Leaders in the United States and Europe appear not to be paying much attention, but Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza has done perhaps more than anything else to undermine the liberal principles they have tried to impose internationally, and to which they claim allegiance.
It took two months of a horrific Israeli siege on Gaza since the breakdown of the ceasefire last March—the denial of food, water, and medicine, and the bombing of hospitals—to shake a few Western states out of their torpor. Three countries—France, Canada, and the United Kingdom—issued a statement on May 19 threatening “targeted sanctions” if Israel failed to end the expansion of West Bank settlements, while vowing “concrete actions” if it did not discontinue its offensive in Gaza and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid. A day later, the British government announced that it would suspend negotiations with Israel on expanding a free-trade agreement, while European Union foreign ministers declared they would “review” the EU-Israel Association Agreement, even if they did not take stronger measures for the time being.
Even while acknowledging this significant shift in European attitudes, if it could take months to reach a decision on so basic a matter as demanding the provision of food, water, and humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, it is no surprise that Israel has been able to perpetrate what Israeli and international scholars and publicists are calling a genocide in the territory. But Gaza has become much more than that: it has also become a hook upon which countries of the Global South are hanging their challenge to the political superstructure of the post-World War II liberal international order.
To put this in perspective, for the last nineteen months one of the most powerful armies in the world has been dropping the heaviest ordnance available on areas populated mainly by destitute, homeless civilians, most of them women and children. This has involved, among other things, using an artificial intelligence program, Lavender, purportedly to kill Hamas operatives, albeit in the full knowledge that a majority of the victims would be civilians. Israel has destroyed most schools, universities, and hospitals in Gaza, and all institutions required to safeguard the territory’s social fabric. The intention is to ethnically cleanse the population, thereby momentarily helping to resolve the Jewish demographic disadvantage that Israel faces from the Arabs in its midst—both in the occupied territories and Israel itself.
Every day, Israel and its supporters explain that all the blame must be placed on Hamas, implying that Israel has no moral responsibility whatsoever for the monstrous number of deaths it has caused in Gaza. This is a convenient deflection tactic that disregards longstanding Israeli preferences for the territory. Certainly, a great deal of opprobrium can be directed at Hamas for the atrocities of October 7, but the organization also gave Israel the opportunity to do what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing allies have long been pining for: emptying Palestine of Palestinians.
This thinking was already in the works early on. In late October 2023, only two weeks after the Hamas attack, news outlets published a document prepared by Israel’s Intelligence Ministry examining Israeli options. The authorities dismissed it as a “concept paper,” indirectly confirming its authenticity. These options included “evacuat[ing] the Gazan population to Sinai” and “creat[ing] a sterile zone of several kilometers inside Egypt and not allow[ing] the population to return to activity or residence near the Israeli border.” Therefore, expulsion of Gaza’s inhabitants was at the forefront of official thinking even then.
Also in October 2023, Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, described Israel’s choices in this way. Israel had “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable,” he wrote, so that “the entire population of Gaza will either move to Egypt or move to the Gulf.” Ultimately, Gaza must “become a place where no human being can exist...” Few Israelis anticipated Israel’s ravages in Gaza more accurately.
Given that the Israelis made their intentions clear, and that most of the major Western countries did nothing to prevent this, and indeed continued to arm Israel, it is no surprise that these countries are facing a legitimate global backlash against their actions, or inaction. Moreover, they also generally failed to stop Israel’s assaults on institutions that are pillars of a rules-based international order—the United Nations and its bodies, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court—or even contributed to their marginalization.
Anyone can see that international law and humanitarian values are meaningless to many Western governments when they contradict their interests and alliances. We knew this, of course, but Gaza has taken this awareness up a qualitative notch, imposing the question of why? Why is it that Ukrainians could enjoy Western sympathy and be received with open arms after the Russian invasion in 2022, while around 1 million Asian and Arab migrants in 2015, and now over 2 million Gazans, are incapable of sharing such favor?
I asked this question in 2022, in an article I wrote at the time. I was loath to attribute Western double standards to racism, arguing that racism was present all over, so that resorting to that explanation really didn’t tell us very much. However, in conversations during the past year on Gaza, in observing the willingness of many people in Western societies to accept, or avert their eyes from, ever higher levels of Israeli barbarity, in seeing how effectively Israel has silenced all condemnation in the West, tarnishing its critics as “antisemitic,” I’m not so sure anymore that the blank check for mass murder in Gaza hasn’t been related to color. I say this because only the dehumanization of an entire people can explain Western permissiveness in the face of such an outrage, and the only thing explaining such dehumanization is that Palestinians are viewed as being less entitled to the universal rights applied to others.
In light of this situation, how can anyone accept anymore the language of international norms and values when it comes from Western leaders? And isn’t that what many voices in the Global South have been saying for decades—that such talk is two-faced and hides an agenda of hegemony, one granting tremendous power to the self-appointed gatekeepers of international acceptance? And yet, universal values do have meaning and must be preserved, which explains why Gaza has been such a train wreck for those in the United States and Europe who claim that they best embody liberal values and human rights.
That’s not to say that the leaders of countries of the Global South wake up in the morning thinking about Gaza. Indeed, some prominent countries in this geopolitical category, such as India, have gone along with what Israel is doing. But they do often wake up thinking about the United States and Europe, which have incessantly lectured them on how they should conduct themselves, or sought to alter their actions in line with Western priorities. The criticism from outside may frequently even be justified. That said, as Gaza has unfolded, the margin of countries in the Global South to turn the tables and denounce their Western inquisitors as hypocrites has expanded exponentially.
When Netanyahu last spoke before the U.S. Congress in July 2024, and was serenaded with 58 standing ovations, he had the temerity to say that Israel “fights on the frontline of civilization” in a clash “between barbarism and civilization.” Two thoughts on this. No Western country has done more damage to the values of the West—or what Netanyahu calls “civilization”—than Israel, which has somehow succeeded during the last six decades to pursue in plain sight an illegal, cruel, and repressive military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, with barely a whimper of protest from the United States and most European countries. And second, in presenting his self-serving dichotomy, the Israeli prime minister must have embarrassed his timorous Western allies, by indirectly implicating them in his crimes in Gaza.
The damage has been done. Gaza stands as a critical juncture in the decomposition of Western liberal internationalist principles. But no one could have expected such principles to long survive once their purveyors began applying them so selectively.
