’ claims of genocide while making no mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements (including Benjamin Netanyahu’s notorious invocation of the biblical Amalek).

In May the corporation fired Gary Lineker, Britain’s most popular soccer commentator and longtime host of Match of the Day, the BBC’s equivalent of Hockey Night in Canada, for social media posts critical of Israel. Lineker had previously blotted his copybook by daring to speak out over government heartlessness toward refugees and migrants.

On June 20, after months of delays, the BBC cancelled a documentary it had itself commissioned on Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s health service on grounds that showing the film would create “a perception of partiality.” Based entirely on first-hand testimonies, the film detailed “how hospitals in the territory have been overwhelmed, bombed and raided. Medics recount being detained and claim to have been tortured.”

Channel 4 showed Gaza: Doctors Under Attack in the UK on July 2 and Mehdi Hassan’s Zeteo media platform made it available for streaming internationally. It was widely hailed as “a crucial film” that “the world needs to see.”

On the same day as the film was broadcast, more than 400 BBC staff, freelancers and industry figures, including 111 BBC journalists—who signed anonymously for fear of reprisals—wrote an open letter to BBC management expressing “concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine.”

The letter expressed particular concern that board member Robbie Gibbs, “an individual with close ties to the Jewish Chronicle… has a say in the BBC’s editorial decisions in any capacity, including the decision not to broadcast Gaza: Medics Under Fire [sic].”

Death, death to the IDF

In the midst of the row over Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, a new confrontation erupted over the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury, Britain’s most popular music festival, which regularly attracts over 200,000 spectators and has long been televised live by the BBC.

In the weeks preceding the festival, pressure was put on the organizers by members of the government, including Keir Starmer, as well as the Conservative opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, to drop the Irish band Kneecap from the roster. Kneecap had made themselves notorious with their earlier performances at the Coachella music festival in California, at which they led the audience in chants of “Free, free Palestine.”

On June 18 Kneecap fans “mobbed sidewalks outside a London court” as the trial opened of band member Mo Chara under Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act. His offense was waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in North London on November 21 “in a manner that aroused ‘reasonable suspicion’ he supported the Lebanese militant group.”

The Glastonbury organizers refused to cancel Kneecap’s performance, and the band took the stage on June 28. Reportedly “thousands of fans chanted ‘free Palestine’ and waved Palestinian flags,” but BBC viewers were not allowed to see this because the corporation pulled the plug on the live feed. The broadcaster later uploaded an edited version of the performance to BBC iPlayer as part of its on-demand Glastonbury sets.

Kneecap performs at Glastonbury. Photo by Katherine Hajiyianni.

Unfortunately for the BBC, another even more controversial set, by the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, slipped under the wire. Looking out from the West Holts stage on a sea of Palestinian flags, rapper Bobby Vylan led the 45,000-strong crowd in chants of “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF.”

Bob Vylan’s entire performance was broadcast live, although “a warning was issued on screen about the very strong and discriminatory language” and it was decided not to make the set available on demand via iPlayer. This did not stop pressure mounting on the BBC, as the police announced a criminal investigation into Kneecap and Bob Vylan’s performances and lurid headlines filled the conservative and tabloid press.

Whacking the moles

Two days later, BBC Chair Samir Shaw issued a contrite statement, which apologized “to all our viewers and listeners and particularly the Jewish community for allowing… Bob Vylan to express unconscionable antisemitic views live on the BBC” and acknowledged that continuing the broadcast was “an error of judgement.”

He promised that “The Executive have agreed to put in place a set of strengthened editorial practices and policies for live music programming” and was “initiating a process to ensure proper accountability for those found to be responsible for the failings in this incident.”

On July 7, the Times reported that Lorna Clarke had resigned her position as BBC director of music “after UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy condemned the “appalling and unacceptable scenes,” adding that “other senior BBC staff have also temporarily relinquished their day-to-day roles over the Glastonbury controversy—pending an investigation.” Needless to say Robbie Gibbs is still in place.

Clarke’s is not the only scalp Nandy is after. She is also demanding to know why nobody had yet been fired at the corporation for permitting an earlier documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, to slip through the censorship net and be broadcast in February.

The BBC pulled the program from its iPlayer after it emerged that its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-controlled Gaza administration. By then the damage was done. Palestinian children had been allowed to speak of their own experiences in their own words, and we can’t have that, can we?

Nandy told the Times that:

I have asked the question to the board [of the BBC]. Why has nobody been fired? What I want is an explanation as to why not. If it is a sackable offence then obviously that should happen. But if the BBC, which is independent, considers that it is not, I think what all parliamentarians want to know is why.


It seems not to have occurred to her that if parliamentarians—or a government minister—can interfere in the BBC’s internal affairs to the extent of demanding to know why staff have not been sacked, its independence is (to say the least) seriously compromised.

Doubling down

Bob Vylan have now been dropped by their agency, banned from several music festivals in the UK and elsewhere, had a number of European gigs cancelled, and seen their US visas revoked by the State Department, scuppering their upcoming US tour. Their following on Spotify has meantime soared and their 2024 album Humble as the Sun has re-entered the charts. Currently it is number one on the UK hip-hop and R&B albums chart, and number seven on the album downloads chart and number eight on the independent albums chart.

It is difficult to think of a clearer indication of today’s societal rifts over Israel and Gaza.

On the one hand, we have ever-growing public revulsion over Western complicity in the Gaza genocide. On the other, we see the political establishment doubling down on a narrative of Israeli self-defence that is losing whatever emotional purchase it once had—a doubling down that is increasingly enforced by the full power of the state.

In the US, they are deporting pro-Palestine activists and withholding research funding from universities they falsely accuse of being “antisemitic.” In Britain, parliament has just proscribed Palestine Action, a protest group whose most violent action to date has been throwing red paint over military aircraft, as a “terrorist organization”—on a par with al-Qaida, Hezbollah, or Hamas. To support it now carries a sentence of 14 years in prison.

The first arrests have just been made by the Metropolitan Police. They include an emeritus professor, several health professionals, and a 83-year-old retired priest, Sue Parfitt, who said the ban was “a very dangerous move that has to be challenged.”

Wither the West?

On June 21, 75 German professors published a letter to the German government arguing that “Your current actions, like those of the previous government, are violating international law and are politically highly dangerous: Germany is actively undermining the international legal system that was established after the Second World War, partly as a response to German crimes.”

It concluded by demanding “an immediate end to the restrictions on academic freedom and freedom of speech in Germany”:

Currently, critical voices on Israel’s actions and its occupation are being defamed using scientifically questionable definitions of antisemitism, events are being cancelled, and protests—including student protests at universities—are being criminalized … The systematic suppression and marginalization of voices expressing criticism and solidarity contribute to Germany’s complicity in Israeli violations of international law—both those already committed and those ongoing—and must end.


The point does not only apply to Germany—or to academia. The demolition of the rule of law in the international arena goes hand in hand with the destruction of liberties at home.

We might well ask, as the Irish poet W.B. Yeats did in an earlier time of troubles:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

By on

First published in Canadian Dimension / June 17, 2025

Aftermath of Israeli airstrike in Tehran, June 13, 2025. Photo courtesy Tasnim News Agency/Wikimedia Commons.

Gaslighting, noun: psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

I woke on Saturday, June 14, to Guardian headlines explaining: “Strikes on Iran ease pressure on Israel to end starvation in Gaza. Critics of war will be more reluctant to press for its end while missiles from Tehran are killing people in Tel Aviv.”

I had two immediate reactions. Both were accompanied by a strong desire to vomit.

First reaction: speak for your f***ing self. I am not going to keep my mouth shut about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza just because Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen this moment to launch a “pre-emptive strike”—that is, an unprovoked act of war—against Iran, nor because Iran, not altogether surprisingly, is defending itself against this aggression.

Initial reports suggest that as well as the military commanders and nuclear scientists Israel individually targeted (whose families were “collateral damage”), the first strike killed at least 60 people in residential neighbourhoods in Tehran and other Iranian cities, including 29 children, and injured many more. This is par for the Israeli course.

By the end of Sunday, Israel’s continuing strikes had killed at least 224 people in Iran and wounded another 1,277. Netanyahu promises the world that this is just the beginning, warning: “We will hit every site and every target of the Ayatollahs’ regime and what they have felt so far is nothing compared with what they will be handed in the coming days.”

Meantime, the carnage in Gaza has not stopped but intensified. On Saturday June 14 alone, reports Al Jazeera, “Israeli fire and air strikes… killed at least 58 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, many of them near an aid distribution site operated by the United States-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).” This brought the number of those killed while attempting to obtain food for their families through the controversial GHF sites (which Israel reluctantly set up under international pressure after banishing UNRWA, the principal supplier of aid to Gaza) to at least 274 people, with more than 2,000 wounded.

Second reaction: what does it say about us that these headlines can be true? That these things can be said at all? Into what new moral abyss has “Western civilization” fallen?

Are we—Canada, the US, Germany, France, the UK—really so morally bankrupt that we will allow Netanyahu’s cynical maneuver, an act of naked aggression in flagrant breach of international law, to divert us from our responsibilities to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

Do we really want to say that the relative handful of deaths so far reported in Israel from Iran’s response (13, as of June 15) count for more than the hundreds of deaths Israel has already caused with its latest strikes on Iran—let alone the more than 55,000 people, the majority of them women and children, Israel has killed in the last twenty months in Gaza? That when the chips are down, Israeli lives are worth that much more than Iranian lives or Palestinian lives—irrespective of the fact that Israel initiated this latest round of fighting?

From the first responses of Western political leaders, it would appear that the answer to all of these questions is unfortunately an unhesitating and emphatic yes.

Was the West getting cold feet about Israel’s genocide?

Significantly, Israel’s attack on Iran came against a backdrop of the beginnings of a sea-change in Western media coverage of Israel’s conduct of its “war” in Gaza and the Israeli government’s encouragement of settler violence in the West Bank. Coincidence? Some might suspect that the attack was designed to nip this dangerous shift in the bud.

Recent weeks had seen a widespread acknowledgment that since its declaration of “war” on Hamas following the latter’s attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity—and likely genocide—not as aberrations but as de facto state policy. This tectonic shift in media coverage was echoed by a number of political leaders in Israel and the West (the US apart), who adopted a more critical stance toward Israel’s conduct of the “war” than they had at any point during the last two years.

Within Israel, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who had long rejected charges that Israel was guilty of war crimes or genocide in Gaza, wrote an editorial for Haaretz on May 27 in which he recorded his recent change of mind. He didn’t mince his words:

What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy—knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.


A week earlier, Yair Golan, a retired general and the leader of the Israeli opposition Democrats, caused outrage among Netanyahu’s supporters when he told Reshed Bet radio: “A sane country doesn’t engage in fighting against civilians, doesn’t kill babies as a hobby and doesn’t set for itself the goals of expelling a population.”

Similar misgivings were expressed by some of Israel’s staunchest Western allies—though notably not by the Trump administration or the Democratic leadership in the US.

Having told the UK parliament on March 17 that Israel’s blockade on aid to Gaza, which began on March 2, was a “breach of international law”—only to be rebuked at the time by PM Keir Starmer and forced to backpedal—Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy gave a passionate speech in the Commons on May 20 in which he denounced Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s dreams of “‘cleansing’ Gaza, of ‘destroying what’s left’ and of resident Palestinians being ‘relocated to third countries.’” He too did not mince his words:

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…

An entente cordiale

The previous day Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had issued a joint statement which offered the most unequivocal condemnation of Israeli actions in Gaza by any G7 leaders yet. It began:

We strongly oppose the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza. The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable. Yesterday’s announcement that Israel will allow a basic quantity of food into Gaza is wholly inadequate. We call on the Israeli Government to stop its military operations in Gaza and immediately allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. This must include engaging with the UN to ensure a return to delivery of aid in line with humanitarian principles…

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 three leaders went on to express opposition to “any attempt to expand settlements in the West Bank,” insisting that “Israel must halt settlements which are illegal and undermine the viability of a Palestinian state.” If Israel continued in its “egregious actions,” they threatened, “we will take further concrete actions in response… including targeted sanctions.”

“By asking Israel to end a defensive war for our survival before Hamas terrorists on our border are destroyed and by demanding a Palestinian state, the leaders in London, Ottowa [sic] and Paris are offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7 while inviting more such atrocities,” Benjamin Netanyahu responded in a post on X.

Netanyahu added: “Israel accepts President Trump’s vision and urges all European leaders to do the same.” That “vision” is to turn an ethnically cleansed Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” under American auspices. As Trump says, he’s a real estate guy at heart. So is Israel, which has been gobbling up Palestinian land and “displacing” its owners since 1948.

On May 29, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced approval of 22 new settlements, some of which already existed as illegal “outposts”—the biggest such expansion in decades. Katz was clear that the point was to “prevent… the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”

Destruction in the Gaza Strip. Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan/Wikimedia Commons.

The Western dilemma

Though disappointingly little in the way of “concrete actions” has followed the British, French, and Canadian leaders’ entente cordiale, the UK did suspend talks on a trade deal with Israel and impose individual sanctions on a few extremist settlers in the West Bank.

Of greater import—though still more of a symbolic gesture than anything else—on June 12, the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK jointly announced “sanctions targeting [Israeli ministers] Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.” They noted that:

Today’s measures focus on the West Bank, but of course this cannot be seen in isolation from the catastrophe in Gaza. We continue to be appalled by the immense suffering of civilians, including the denial of essential aid. There must be no unlawful transfer of Palestinians from Gaza or within the West Bank, nor any reduction in the territory of the Gaza Strip.


The problem with this position is that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are not rogue extremists, but key ministers in Netanyahu’s government. They respectively hold the ministerial portfolios of national security and finance. The policies and words for which they are being individually censured are collectively those of Israel’s government as a whole.

The statement concludes: “We will continue to work with the Israeli Government and a range of partners,” but the main obstacle to its attaining its objectives, “an immediate ceasefire, the release now of the remaining hostages and for the unhindered flow of humanitarian aid including food,” and “a reconstructed Gaza no longer run by Hamas and a political pathway to a two-state solution,” is precisely the Israeli government itself. As, of course, Messrs. Carney, Starmer, and Macron very well know.

Their position, like much else in the West’s response to Israel’s actions since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, is incoherent. But the incoherence is revealing. The West is being tossed on the horns of an irresolvable dilemma—as it has been, in one form or another, since the foundation of the State of Israel and the Nakba of 1947-1948. This dilemma has assumed acute form since October 7.

If the West continues to support Israel’s “right to defend itself” as Israel interprets that “right,” then—as has become crystal clear over the last twenty months, and has once again been proven by Israel’s latest “pre-emptive strike” on Iran—it can do so only at the cost of trashing the norms of international humanitarian law and the cherished “Western” values of human rights and the universal rule of law upon which they supposedly rest. The supreme irony here is that Israel has repeatedly claimed to be waging this “war” in defense of the humanist values of Western civilization and against Islamist barbarism.

If, on the other hand, Western democracies are seriously to uphold those values and enforce the rule of law, they are morally and legally bound not simply to condemn Israel’s crimes but to take whatever concrete actions lie within their power to prevent them—including, at a minimum, stopping all arms supplies and applying economic and other sanctions (as has been done in the case of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine).

Stronger action might include international military intervention under United Nations auspices, like that which followed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

As just one example of this, in its landmark judgment on the legal status of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories—within which it counted blockaded Gaza—of July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and Israel must “end its unlawful presence… as rapidly as possible,” “cease immediately all new settlement activities, and… evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The court unambiguously spelled out the resulting obligations of all UN member states, including Canada:

all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.


In the same way, all 125 countries that signed the 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC)—the US is not among them, but Britain, France, Canada, the rest of the G7, Australia, New Zealand, and most members of the EU and NATO are—are legally bound to execute the court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, whether they approve of them or not.

The West cannot have its cake and eat it. Either it supports Israel, or it supports the rule of law. Israel’s “right to self-defense” does not permit war crimes or genocide, period.

More theatre for public consumption?

Two other recent initiatives that signalled apparent shifts in Western attitudes toward Israel’s ongoing Gaza “war” are worth mentioning here. Both have now been rudely sidelined by events.

The first was a conference, co-hosted by France and Saudi Arabia under UN auspices and scheduled to take place on June 17-20 in New York, at which it was hoped to make progress toward a two-state solution to “the Palestinian problem.” This “solution” is one to which Israel and its Western supporters have been nominally committed since the Oslo Accords of 1993-5, even though Netanyahu has repeatedly stated his opposition to any “attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel” on grounds that Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River… That collides with the idea of [Palestinian] sovereignty. What can we do?”

It was widely rumoured that France and Britain might recognize a Palestinian state at the conference in order to maintain pressure on Israel to stop the war in Gaza and return to the negotiating table. This led Donald Trump to call upon the world’s governments on June 10 to boycott the conference and threaten “diplomatic consequences” if they took “any steps that would unilaterally recognise a conjectural Palestinian state.”

Faced with this US threat, Macron was already backtracking on recognizing Palestine when Israel launched its “pre-emptive strike” on Iran. The new situation gave him the perfect off-ramp. On the same day as Israel attacked Iran, he announced that the two-state conference was indefinitely postponed “for logistical and security reasons.”

The second initiative—a poignant one, in retrospect—occurred at the UN. Meeting in an emergency session on June 12 , “the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional and lasting ceasefire in Gaza,” which:

strongly condemn[ed] the use of starvation as a weapon of war, demand[ed] a full lifting of the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid, and insist[ed] on the protection of civilians under international law.


A week earlier a similar resolution had failed to pass at the Security Council due to a lone veto by the US. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that the US government could not support any resolution that “draws a false equivalence between Israel and Hamas, or disregards Israel’s right to defend itself.” The rest of the UNSC voted in favour.

The General Assembly resolution passed with 149 votes in favour, 12 against, and 19 abstentions. Joining Israel, the US, and a sprinkling of US Pacific dependencies in the No lobby were Argentina, Hungary, and Paraguay—hardly paragons of liberal democracy. The rest of the G7, and most members of the EU and NATO,1 supported the motion.

The day after this near-universal condemnation of Israel by the international community, Israel attacked Iran. And everything changed overnight.

Come back Bibi, all is forgiven

“Game on. Pray for Israel,” posted the reliably odious US Senator Lindsey Graham on X upon hearing the news of Israel‘s strikes on Iran. His recent contributions to peace in the Middle East included the post “Hope Greta [Thunberg] and her friends can swim!”—an invitation for the IDF to attack the Madleen, on which activists were sailing to Gaza to draw attention to Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.

Before long, the mantra “pray for Israel” was broadcast far and wide, and sob stories of poor Israeli families having to spend the night in air-raid shelters began to appear in the Western press.

One could be forgiven for believing that Iran had launched a pre-emptive strike on Israel that killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in Tel Aviv and Haifa rather than the other way around.

Worse was to follow. Speaking with Israeli President Isaac Herzog “concerning the escalating situation in the Middle East” on June 13, President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen“reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself and protect its people.” She made no mention of the fact that Israel struck first.

On the same day Emmanuel Macron called “on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate” in an English-language statement on X that began: “France has repeatedly condemned Iran’s ongoing nuclear program” and continued “France reaffirms Israel’s right to defend itself and ensure its security.” He made no mention of Iran’s right to self-defense against Israeli strikes.

In a still more blatant masterpiece of Orwellian doublespeak, the German foreign ministry squarely blamed Iran for Israel’s latest aggression:

The situation in the Middle East has escalated dramatically overnight. Israel has carried out targeted strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran is responding with hundreds of drone attacks on Israel. This development is more than alarming.

We strongly condemn the indiscriminate Iranian attack on Israeli territory. Iran’s nuclear program violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty and poses a threat to the entire region—especially to Israel.

Israel has the right to defend its existence and the security of its citizens. At the same time, we call on all parties to avoid further escalation. Germany remains committed to diplomacy—together with our partners in Europe and the United States.


This conveniently overlooks the facts that unlike Iran, Israel declines to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, possesses a nuclear arsenal, and has refused to let the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspect its facilities; that in 2015 Iran agreed a deal with China, France, Russia, the UK, the US, and Germany to limit its nuclear program in exchange for relief on sanctions, which Donald Trump unilaterally scuppered in 2018; that negotiations between Iran and the US to renew such a deal were well advanced when Israel launched its attack (one of those assassinated in the first wave of targeted missiles was the leader of the Iranian negotiating team, Ali Shamkhani); and that as the IAEA has emphasized in a statement of June 13, “any military action that jeopardizes the safety and security of nuclear facilities risks grave consequences for the people of Iran, the region, and beyond.” But who cares when Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel famously defined German support for Israel, is at issue?

UK Finance Minister Rachel Reeves joined the chorus of condemnation of Iran, telling Sky News on June 15 that British military assets—including fighter jets—were being moved to the conflict zone “to protect ourselves and also potentially to support our allies.” While “this does not mean we are at war,” she said, these assets could “potentially” be used to help defend Israel and the government is “not ruling anything out.”

Canada’s about-turn is perhaps the most despicable of all. At least Germany had the honesty to acknowledge that Iran’s “indiscriminate attacks” came in response to Israel’s “targeted strikes.” Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s June 13 post fails to admit even this. For all we are told, “Iran’s attack upon Israel” came out of nowhere.

The sheer chutzpah boggles the mind. Anand remained silent on Israel’s attack on Iran. But as soon as Tehran retaliated, she was quick to announce that:

Canada condemns Iran’s attack on Israel, and urges restraint on both sides. Further actions can cause devastating consequences for the broader region. The US-Iran negotiations represent the best path to achieving a lasting and peaceful resolution to Iran’s nuclear program. Diplomatic engagement remains essential to ensuring long-term regional stability and international security. Iran cannot obtain nuclear weapons. Iran’s continued efforts to pursue nuclear weapons, support for terrorists, and direct attacks on civilian centres embody Iran’s persistent threat to regional stability and to Israel, which has the right to defend itself.


Once again, Israel’s absolute right to possess nuclear weapons, support terrorists, and direct attacks on civilian centers in Iran and elsewhere (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen …) in the name of “self-defense” goes unquestioned. If these are not “persistent threats to regional stability” I don’t know what that phrase means.

The next day Anand thanked Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar “for the conversation this evening,” adding: “Thank you to the brave firefighters who helped a Canadian embassy staff member in a building that was struck by a missile in Tel Aviv. She was eventually rescued, along with other occupants of the building, and is safe and sound.” How sweet.

They say a week is a long time in politics. As Nesrine Malik wrote in the Guardian on June 16, two days after I was nauseated by any such suggestion:

Stories of people dying of starvation in Gaza or of the hungry being killed while queueing for food, have fallen away from the headlines. The relentless assault on the West Bank and the expansion of illegal settlements has receded from view. The pressure that was beginning to build on Israel to let in more aid and honour a ceasefire has been replaced with the same mealy-mouthed defences that we saw in the early days of the war in Gaza, plus the same pabulum of urging “restraint.” The clock is reset.


Hats off to you, Bibi. With one small act of war, you’ve gaslit the whole Western world into dancing to your genocidal tune yet again.

By on

First published in Canadian Dimension/ June 7, 2025

Fire engulfs a classroom at the Fahmi Al-Jargawi School in Gaza City following an Israeli strike, May 26, 2025.

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 US 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 US 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 Independentagain 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 US 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.

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 US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who made himself notorious for his smirking defences of Israeli actions under the Biden administration, admitted in a Sky Newsinterview 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 member 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.

By on

The great institutions of liberal America are falling to Trump like dominoes, one by one

Canadian Dimension Derek Sayer / April 7, 2025 / 20 min read

Republished in Monthly Review Online, April 9, 2025.

US President Donald Trump in the White House Rose Garden. Photo by Daniel Torok.

A non-political civil service, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, USAID, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Scholarships, federal funding for scientific and medical research—the Washington Post, the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Ivy League universities, “big law”—the great institutions of liberal America are falling to Trump like dominoes, one by one. Those with the biggest reputations have all too often capitulated, starting with the Fourth Estate.

Anticipatory obedience

Obeying in advance began well before Trump’s inauguration on January 15. Last October Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder and ex-CEO of Amazon, sniffed the way the wind was blowing and intervened to cancel the editorial board’s proposed endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election.

The owner’s interference in the editorial independence of the storied paper whose journalists ended Richard Nixon’s presidency provoked the resignation of Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan and the loss of over 250,000 subscribers. Editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts and columnist Michele Norris, the first Black female host for National Public Radio (NPR), followed Kagan out the door.

The Los Angeles Times also backed out of endorsing any candidate on the orders of billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, which led Editorials Editor Mariel Garza to quit, together with editorial board members Karin Klein and Robert Greene. When Soon-Shiong’s 31-year-old daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, claimed that the family declined to endorse Harris “to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children” in Gaza, her father hastened to deny any such suggestion.

Early in January, the Washington Post refused to publish a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ann Telnaes that depicted Bezos, Soon-Shiong, and tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO of Meta) and Sam Altman (co-founder and CEO of OpenAI) offering “bags of money to a larger-than-life Trump statue standing on a decorated pedestal with its head just out of view.” Telneis resigned from the Post, where she had worked since 2008, in protest at this blatant act of political censorship.

Zuckerberg and Bezos have had their disagreements with Trump in the past. But along with other billionaires, both were a prominent presence at his inauguration. So was Elon Musk. Well before their current bromance bloomed, Musk had tried to ingratiate himself with Trump by reinstating his account on X (formerly Twitter). His Latin comment “Vox populi, vox dei” (the voice of the people is the voice of God) reads ominously in retrospect.

Meta hastened to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed after his banning from Facebook following the January 6, 2020 assault on the Capitol, and obligingly replaced independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram with X-style user-generated “community notes.” Independent fact-checkers were “too politically biased,” explained Zuckerberg, and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression.”

On February 26 Bezos instructed Washington Post editorial staff that from now on only opinions supportive of “personal liberties” and “free markets” would be accepted for the opinion pages of the paper, and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned. Bezos says he asked Shipley whether he wanted to stay on, suggesting “if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’” Ain’t free expression great?

Billionaires have much to gain from cozying up to Trump—like a $4.5 trillion tax cut and a bonfire of environmental and other regulations—and even more to lose if they don’t. For those less willing to kiss the ring, the administration has other means of persuasion.

Muzzling the media

Speaking at the Conservative Policy Action Conference (CPAC) on February 23, 2024, MAGA cheerleader Kash Patel urged:

We [must] collectively join forces to take on the most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen, and no it’s not Washington, DC, it’s the mainstream media and these people out there in the fake news. That is our mission!


A year later, MAGA’s war against the media is raging on all fronts.

Among other “intimidation tactics” (as the New York Times rightly describes them) designed to control the news, the Trump administration has removed Associated Press reporters from the White House press pool; stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its historic role in deciding which journalists have access to the president; and attempted to dismantle Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which Trump accuses of a “leftist bias” and failing to project “pro-American” values.

The New York Times may complain about Trump vilifying its star correspondents, but it is not above self-censorship when it matters. Per CNN, on April 5, “1,400 “Hands Off!” mass-action protests were held at state capitols, federal buildings, congressional offices, Social Security’s headquarters, parks and city halls throughout the entire country,” and involved “millions of people.” One of the largest marches stretched for 20 city blocks on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The Times reported it on page 18 of its Sunday print edition.

The DOGE Subcommittee of Congress, headed by Trump’s ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, has threatened the public broadcast networks NPR and PBS, whose CEOs it summoned on March 26 “to explain why the demonstrably biased news coverage they produce for an increasingly narrow and elitist audience should continue to be funded by the broad taxpaying public.”

Trump has meanwhile extorted $15 million from ABC News in an out-of-court settlement of a defamation case over its reporting of the E. Jean Carroll trials, and his campaign is suing the Daily Beast for defamation in “a transparent attempt to intimidate The Beast and silence the independent press.” Other intimidatory litigation is ongoing against CBS News, the Des Moines Register, and the Pulitzer Board.

“Hands Off!” protesters rally against the second administration of President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, April 5, 2025. Photo by G. Edward Johnson/Wikimedia Commons.

Mugging the lawyers

Trump has used executive orders to go after several top law firms who have taken cases and represented clients he doesn’t like. An order against the law firm Jenner & Block, for example, punished it for pro bono representation of transgender people and immigrants. The sanctions imposed on this and other practices include removing their lawyers’ security clearances, barring federal agencies from doing business with them, and excluding them from federal government buildings—including the courts.

An executive memorandum of March 22, aimed at immigration lawyers in particular, directs “the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States,” rendering pursuit of any lawsuit against any government agency a risky proposition.

While Jenner & Block and two other firms are challenging these orders in court, four other “big law” outfits—Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps, Milbank, and Willkie Farr—have not only caved to Trump’s demands, but agreed to commit millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to causes that Trump supports in order to avoid being sanctioned. Best keep on the right side of the boss, even if the boss is clearly on the wrong side of the law.

Defending “all firms and lawyers who fight against this president’s lawless executive actions,” senior partners of the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters wrote:

We sympathize. We take seriously our obligations to our clients, our associates, our staff and their families. But at this crucial moment, clients need to find their courage, too. And partners at big firms—who often earn millions a year—must be willing to take financial risks when the fate of our nation, the future of our profession and the rule of law itself are at stake.

You can support a lawyer’s right to represent unpopular clients and causes against powerful forces—essentially the oath we all took when becoming members of the bar. Or you can sit back, check your bank balance and watch your freedoms, along with the legal system and the tripartite system of government we should not take for granted, swirl down the drain.

Playing the terrorism card

Citing a provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act that empowers the government to deport people if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe their presence in the country “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident and recent graduate student at Columbia University, in front of his eight-months pregnant wife—who is an American citizen—and have since detained him first in New Jersey, then in Louisiana. The only thing preventing him from being deported is a court challenge.

Khalil’s offense is the leading role he played in last year’s protests at Columbia University against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. However, as his lawyers emphasize:

Mr. Khalil has never been accused, charged or convicted of any crime. He was ripped from his home, detained and threatened with deportation in retaliation for his political beliefs. His case represents a clear attempt by the Trump administration to silence dissent, intimidate our universities and attack our freedom.


Khalil’s case is the first of many. Others (we know of) include Badar Khan Suri, Yunseo Chung, Ranjani Srinivasan, Alireza Doroudi, and Momodou Taal.

Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk, who is in the US on an F-1 visa, was snatched off the street by masked and anonymous ICE agents, transferred to a detention facility 1,500 miles away with no access to a lawyer, and threatened with deportation for no other “crime” than that she coauthored an op-ed for the school’s student newspaper whose contents Secretary of State Marco Rubio doesn’t like.

According to his own testimony, Rubio has since retrospectively revoked the visas of hundreds other foreign student “lunatics” on grounds that their social media posts show them to be a threat to national security, leaving them liable to deportation without due process, “potentially to countries other than a student’s homeland” (my emphasis).

This is exactly what happened to 238 Venezuelan migrants, who have been deported to El Salvador and imprisoned without trial in the notoriously brutal Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca. They were alleged members of the “terrorist” criminal gang Tren de Aragua, but this has never been established in court. In this case Trump has perverted the 1798 Enemies Alien Act to define Tren de Aragua as “invaders” of the United States. The sole “evidence” connecting the gay makeup artist Andry José Hernández Romero with the gang was his crown tattoos—which are traditional in his Venezuelan hometown.

The message is: keep your head down, your nose clean, and your mouth shut and you’ll be OK. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel as FBI director has set many alarm bells ringing. Patel’s resumé is long on “counter-terrorism,” and boasts of “working with our nation’s tier one special forces units to conduct collaborative global targeting operations in almost every theater of war worldwide.” Now he’s bringing it all back home. Specious associations of “terrorism” are being used to launch a real reign of terror.

The Trump Kennedy Center

On February 7, Trump posted a surprise announcement on Truth Social regarding the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, whose annual awards ceremony he had ostentatiously shunned during his first term in the White House:

At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN. I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!


Trump went on to fire two dozen members of the traditionally bipartisan board and replaced them with MAGA loyalists, including the wives of Vice President J.D. Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (and her mother Cheri Summerall), mega-donor Patricia Duggan, Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartilomo, and the spouses of several business allies.

Trump then had the trustees elect him chairman in place of billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein; ousted the center’s long-serving director Deborah Sutter and other senior staff members; and installed Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence, as interim president. Grenell told CPAC that his vision for the center was “to make art great again,” with “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”

Trump promised his supporters that “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP.” Instead, he wants the center to stage Camelot, Hello Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera. The fact that only Phantom is currently playing in North America—these respectively premiered in 1960, 1963, 1964, 1981, and 1986—seems not to have deterred him.

Meantime, in one of those richly symbolic details where the devil likes to lurk, records of the 2023 production of 1776, in which a multiracial cast of female, trans, and non-binary performers donned breeches, buckle shoes, and wigs to impersonate America’s all-white Founding Fathers, have been disappeared from the center’s website.

A dozen center staff, including Ellen Palmer, vice president of corporate engagement, and Leslie Miller, the senior vice president of development, quit over the MAGA takeover. Actor Issa Rae, TV producer (of Scandal and Bridgerton fame) Shonda Rhimes, opera singer Renée Fleming, and musicians Rhiannon Giddens and Ben Folds and other artists cut ties with the center or canceled upcoming performances.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, which had been scheduled to run for several weeks in 2026—and would likely have been the highest-grossing event of the season—was pulled by its producer. Miranda explained: “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center.”

Donations are drying up, ticket sales have plummeted, and revenues have tanked. No matter. The Great American Cultural Revolution must go on.

Inside the museums diversity goes up on trial

Back in 2021, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC announced that its “strategic priority” was to “focus on diversity, equity, access and inclusion throughout our work to diversify the stories we tell, the ways in which we tell them, and our staff.”

Metrics for measuring the plan’s success included increasing gender, racial, and ethnic diversity in acquisitions, as well as “progress toward special exhibitions and installations of the permanent collection … that tell non-Euro-centric art stories … [and] include a significant percentage of non-white artists and women artists.”

Over the next three years the museum “hired its first curator of African American art, recruited trustees of color to the board and began mounting more shows by women and artists of color.” That process of liberal enlightenment has now come to an abrupt halt.

In response to Trump’s executive order of January 20 banning “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)” in all agencies and entities of the federal government, the NGA announced that it had “closed its office of belonging and inclusion and removed related language from our website.”

The NGA is not an agency or entity of the federal government, and the US is not the Soviet Union or North Korea. The president cannot (yet) simply decree what the NGA and other museums are permitted to exhibit. But the NGA receives 80 percent of its operating budget from the federal government and was hardly in a position to argue.

Fears of losing federal funding likely also explain why the National Endowment for the Arts has eliminated Challenge America grants designed to “extend the reach of the arts to underserved groups/communities,” instead prioritizing “projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America (America250).” Discretion is the better part of valour.

Whitewashing the past

Perhaps the most ominous piece of MAGA cultural regulation to date is Trump’s March 27 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Trump begins:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.


Remembering, perhaps, the widespread interrogation of exactly whose histories were being commemorated in public spaces that followed the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the order directs the secretary of the interior to:

take action … to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.


Trump reserves his fiercest fire for the Smithsonian Institution—whose 21 museums, 21 libraries, and 14 education and research centres in Washington, DC make it one of the largest and most influential knowledge complexes on the planet. He is appalled that:

the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”


The clear implication is that if white people dominate American society, the reasons must lie in the biological superiority of the white “race,” not in a history built on the twin pillars of genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of millions of Africans. The undisguised fascist roots of Trump’s worldview are on display here for all to see.

The order goes on to direct J.D. Vance, in his capacity as a member of the board of regents, to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and “ensure that future appropriations … prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that … promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

The Smithsonian has yet to formally respond. But again, though it is not part of any branch of US government, two-thirds of the institution’s $1.25 billion annual budget comes from federal allocations. Secretary Lonnie Bunch, who founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), faces a difficult choice.

NMAAHC was another target of Trump’s executive order. The poet Kevin Young, Bunch’s successor as NMAAHC director, was put on indefinite leave on March 10. He resigned “to focus on his writing” on April 4.

The war on science and education

The administration started softening up America’s universities early in Trump’s second term, with cuts to federal research funding causing hiring freezes, lab closures, layoffs, cuts in graduate admissions, and the withdrawal of job offers. MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania were among the schools affected.

At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which now falls under the jurisdiction of vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr., grant review panels were suspended, blocking millions of dollars in funding for medical research.

On March 27, Kennedy announced 10,000 job losses, including leaders of divisions regulating food and drugs, studying chronic diseases and the risks of environmental disasters, and targeting HIV prevention. Among those fired were eleven principal investigators, who lead research teams. One senior NIH scientist predicted the result would be “chaos,” with cutting-edge neurological research particularly at risk.

It speaks volumes that the hundreds of “words federal agencies are now discouraged from using” (per a New York Times compilation of government documents) include not only Black, disabilities, equality, gender, historically, indigenous community, transgender, and women, but also clean energy, climate crisis, and climate science.

During the night of April 3, state humanities councils and recipients of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) began receiving emails telling them their funding was ending immediately because the agency would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda.”

The new acting director of the agency, Michael McDonald, who was appointed after his predecessor Sally Lowe was forced to resign “at the direction of president Trump,” told senior NEH staff that upward of 85 percent of the agency’s current grants would be canceled. In the future, NEH would focus on “patriotic programming.” The New York Times had previously reported that DOGE wanted to cut 80 percent of NEH’s 180 staff.

Though the NEH is not about to find a cure for cancer—that prospect just grew a lot more distant thanks to the cuts at the NIH—we should be in no doubt of the magnitude of the stakes here. According to its website:

NEH is the only federal agency in the United States dedicated to funding the humanities. Since its founding in 1965, NEH has awarded over $6 billion in grants to museums, historic sites, colleges, universities, K–12 teaching, libraries, public television and radio stations, research institutions, independent scholars, and to its humanities council affiliates in each of the nation’s 56 states and jurisdictions. Panels of independent, external reviewers examine and select top-rated proposals to receive grants.


Who needs experts? On this as on everything else, the self-professed stable genius in the White House knows best.

The antisemitism canard

Alongside these cuts, Trump’s administration has attacked academic freedom under cover of combatting “antisemitism”—which in Trump’s America, like in Biden’s America, has been redefined to encompass virtually any criticism of Israel’s “plausibly genocidal” actions in Gaza, even when the critics are Jewish.

On March 7, Trump’s so-called Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The statement went on:

The decisive action by the DOJ, HHS, ED, and GSA to cancel Columbia’s grants and contracts serves as a notice to every school and university that receives federal dollars that this administration will use all the tools at its disposal to protect Jewish students and end anti-Semitism on college campuses.


On March 10, the Department of Education—a body Trump is committed to abolishing, but which in the meantime has its uses—put sixty elite institutions on notice that they were under investigation for “antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”

In fact, under President Minouche Shafik, who resigned under Republican pressure in August 2024, and her successor Katrina Armstrong, Columbia bent over backwards to protect Jewish students.

Among other measures, the university restricted access to campus to those carrying Columbia ID; tightened up event policies; revamped procedures “to report allegations of hate speech, harassment, and other forms of disruptive behavior, including antisemitic behavior”; “enhanced reporting channels … supplementing internal resources through a team of outside investigators”; established an antisemitism task force; banned student societies, including Jewish Voice for Peace; twice invited NYPD armed riot police onto campus to break up protests, leading to scores of arrests; disciplined student protestors; removed three deans for allegedly antisemitic text messages; and forced law professor Katherine Franke into early retirement for her claim that “students who “come right out of their military service” have “been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus”—a reference to a case in which ex-IDF Columbia students sprayed protestors with an unknown substance, sending several of them to hospital.

It is difficult to see what more the university could reasonably have done to protect its Jewish community—many of whose members were (and are) active in the protests. But facts (and Jews) are not what matter here. It’s all about messaging.

As New York Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Adriano Espaillat wrote in a joint statement:

Revoking federal grants to Columbia University isn’t about combating anti-Semitism; it’s about the Trump administration’s war on education and science … Today’s announcement does nothing to keep Jewish students safe and sends a chilling message that universities must align with the MAGA agenda or face financial ruin.


The administration has since threatened to axe billions of dollars in federal funding from Princeton, Harvard, Brown, and other elite universities over their alleged tolerance of antisemitism, and has suspended $175 million in research grants to the University of Pennsylvania over a transgender swimmer who last represented the school in 2022.

Bending the knee

Faced with the threat of further cuts in funding, Columbia caved to Trump’s blackmail, agreeingamong other measures to ban face masks, hire 36 “special officers” to arrest individuals, and install a “senior vice-provost” to take over running the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies, with a mandate to “review all aspects of leadership and curriculum.”

Scores of schools, including UCLA, the University of Florida, Georgia Tech, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, Texas A & M, the United States Naval Academy, the University of Virginia, and the entire University of North Carolina and University of Texas systems hastened to close DEI offices, dismantle DEI programs, and purge DEI statements from their websites.

Harvard—the richest university in the world, with an endowment of $53.2 billion—suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer. NYU cancelled a talk on challenges in humanitarian crises by Dr Joanne Liu, a former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, over the content of some of her slides. They dared to mention casualties in Gaza and cuts at USAID.

Yale fired the Iranian legal scholar Helyeh Doutaghi, a prominent critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, for her alleged connections with a Palestinian charity the US government has designated as a fundraiser for terrorism. Johns Hopkins instructed faculty, staff, and students not to obstruct ICE officers if they try to arrest any member of the university community on campus, nor tip off anyone that ICE was hunting them, “or engage in any behavior in an effort to enable them to leave the premises or hide.”

A few brave holdouts like Brown, Tufts, the Rutgers University Senate, and one lonely University of Michigan dean at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design have stood up against the Trump administration’s pressure, but many more institutions have not.

Even Barack Obama—who like former Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Joe Biden has kept disgracefully quiet about Trump’s assault on liberal America—was moved to comment:

If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?

If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.

The chickens come home to roost

With a handful of exceptions—the most notable being Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee, and other members of “the Squad”—the Democrats have mounted no significant opposition to Trump’s blitzkrieg.

Rather than boycotting—or even showing up and turning their backs on—Trump’s address to both houses of Congress on March 3, Hakeem Jeffreys called upon his colleagues to maintain a “strong, determined and dignified” presence. Under the leadership of Chuck Schumer, enough Senate Democrats voted with the Republicans to confirm almost all Trump’s appointments and pass a funding bill House Democrats characterized as “an assault on critical programs for vulnerable Americans.”

Kamala Harris made herself notorious for shutting up hecklers who dared protest her policy on Gaza during the election campaign with her catchphrase “I’m speaking”—a stance that may well have cost her the election. A YouGov poll released on January 20 showed that “29 percent of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 cited ‘ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ as their reason for withholding their vote.” This may have been enough to tip the balance in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which would have put Harris in the White House had the vote gone the other way. Now, the only speaking Harris is doing is to real estate conventions in Australia (where she is listed as giving “no interviews” to the media).

The high point of the Democrats’ “resistance” is Cory Booker’s 25-hour Senate speech, which beat the previous record for bloviating set by the arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond filibustering the Civil Rights Act in 1957. In all of that time Booker did not once mention the genocide in Gaza—or the repression of protests in the US.

Two days later Booker voted against Bernie Sanders’ attempt to block $8.8 billion in new arms sales to Israel, including more than 35,000 2000-pound bombs whose sale the Biden administration had suspended. His two motions were defeated by majorities of 83-15 and 82-15. Only 14 Democrats (out of 45) strayed from the party line.

And here, in a nutshell, is the problem. The Democrats cannot credibly lead resistance to Trump’s trampling on democratic norms and the rule of law in America because that is exactly what the Biden–Harris administration—along with most other Western governments—had been doing in relation to Gaza for the last 18 months.

In the words of the activist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking to an audience of students at the University of Michigan on February 21:

We are in a moment right now where people are asking themselves, ‘Why can’t the Democratic Party defend this assault on democracy?’” However you take the state of democracy in America to be … I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, if you can’t fight for something that is so blatantly and obviously unjust, if you can’t oppose the 2,000 [pound] bombs dropped on schools and on hospitals, what does everything else mean?

By on

US in meltdown, Palestine genocide back on, West very concerned

Canadian Dimension, Derek Sayer / March 24, 2025 / 16 min read

Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things—that’s all.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”


—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Not for the first time in the last 18 months, recent events in the Middle East and the United States have had me marvelling at the shiftiness of words.

On Saturday, March 15, three days before Donald Trump’s promised all hell once again broke loose in Gaza, I read in the Guardian that:

The current fragile pause in hostilities in Gaza has come under further threat with Hamas hardening its negotiating positions amid new Israeli airstrikes in the devastated territory.

The first phase of the ceasefire agreement ended two weeks ago but Israel is refusing to implement the scheduled second phase, which is supposed to end with its withdrawal from Gaza, the freedom of all remaining hostages held by Hamas, and a definitive end to the conflict.

Currently, both sides have refrained from returning to war, though Israel has conducted an intensifying series of airstrikes in Gaza that have killed dozens of Palestinians. (My emphasis)


If conducting “an intensifying series of airstrikes that have killed dozens of Palestinians” is not a “return to war,” I exploded, then what was it?

When is a ceasefire not a ceasefire?

The “ceasefire agreement” was announced on January 15—just in time for Donald Trump’s inauguration—and came into operation four days later. It was a funny sort of ceasefire. Hamas kept its side of the bargain and didn’t fire a single rocket into Israel during the truce. But between January 22 and March 11 at least 700 Palestinians were killed by the IDF or their bodies retrieved from areas medics could not access before.

Just one Israeli was killed in Gaza during that same period, a contractor Israeli forces “misidentifiedas [a] threat as he arrived at IDF post in civilian clothing” and shot.

Israel also failed to withdraw its troops from the so-called Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, as promised in the agreement. Instead of moving on to Phase 2 of the ceasefire, it demanded that Hamas accept a new proposal from Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to prolong Phase 1 through Ramadan and Passover in exchange for immediate release of half of Hamas’s remaining hostages, but with no guarantee that Israel would implement the already agreed terms of Phase 2 thereafter.

Hamas’s reluctance to accept this unilateral shifting of the goalposts was what the Guardian meant when it spoke of Hamas “hardening its negotiating positions.”

Although the agreement mandated the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza, Israel obstructed the delivery of tents, prefabricated homes, and heavy machinery into the strip, where over 90 percent of the population have been (to use the media’s favoured euphemism) “displaced” and are attempting to survive the winter in the bombed-out hellscape in which their homes have been reduced to piles of rubble. While for a time Israel did allow the flow of food aid to increase, it continued to block everything else it considered “dual use,” from scalpels and scissors to scaffolding and generators.

On March 2 the Israeli government went further and decided “to prevent any entry of goods and supplies into Gaza”—whether from aid agencies or commercial sources—in order to pressurize Hamas to accept the Witkoff proposal. Since that date, no trucks have been allowed through the Gaza crossings, all of which Israel controls.

Tightening the screw, a week later Israel cut off all remaining electricity supplies (most had already been stopped after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023), crippling the desalination plant that supplies Gaza’s already depleted supply of clean drinking water.

This reimposition of seige conditions on Gaza’s desperate civilian population was widely condemned internationally—though not, needless to say, by the United States. The foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the UK issued a joint statement warning that “Humanitarian aid should never be contingent on a ceasefire or used as a political tool.”

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy, normally a staunch defender of Israel, went so far as to tell the House of Commons on March 17 “This is a breach of international law.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer soon slapped him down. A Downing Street spokesperson later clarified that in Britain’s view “Israel’s actions in Gaza are at clear risk of breaching international humanitarian law,” without accusing Israel of actually having done so. They added: “The government is not an international court, and … it is up to courts to make judgments.”

They neglected to mention that the world’s two highest courts, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have both (severally) ruled that Israel is in flagrant breach of international humanitarian law.

Four months ago the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.” The indictment states:

both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity … [as well as] impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law …


These are the very things Israel resumed doing while the ceasefire was still in operation.

Two days after the ceasefire went into effect in Gaza, the IDF launched a major offensive in the occupied West Bank, attacking Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur al-Shams refugee camps and “displacing” 40,000 residents. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz told the troops to prepare for an “extended stay” of at least a year and “prevent the return of residents.”

Per UNRWA, this is “by far the single longest Israeli Forces’ operation in the West Bank since the second intifada in the early 2000s … causing the largest population displacement since the 1967 war.” As of March 4, 90 Palestinians, including at least 17 children, had been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of this year.

Through the looking glass

While for the Guardian all this still did not amount to “returning to war,” the word “war” was taking on a whole new range of meanings in Washington.

In pursuit of his objective of ridding America of the “illegal immigration … poisoning the blood of our nation,” Trumpty Dumpty has now invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants not to Venezuela but to a third country, El Salvador. They have been imprisoned in the notoriously brutal Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, condemned to hard labor for a year—a term that is indefinitely renewable.

The similarities to Israel’s “administrative detention,” in which 3,327 prisoners/hostages were held as of December 31, 2024 without charge and (as documented in multiple reports) beaten, starved, raped, tortured, and brutalized, have been duly noted.

These deportees have not been given access to due process in either the US or El Salvador. The only proof of their alleged involvement in the criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), which was designated a “terrorist organization” by the State Department in February, is the US administration’s assertion of their membership. Evidence of that involvement has not been presented in the courts of either country, and the accused have been given no opportunity to access lawyers or to defend their case. In several instances, distraught family members have convincingly attested their innocence.

Compounding the illegality, the flights violated US judge James E. Boasberg’s court order temporarily forbidding the deportations (and his verbal injunction that the planes must turn back if they were already in the air). Trump’s “border Tsar” Tom Homan was unapologetic, telling Fox News “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care.”

Passed in 1798 in anticipation of hostilities with France, the Alien Enemies Act has only been used three times in its entire history, all of them during actual wars.

Its most notorious invocation was by Franklin D. Roosevelt after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to facilitate the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals in the US (the internment of Japanese American citizens had a different legal basis). Internment was later acknowledged to be a grave injustice. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 gave survivors reparations and a formal apology by President Reagan.

The Alien Enemies Act states:

Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.


Pretty clearly—to anybody who understands plain English, which is now, thanks to Trump, the sole official language of the United States—the US is not involved in a “declared war” with the Venezuelan nation or government, TdA is not a part of the Venezuelan military, and nobody has “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” an “invasion or predatory incursion” into US territory in any usual sense of the words.

The US president, incidentally, does not have the authority to declare war. That power exclusively belongs to Congress.

But the Master makes words mean exactly what he chooses them to mean—neither more nor less. According to Trump’s presidential proclamation,

Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States … Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens.


So, we must conclude, while in Gaza an intensifying series of air strikes killing dozens—or more accurately, hundreds—of Palestinians does not constitute an act of war, the US is the victim of a “invasion” launched by Venezuela involving neither ground troops nor air power, but whose “devastating effects” nevertheless justify the suspension of normal due process rights under the US constitution. Truly we are living in the upside-down.

The never-ending, ever-expanding “war on terror”

Just how upside-down our reality has become is well illustrated in an affidavit filed on March 17 in Justice Boasberg’s court. Attempting to justify the summary deportation of the Venezuelans, Robert L. Cerna, acting field office director for ICE’s enforcement and removal operations in part of Texas, argued that:

While it is true that many of the TdA members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile. (My emphasis)


Read it again. Perverse as it sounds, Cerna is saying that the absence of evidence of criminal activity on the part of the alleged TdA gang members should itself be taken as proof of their being “terrorists”! This is the dystopian world imagined in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the party slogan is “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”

The Oxford Dictionary defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” This is a relatively restrictive definition, which limits the use of the term to illegal uses of violence or threats thereof, principally against civilians, in support of political objectives.

Unfortunately in recent years—and in particular, since George W. Bush declared a “Global War on Terror” following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—the semantic boundaries of the term “terror” have been expanded, while its meanings have become less and less precise.

Because of, rather than in spite of, this imprecision, “terror” has become the perfect floating signifier, in which the horror that is evoked by memories of 9-11, or the 2015 Charlie Hebdo killings, or the 2017 massacre at Ariana Grande’s Manchester Arena concert, is transferred onto whoever and whatever governments choose to demonize and provides the justification for taking extraordinary measures against them.

Meaning is assigned, in other words, acording to the dictates of power. As with Humpty Dumpty, the question is which is to be master—that’s all.

The “war on terror” provided the cover for the American-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003—a conflict based on faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, which led to from 150,000 to one million civilian deaths.

It also gave us the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, extraordinary renditions, and Guantánamo Bay internment camp, which despite many promises remained in use throughout the Obama and Biden presidencies (and is now being refashioned by the Trump administration to warehouse deported migrants).

These latter operate in a shadowy state of exception beyond the reach of law, but the law itself has also been mobilized in the war on terror in ways that are no less detrimental to civil liberties. In many western jurisdictions legislation that is ostensibly designed to prevent support for organizations designated by governments as “terrorist” has the effect of criminalizing speech or actions, like protest demonstrations, that otherwise would be perfectly legal, and empowering the state to surveil and intimidate a wide range of dissident opinion which goes well beyond “terrorism” as usually understood.

In the UK, for example, last August a police swat team conducted a dawn raid on the London home of Asa Winstanley, associate editor at The Electronic Intifada news site, and seized his electronic devices. Earlier in the month another pro-Palestinian journalist, Richard Medhurst, was detained and questioned for 24 hours at Heathrow Airport.

Both times the police were acting under the “Encouragement of Terrorism” and “Dissemination of Terrorist Publications” sections of the UK’s 2006 Terrorism Act, which carry a maximum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment. This “disturbing pattern of weaponizing counter-terrorism laws against reporters,” argued the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, is having “a chilling effect on journalism and public service reporting in the United Kingdom.”

Donald Trump and his minions have also discovered they can make “terrorism” mean many different things, depending on the political needs of the moment.

Trump has designated international drug cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” despite the fact that their aims are criminal rather than political. He is reportedly also considering designating “illicit fentanyl” as a “weapon of mass destruction.” While the former order provided the basis for invoking the Enemy Aliens Act in the case of the Venezuelan deportees, the latter could be used to justify military action against Mexico or Canada, both of which he has accused of supporting the trafficking of fentanyl across the US border, while repeatedly threatening to annex Canada as the “51st state.”

More recently, when asked whether the wave of vandalism against Tesla dealerships should be treated as “domestic terrorism,” Donald Trump replied:

I’ll do it. I’m going to stop them … because they’re harming a great American company. When you hurt an American company, especially a company like this that supplies so many jobs that others are unable to do.


Attorney General Pam Bondi followed up with a statement that described “the swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property” as “nothing short of domestic terrorism” and promised “We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

I am not for a moment suggesting that such violent attacks should go unpunished. The point is that the administration doesn’t need to invoke “domestic terrorism”—which hitherto, in the US, has mostly been the province of the extreme right—to prosecute vandalism or arson. The existing legal framework suffices. But this is not about the law.

Trumping constitutional rights

The Trump administration has made its intention to use the canard of “terrorism” to go after political dissidents crystal clear. While the main target at this time is academic and other critics of Israel, there is no reason to believe the persecution will stop there.

Commenting on March 10 on what is rightly being seen as one of the most critical legal cases of modern times, Trump posted the following on his Truth Social network:

Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you! (My emphasis)


Khalil was a leading figure in last year’s student protests against Columbia University’s links with Israel. He is not, however, by any stretch a “terrorist sympathizer,” and can only be misrepresented as such if all criticism of Israel is equated with support for Hamas.

The details of Khalil’s arrest, transfer from New Jersey to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, and attempted deportation (which at the time of writing has temporarily been blocked by the courts) have been well covered in the mainstream media.

What matters here that Khalil is a Green Card holder, which is to say, a legal permanent resident of the United States, who has not been accused, let alone convicted, of any crime. He is being expelled from the US, in his own words, for “exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza“—a right that is supposedly protected by the First Amendment to the US constitution.

The sole basis for Khalil’s attempted deportation is that “that the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe that his presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The secretary of state is not required to provide any evidence in support of that belief.

The administration maintains that judges who interfere in the use of executive fiat to deport are exceeding their authority. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump fumed apropos Justice Boasberg, whom he called a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge” and a “troublemaker.”

“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced after Khalil’s arrest. “He’s going to leave—and so are others. We’re going to keep doing it,” he reiterated on Face the Nation.

In another recent case, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at a medical center affiliated with Brown University, was denied re-entry to the US after visiting her parents in Lebanon because immigration officials deemed her to be a supporter of Hezbollah. The “evidence” for this was photos and videos on her phone of the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated in an Israeli air strike, which was attended by “hundreds of thousands” of mourners. It was only “common sense security,” Trump officials claimed. Once again, Dr Alawieh was denied due process.

We can expect many more summary deportations to follow. This is an administration that means business, and shows little inclination to be restrained by the niceties of law.

In Israel, back in October, the Knesset adopted two laws designating UNRWA—the principal channel for distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza—as a “terrorist organization,” banning it from operating in Israel or the occupied territories. Donald Trump has meantime publicly mused about removing Gaza’s surviving Palestinian population and repurposing the strip, under American auspices, as a “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Terror is as terror does

The Guardian finally acknowledged that Israel had “returned to war” in Gaza on March 18, when it reported that the IDF had “launched attacks that killed more than 400 people in the devastated Palestinian territory, in the bloodiest single day of violence since the first months of the war in 2023.”

The next day the paper carried an editorial which laid the blame for “shattering the two-month ceasefire that had brought a fragile peace and relief to Gaza” squarely on Israel.

Among the casualties of Israel’s air strikes in the early morning hours of March 18, when most people will have been asleep in their tents or makeshift shelters, were 174 children and 89 women. I mention this not because I consider the lives of Palestinian men of any less importance but because it underlines the fact that now, as throughout the war, the principal victims—and indeed targets—of Israel’s actions in Gaza have been civilians.

I was wrong, however, when I asked earlier what this was if not a “return to war.”

What Israel has done to Gaza in the last 18 months is obscenely violent, not to say monstrously disproportionate—as of March 20, the official death toll in Gaza had climbed to 49,617, as compared with the 1,139 killed in Israel during Hamas’s October 7 attack, of whom one-third were members of the IDF, police, or kibbutz security guards and an unknown number died from IDF “friendly fire.”

But this is not a war, in the accepted meaning of the word. It is, rather, a collective punishment by an occupying power, in which Hamas’s October 7 attacks—which also according to the ICC involved war crimes and crimes against humanity, albeit on a much smaller scale—provided the Israeli state with the opportunity to further the process of ethnic cleansing, if necessary by genocide, of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine that began with the Nakba of 1948 and now appears to be reaching its Final Solution.

In a video broadcast on March 19, Yoav Gallant’s successor as Defense Minister Israel Katz didn’t even try to hide his government’s agenda. His remarks were addressed not to Hamas, but to Gaza’s civilian population:

Residents of Gaza, this is a final warning. If all the Israeli hostages are not released and Hamas is not eliminated from Gaza Israel will act with forces you have never known before. Take the advice of the US president. Return the hostages and eliminate Hamas, and other options will open up for you—including going to other places in the world for those who wish. The alternative is complete destruction and devastation.


There is a word for “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” It’s called terrorism.

By on

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we’re watching a not-so-slow-motion coup in real time

Canadian Dimension, Derek Sayer / March 10, 2025 / 11 min read

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in 2019. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

“This is going to be great television, I will say that,” said Donald Trump at the end of the February 28 “Oval Office showdown” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

When Vice President JD Vance complained that Zelensky was “trying to fight it out in the American media” rather than “litigating” their disagreements behind closed doors, Trump cut in:

But you see, I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on. I think it’s very important. That’s why I kept this going so long.


The president made by reality TV knew exactly what he was doing. The “Oval Office showdown” was one in a procession of choreographed spectacles—Trump signing a tsunami of executive orders surrounded by his adoring disciples, Elon Musk brandishing a symbolic chainsaw at CPAC—designed to shock and awe the world into submission.

The MAGA revolution

As anybody not living on a desert island without internet access cannot fail to have noticed, Donald Trump has begun his second term in the White House with a flourish.

A Republican budget promising $5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich and enhanced funds for the military and immigration enforcement, to be financed by $880 billion in cuts to public expenditure, threatening the social security and medicare and medicaid on which poorer Americans rely, was only to be expected from the party of Jesus.

But the speed and comprehensiveness of the rest of Trump’s MAGA revolution has left many reeling, not just in the US (or Canada) but across the globe. It is astonishing just how much has been done—and undone—in just six weeks.

The following list is not exhaustive.

Foreign relations

Trump has:

  • Withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Paris Climate Agreement, and the United Nations Human Rights Council, and ordered a review of US funding and involvement in the UN, including the “anti-American” UNESCO.
  • Frozen all foreign aid while dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID), cancelling “about 90 percent of the agency’s work and tens of billions of dollars in spending” and devastating humanitarian aid projects across the world.
  • Voted against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; stopped offensive cyber-operations against Russia; and directed the State and Treasury departments to draw up a plan to give Russia relief from sanctions.
  • Trashed EU and NATO states (see speeches by Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth), and threatened not to defend NATO allies “if they don’t pay”
  • Suspended military support for Ukraine and paused the flow of intelligence to Kyiv.
  • Floated a plan to expel Gaza’s two-million-strong Palestinian population and transform the strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East” under US control.
  • Sanctioned International Criminal Court officials and family members for the court’s indictment of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
  • Rescinded the Biden administrations temporary pause on supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, and used emergency powers to bypass Congress and “expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel.”
  • Threatened to annex Greenland (“I think we’re going to get it—one way or the other, we’re going to get it”), “take back” the Panama Canal, and apply economic pressure on Canada to force it to become “a cherished and beautiful 51st state.”
  • Imposed 20 percent tariffs on Chinese goods and 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, and promised unspecified tariffs on the EU (which Trump says “was formed to screw the United States”).

Immigration and the border

Trump has:

  • Declared a national emergency and halted asylum at the US–Mexico border; suspended the refugee resettlement program; revoked deportation protections for Venezuelans; detained the first of a promised 30,000 migrants in Guantánamo; threatened to prosecute officials who impede ICE operations and remove federal funding from “sanctuary cities”; and pushed the IRS to provide the addresses of 700,000 undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security.
  • Moved to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.
  • Reportedly considered revoking the temporary legal status of 240,000 Ukrainian refugees in the US.

Diversity, equity and inclusion

Trump has:

  • Terminated programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in “virtually all aspects of the Federal Government … from airline safety to the military,” and halted new civil rights cases or investigations by the Justice Department.
  • Required all government-issued documents, including passports, to reflect sex assigned at birth; ordered transgender women inmates to be transferred to male prisons; barredtransgender soldiers from the US military; restricted all gender-affirming treatments for minors under 19; ordered federal employees to remove “any gender identifying pronouns” from their email signatures; and moved to exclude transgender athletes from women’s sports.
  • Taken down thousands of government web pages with content related to diversity and “gender ideology,” including information about vaccines, scientific and medical research, hate crimes, and veterans’ care (among the images caught in this cull by AI was the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima).

Science, arts, media

Trump has:

  • Canceled scheduled biomedical scientific meetings, including grant review panels, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—thereby blocking millions of dollars in funding for research on cancer, addiction, and other health threats—and imposed a moratorium on all public communications from federal health officials.
  • Halted funding to Fulbright Scholarships and other US international exchange and study abroad programs, leaving thousands of students stranded abroad in limbo.
  • Created “chaos” across American university campuses with cuts to “billions of dollars in research” that amount to “a complete, utter, destruction of the United States research infrastructure” and have led to hiring freezes or layoffs at MIT, Stanford, Brown, Johns Hopkins and numerous other schools.
  • Stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) of its 70-year-old role in deciding which journalists have access to the president in the Oval Office and on Air Force One and taken control of the White House press pool.
  • Appointed himself chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, firing board members who don’t “share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

“Antisemitism”

Under the pretext of combatting antisemitism, Trump has:

  • Ordered US colleges to “report activities by alien students and staff” that “could be considered antisemitic or supportive of terrorism,” threatening that “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”
  • Cancelled “approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” and warned that “additional cancelations are expected to follow.”
  • Given notice “to every school and university that receives federal dollars that this Administration will use all the tools at its disposal to protect Jewish students and end anti-Semitism on college campuses.”
  • Changed the Student Loan Forgiveness Program (affecting approximately two million people) to allow disqualification of federal and non-profit employees, teachers, police, and pastors, among others, who engage in “improper activities,” including providing legal support, advocacy, or education work on behalf of undocumented immigrants, or “whose work had been tied to foreign terrorist groups.”

On previous experience at Columbia and elsewhere, virtually any criticism of Israel—including from Jewish organizations and individuals—is regarded as “antisemitic” and virtually any support for Palestine considered to be “support for terrorism.”

Environmental policy

Trump has:

  • Declared a “national energy emergency”; halted federal approvals for new offshore windfarms; opened up wilderness areas of Alaska to mining and drilling; ordered a 60-day pause on approvals for renewable energy developments on public lands; revoked Biden’s prohibitions on offshore oil drilling; and instructed federal agencies to end subsidies for electric vehicles.

Other domestic initiatives

Trump has:

  • Restored the federal death penalty.
  • Designated English as “the official language of the United States.”
  • Renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America (and banned Associated Press from presidential press conferences and news events until it adopts the name change).
  • Granted a “full, complete and unconditional” pardon to almost all the 1,600 rioters charged in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, some of whom injured police officers, and commuted the sentences—in one case, of 22 years—imposed on 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militias for seditious conspiracy.

You’re fired!

Since the US is not—yet—a dictatorship, some of this is being challenged in the courts. Whether or not the administration will abide by their judgments remains to be seen.

Ominously, a recent executive order from Trump instructs government agencies to request judges to require anyone suing the government to post a bond in advance to cover government legal costs should the suit not succeed. While judges are not bound to grant such requests, the clear intent is to discourage court challenges by putting them beyond the pocket of most potential plaintiffs.

Emboldened by the US Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024 ruling that “presidents can never be prosecuted for actions relating to the core powers of their office, and that there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly,” Trump is clearly testing the limits of his power.

Among other measures whose legality is dubious, he has asserted the supremacy of the president over all federal independent agencies, which regulate critical areas of the US economy and society, including the stock market, product safety, fraud and corruption, the money supply, labour relations, monopolies, nuclear power, the media and elections.

Trump’s newly-created so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a shadowy entity that operates entirely outside the previous framework of US governance, with no mandate from Congress, no requirement that its billionaire head, Elon Musk, be confirmed by the Senate, and no security clearances for the handful of young tech bros it employs, has taken a chainsaw to federal departments—and the men and women who staff them. Its depredations have reportedly already caused pushback from cabinet heads of government departments, including secretary of state Marco Rubio.

In the supposed interests of “cutting costs,” Trump and Musk’s assault on the machinery of US governance has included:

  • Freezing all federal government hiring “except for members of the military” or “positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.”
  • Offering all federal employees “inducements” to resign or face being fired, beginning with the “Fork in the Road” offer to two million federal employees to receive nine months pay if they quit now—which was accepted, it is claimed, by about 75,000 workers.
  • Ending remote work for federal workers and requiring “employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis” (the assumption being this will push many of them into quitting their jobs).
  • Terminating at least 20,630 federal employees during the probationary period of their contracts—including not only newly hired but newly promoted workers.
  • Demanding that all federal agencies provide a detailed list of divisions to be consolidated or cut by March 13 and submit plans for relocating Washington DC offices to areas of the country where the cost of living is lower by April 14.
  • Putting all federal staff in DEI programs on paid administrative leave and closing all DEI program-related offices; cutting thousands of jobs at USAID, with the goal of reducing its workforce from over 10,000 to 290 employees; and closing six out of 10 regional Social Security Administration offices, eliminating 7,000 jobs.
  • Inflicting substantial job losses at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, prior to its anticipated closure; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; and the Pentagon, which plans a “5-8 percent reduction in its civilian workforce.”
  • Reportedly planning to cut the IRS workforce of roughly 100,000 by a half, and to lose 82,000 out of 400,000 employees at Veterans Affairs.

No less worrying than this often arbitrary slashing is Trump’s targeted purge—the term, with its Stalinist echoes, is the appropriate one—of individuals, and their replacement by MAGA loyalists.

Among the people Trump has so far removed from office are:

Trump has also revoked security clearances for political opponents, including former President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan; 51 senior former intelligence officials who (allegedly) “engaged in misleading and inappropriate political coordination with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign”; a raft of lawyers with whom Trump has crossed swords, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco; and Trump’s one time National Security Advisor John Bolton.

While some of these targeted actions against individuals send out ideological messages, and others are clearly about Trump settling personal scores, their cumulative effect is to sideline or neutralize potential sources of opposition to the implementation of the MAGA agenda in the government apparatus—including, crucially, the judiciary, the military, and the police.

A not-so-slow-motion coup?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are watching a not-so-slow-motion coup in real time, involving the simultaneous unraveling of American democracy and the destruction of the post-war “rules-based order,” and its replacement by—at best—a Viktor Orban-style “illiberal democracy.”

The characteristics of the latter have been ably summarized by one political scientist as follows:

  • Consolidation of power in the executive
  • Charismatic leader
  • Erosion of the independence of the judiciary
  • Weakening status of the parliament
  • Recourse to direct democracy (plebiscites/referenda)
  • Populist rhetoric/propaganda
  • Discrimination of minorities
  • Monitoring and moulding of civil society
  • Media and internet censorship
  • Curbs on academia and educational curricula
  • Targeted repression of opponents
  • Restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly
  • Disregard for rule of law and human rights
  • Misuse of state resources (cronyism)
  • Emasculation of the electoral process
  • Forging of external enemies

Almost every one of these has accelerated in the United States since Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20. What used to be called the free world has ample reason to worry—and little time to act. Maintaining Hakeem Jeffries’ “dignified presence” will not be enough to save us.

But it does make for great TV—which we mostly watch, these days, on the two-way Orwellian telescreens we carry in our pockets that monitor and monetize our every move as we sleepwalk on into the darkness, mesmerized by a spectacle that lies somewhere between Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd.