Tag: iran

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We warned you: the wholesale destruction of Gaza was not an exception, it was a blueprint to crush anyone who opposes the plutocratic imperialism embodied by US/Israel and their global allies.
Act now: defend int[ernational] law from lawlessness, before the rupture becomes irreversible.

Francesca Albanese, post on X, March 1, 2026

A bloodstained backpack left after the Israeli-US missile strike on Minab elementary girls’ school, Iran, February 28, 2026. BDS.

On February 28, Mark Carney issued a statement on what he delicately termed the “Iran-related hostilities throughout the Middle East.” He did not call them the “Israel-initiated hostilities” or the “US-initiated hostilities,” despite the fact that the hostilities originated in a so-called “preemptive strike” on Iran by Israel and the US earlier that day. 

“Canada,” the PM’s statement proclaimed, “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security” (my emphasis). This was a clear endorsement not only of the (purported) political objectives of the US military action, but of the action itself. 

Preemptive massacres 

So what, exactly, is Canada supporting? Equally to the point, what is it opposing?

During the first round of strikes, Israeli and US missiles assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with his daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law. Khamenei’s wife died from her injuries on March 2. The IDF boasted of taking out 40 top Iranian commanders “in the first minute” of the attack, including armed forces chief of staff Maj.-Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi.

So successful were these targeted assassinations that on March 3 Donald Trump told reporters that “Most of the people we had in mind [to succeed Khameini] are dead … And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So, I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

Military and political leaders were not the only casualties. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, the first day of the war left 555 dead across Iran. Bombings have continued every day since, with the capital Tehran being especially hard hit. By March 5 the death toll had reached 1,230—more than the number of people killed in the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October 2023, which appalled the world and precipitated Israel’s Gaza “war.”

Thousands of kilometers away off the coast of Sri Lanka “an American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.”  I quote US secretary of war—he’s no longer called secretary of defense—Pete Hegseth. Eighty-seven bodies were recovered. 

The war has meantime spread to Lebanon, where Israel is carpet-bombing and has ordered more than half-a-million people to evacuate Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Most horrifically, a missile attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab in southern Iran killed at least 165 people, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12. 

Israel disowns the Minab massacre, stating that it has not “found any connection to our operations.” The Pentagon is “investigating,” but Pete Hegseth has assured the world that “we of course never target civilian targets” and US secretary of state Marco Rubio protests “The United States would not deliberately target a school.”

Neither Carney nor foreign minister Anita Anand have yet uttered a word of regret about the Minab slaughter. In fact, they haven’t mentioned it at all. But while remaining silent on what—at the least—is a tragic instance of collateral damage, they rushed to condemn the “strikes carried out by Iran on civilian infrastructure across the Middle East.” 

According to Anand, it is Iran’s retaliatory strikes, not the the Israeli-US aggression that Canada supports, that “represent an unacceptable escalation and a blatant attempt to further destabilize the region.” The first European leader to publicly react to the war, EU commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, also denounced Iran’s “reckless and indiscriminate strikes” as “a blatant violation of … sovereignty and a clear breach of international law,” without mentioning, still less condemning, the Israeli-US actions that provoked them.

This is self-evidently absurd. Asked by NBC News why Iran was attacking US bases in neighboring Gulf states, the Iranian foreign minister gave the only appropriate response: “Um, because you’re bombing us from those bases? What do you want me to say?” 

Value-based realism?

Carney’s backing for the Israeli-US strikes on Iran came as a nasty shock to many in Canada and abroad in light of his widely-acclaimed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos little more than a month earlier. 

Carney began his Davos speech by acknowledging “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality where geopolitics—where the large, main power—is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” But, he argued, 

the other countries, particularly intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the various states.

The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.

Invoking former Czech president Václav Havel’s parable of the Prague greengrocer who places a sign in his window every morning reading “Workers of the World Unite” not because he believes it but “to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along,” Carney urged: “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”

Middle powers like Canada should adopt “value-based realism” in foreign policy. He presented this approach as

both principled and pragmatic—principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.

Carney’s value-based realism seems to have crumbled in the face of its first test. 

Odious as the ayatollahs’ regime may be when judged from the standpoint of human rights as proclaimed—though not always honored—by the West, the Israeli-US attack has unquestionably violated Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and is manifestly not consistent with the UN Charter or international law. 

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states categorically that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” However evil a regime may be, force may only be used in pursuit of regime change if the UN Security Council has authorized it.

While Article 51 permits the use of force in self defence, this has been understood to mean “in response to an actual or truly imminent armed attack.” Preemptive defensive action is admissible only when the risk of attack is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” (the so-called Caroline Test). 

This was not the case here. Notwithstanding White House press secretary’s Karoline Leavitt’s assertion that “The president had a feeling … based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States,” administration officials told congressional staff in private briefings on March 1 that “U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to launch a preemptive strike against the U.S.” Do Trump’s feelings now override international law?

A war of choice

Whether the US action was undertaken to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, as Carney says, must also be seriously doubted. It is more likely a pretext for war, just like George W. Bush’s false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction during the lead-up to the 2003 Gulf War. The difference in this case is that the US has not even gone through the motions of seeking UN support for the attack.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities when it bombed them back in June 2025. This may just be typical Trumpian bluster, but on March 3 Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said his inspectors had not uncovered any evidence of “a systematic and structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.” 

Before the attack, negotiations on the nuclear issue were well underway between Iran and the US, and seemed headed for a favorable outcome. The Omani foreign minister, who was mediating the talks, told CBS News “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan on February 27 that he was confident “a peace deal is within our reach.” 

Iran, he explained, was prepared to agree to a deal in which it “will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb”; its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium would be “down blended to the lowest level possible … and converted into fuel”; and there would be “full and comprehensive verification by the IAEA.”

Asked whether he feared that “Israel is planning to take a first strike, even though the U.S. and Iran are agreeing to talk,” Albusaidi replied “I hope that is not the case.” 

This fear likely explains why the Omani minister went public in the first place. As Triti Parsi points out, he wanted to make clear to the world that although “what has actually been achieved in the negotiations is quite unprecedented … everything indicates that Trump won’t take yes for an answer. That he will start a war of choice very soon.” 

Marco Rubio later let the cat out of the bag when he told the press that the “imminent armed attack” that led the US to launch its so-called “preemptive defensive strike” was in fact Israel’s strike on Iran. The logic is straight out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: 

The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action [against Iran], we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

Stung by the suggestion that he could possibly be Bibi Netanyahu’s puppet, Donald Trump subsequently denied that the US was “pushed into war” by Israel (“I think they [Iran] were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So, if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand”). But this only confirms that this indeed was a war of choice.

The fault line in our foreign policy

Carney’s support for the Israeli-US attack has copped a lot of flak in Canada and beyond. Lloyd Axworthy—no “radical left lunatic,” but a well-respected former foreign minister in Jean Chrétien’s government—called out the glaring hypocrisy:

Canada’s response to the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a fault line at the heart of our foreign policy.

We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans—whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat—doing the bombing. 

Axworthy is only echoing Carney’s own admission in Davos “that international law [was] applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” 

“The double standard is obvious,” Axworthy goes on: “when Russia uses force without lawful grounds [as in the invasion of Ukraine], it is condemned as an outlaw; when the U.S. does something legally analogous, we kowtow in an effort to curry favour.”

More importantly, in the context of this article, Axworthy questions whether supporting the US in this illegal war is remotely in Canada’s national interest—precisely because of the new world disorder (or as Sandra Kendzior dubs it, the “no world order”) described by Carney, within which “the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu … ” 

“We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if we choose to wield them together,” Carney continued. This means, among other things, “acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals” (my emphasis). 

Not only, then, is Canada’s support for the Israeli-US war on Iran unprincipled. It is also, on Carney’s own premises, unpragmatic. “For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security,” Axworthy concludes, “that is not realism; it is recklessness.”

If Canada condones the US attack on Iran, then what will we say if Trump decides to make good on his repeated threats to absorb Greenland (“I think we’re going to have it”) and make Canada “a cherished and beautiful 51st state”? Who will be there for us? 

Putting the signs back up

Mark Carney is far from stupid, and though he may be a novice in politics his experience of moving in the top circles of international governance is unrivalled among Canadians. He knows that—as he later admitted to a Toronto Star reporter—”the United States and Israel have acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting allies, including Canada” and that the attack is “prima facie inconsistent with international law.” 

He must also be well aware that his endorsement of the US action will dismay many of his supporters—not just among the progressive left, but more centrist Canadian opinion—not least because what allowed him to overturn the enormous lead Pierre Poiliévre had in opinion polls and win the federal election was his perceived willingness to stand up to American bullying. His slogan “Elbows Up!” was a stroke of genius, summoning up the shades of Gordie Howe and Terry Fox to come to the aid of the nation in its hour of need. 

The first Canadian opinion poll since the Israeli-US strike on Iran, from Angus Reid, does not bode well for Carney: 35% supported the attack, 48% opposed it, and 17% were unsure. Most worrying for the Liberal government was the finding that just 17% of past Liberal voters—in other words, those who elected Carney—supported his position.

Carney’s support for the Israeli-US attack also manifestly does nothing for our standing with the middle powers with whom he sought to cooperate in “building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored … something bigger, better, stronger, more just …” So what gives?

Carney didn’t have to endorse Trump’s attack on Iran. So the inevitable question arises: why did he?

For Spain read spine

Carney is not the only one to find himself impaled on the horns of this dilemma. The US-Israel attack on Iran led to uncertainty as to how to respond across western capitals. 

Though Norway’s PM Gahr Støre complained that “The attacks this morning and the spreading of the conflict to Iran’s neighbouring countries is not in line with international law,” Spain was the only EU member to condemn the US-Israeli attack outright. 

Prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused the US permission to use jointly-operated bases for launching strikes on Iran, leading Trump to threaten “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.” Sanchez was unbowed, stating thathis country “will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world—and that is also contrary to our values ​​and interests—simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.” 

On March 4 Karoline Leavitt assured reporters “I think [Spain] heard the president’s message yesterday loud and clear. It is my understanding over the past several hours they’ve agreed to cooperate with the US military.” 

Whether this is a sign of American insecurity or just another regular White House Lie™ I can’t say, but José Manuel Albares soon set the record straight:

The Spanish government’s position on the war in the Middle East, the bombings in Iran, and the use of our bases has not changed one iota. Our ‘no to war’ stance remains clear and unequivocal … She may be the White House press secretary, but I’m the foreign minister of Spain and I’m telling her that our position hasn’t changed at all.

Take note Mr Carney. This might be what “value-based realism” looks like. As Václav Havel knew better than most, when the going gets tough living in truth takes cojones.

The devil or the deep blue sea?

Other EU leaders were more circumspect. In the immediate aftermath most denounced the Iranian regime and several welcomed the death of Khamenei. Needless to say, there was widespread condemnation of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. But it is noteworthy that while nobody followed Sánchez in rejecting the Israeli-US action, nobody followed Carney in voicing support for it either. For that he had to wait for Australia and New Zealand. 

Even Germany, whose Middle Eastern policy seems to comprise atoning for its part in the Holocaust by facilitating genocide in Palestine, prefers not to jump too visibly on Trump’s bandwagon. Pressed on the legality of the Israeli-US operation, Chancellor Friedrich Merz diplomatically evaded the question: “Categorizing the events under international law will have relatively little effect. This is not the moment to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of their objectives.” He again dodged the issue when questioned after meeting with Trump on March 4.

Britain, France, and Germany issued a joint statement on March 1 condemning “the indiscriminate and disproportionate missile attacks launched by Iran against countries in the region” in which they promised “to work together with the US and allies in the region … potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source.” Again, they stopped short of expressing support for the Israeli-US attack itself, on which the statement was silent.

The next day France’s Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot began to distance France from Israel and the US. Asked by a journalist whether “France today believes this war is justified, because you haven’t condemned it,” he responded: “we weren’t informed and didn’t take part in the military operations launched by the United States and Israel … only by facing the Security Council could such operations have had the legitimacy of international law.”

Addressing the nation on the Middle Eastern situation on French TV on March 3, President Emmanuel Macron flatly stated that the Israeli-US attacks were “outside of international law” and France “cannot approve of them.” Italy’s foreign minister Guido Crosetto likewise told his parliament on March 5 that the US-Israeli attack was “in violation of the international law” and confirmed that Italy had no prior knowledge of it.

Caught between not wanting to provoke the wrath—and economic or other retaliation—from “Daddy” (as NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte called Trump), and being dragged into an illegal war that could easily spiral out of control, the Europeans are squirming.

And that “special relationship”?

Perhaps the most entertaining contortions have come from UK prime minister Keir Starmer. Keir cannot have been happy with Trump and Netanyahu putting him on the spot less than a week after his hammering in the Gorton and Denton by-election by the Green Party, whose leader Zack Polanski is a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Walking a tightrope between appeasing Trump and fending off his domestic critics to both the right and the left, Starmer predictably ended up satisfying neither. Speaking in the House of Commons on March 2, he made clear that “The United Kingdom was not involved in the initial US and Israeli strikes on Iran” and “That decision was deliberate.” 

Indeed, Starmer denied US requests to use British military bases for its initial attack on Iran. Furious, Trump complained that “we are not happy with the UK” and “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” “He should be giving us, without question or hesitation, things like bases,” he told the New York Post on March 5. 

However, Starmer continued, “it is now clear that Iran’s outrageous response has become a threat to our partners, to our interests, and to our allies.” For this reason, he was now prepared to modify Britain’s stance to allow the US to use British bases “to destroy the [Iranian] missiles at source, in their storage depots or at their launchers.” 

“To be clear,” he emphasized, “the use of British bases is strictly limited to agreed defensive purposes. The UK has not joined US offensive operations.” 

A lawyer by trade—once upon a time a civil rights lawyer, as well as the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions—Starmer was certainly, as Trump suggested, “worried about the legality.” He told MPs that government would publish its legal advice (it did), explaining

We all remember the mistakes of Iraq, and we have learned those lessons. Any UK actions must always have a lawful basis, and a viable thought-through plan. That is the principle that I applied to the decisions that I made over the weekend. 

Unlike Macron, nowhere in his speech—or, as far as I am aware, anywhere else—did Starmer comment on the legality of the Israeli-US attack on Iran itself. 

On March 5 German foreign minister Johann Wadephul told reporters in Berlin that “Germany is not participating in this war. And that will remain the case,” and on March 6 Macron was reported as assuring a social media user that “France is not part of this war. We are not in the fight and we are not going to get involved in this war.” 

By contrast, Britain’s deputy PM David Lammy caused consternation when he told BBC Breakfast viewers the same morning that “there was a “legal basis” for the Royal Air Force to participate in strikes on Iranian missile sites” (as distinct from the UK merely allowing the US to use British bases to launch them). Mark Carney, too, has refused to“categorically rule out participation. We will stand by our allies when it makes sense.”

Britain and France have meantime moved ships, planes, and troops into the Middle East, ostensibly for the purposes of aiding the US in its “defensive” strikes on missile facilities or protecting their citizens and allies. It is not hard to see how things might go south.

Why?

Whatever else this circus might be, it is certainly not middle powers banding together to fight power with value-based realism. The abandonment of principles (while paying lip-service to international law) is undeniable. 

But as Lloyd Axworthy observed in relation to Canada, this is hardly good pragmatics either. What do Canada, Australia, the UK, or the EU countries have to gain from getting drawn into an Israeli-US war which if previous experience (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria) is anything to go by will only create further chaos in the Middle East and floods of new refugees?

So we must ask, once again, why are they doing this? No doubt there are a multiplicity of reasons, including fear of US tariffs and sanctions, strength of Zionist lobby groups, and (for some) the prospect of money to be made out of armaments, oil, or postwar reconstruction of bombsites into rivieras. 

We also cannot ignore the deep racism underlying Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump’s framing of these wars as “a battle of civilization against barbarism.” If there is one thing that unites the US, Canada, Australia, and the Europeans, it is whiteness. Europeans found it easier to stand up to Trump when he took a fancy to Greenland.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Marco Rubio laid out an unashamedly imperialist agenda for “a new Western century”:

We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir … And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.

But if we ask how any of this was possible—how the western world got to where it is now—I believe the answer lies under the rubble in Gaza. 

For more than two years, during much of which Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, was in the White House, the West participated in, endorsed, or at best turned a blind eye to overt war crimes in Gaza. While the UN, ICJ, ICC, and every major human rights organization on the planet warned of genocide, the Western democracies supplied Israel with arms, gave it diplomatic protection at the UN, and punished dissenters at home, while from the BBC to the New York Times an obliging media became a mouthpiece for Israeli hasbara. The US and other governments recklessly shredded international law and sabotaged its key institutions—the UN and its agencies, ICJ, and ICC—in the process.

This is a deeply corrupting process for everyone involved. If you don’t believe me, read Václav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless.”

Asked in February 2025 why he thought the Democratic Party was powerless to resist Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, the writer Ta-Nahisi Coates replied: “I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.” His point applies more generally.

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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.