Israeli acts of piracy and torture against Canadian Sumud flotilla activists require a meaningful response by PM Mark Carney

The Canadian government has already condemned Israeli actions. But words without actions that have meaningful consequences risks becoming complicity.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

The illegal interception of the Global Sumud humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza by Israeli forces in international waters south of Cyprus in mid-May 2026 is not an isolated “incident.” It is the latest expression of a decades-long pattern in which Israel uses overwhelming military power, systematic and deliberate abuse, and flagrant disregard for international law to punish Palestinians and those who stand with them in their struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation and oppression.  It is an act of piracy and terrorism that requires action by the nations of the people who were abducted and tortured while in Israeli custody.

While the flotilla activists have now been released and are on their way home they are not returning unharmed. After being given medical examinations upon being deported to Turkiye—the starting point of the flotilla—they reported being subjected to severe abuse and torture in Israeli custody, including documented evidence of physical violence—beatings, use of tasers, sexual assault, torture—psychological torment, and degrading treatment that constitute clear violations of international humanitarian law.

This brutality against unarmed humanitarian workers is yet another criminal act in Israel’s decades-long campaign of state terror—alongside its genocide in Gaza, the routine torture of Palestinian and international detainees, and its entrenched system of brutal domination against those who oppose them. Such conduct is more evidence marking Israel as a rogue, criminal state that uses terrorist violence and impunity against civilians and aid workers alike.

In these circumstances, Canada (along with other nations) has both a moral and legal obligation to respond with concrete measures, including broad sanctions, arms restrictions, and accountability mechanisms targeting the Israeli leaders criminally responsible for these actions.

Piracy and terrorism at sea

The Global Sumud flotilla set sail with approximately 50 boats and more than 400 activists from over 40 countries, carrying food, baby formula, and medical supplies to a besieged Gaza Strip facing catastrophic deprivation and famine. The vessels were intercepted hundreds of kilometres from Israel’s coast, in clearly international waters, as multiple reports and UN experts have emphasized.

According to Turkiye’s Anadolu Agency and other news outlets, Israeli forces attacked the flotilla volunteers with rubber bullets and boarded the ships, detaining around 428 activists and transporting them to Israeli ports and prison facilities. Amnesty International described the interception as “shameful and inhumane,” stressing that the flotilla was attempting to break an illegal Israeli blockade and deliver life‑saving aid to a population in Gaza subjected to mass atrocity crimes, apartheid and genocide.

Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the forcible seizure of civilian vessels in international waters, absent a lawful basis such as piracy suppression or UN Security Council authorization, is widely viewed by legal experts as a flagrant violation of the freedom of navigation. The UN experts’ statement on the Global Sumud flotilla explicitly called the interception “a blatant violation of international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,” and demanded the immediate release of the activists.

When a state uses armed force on the high seas to abduct civilians engaged in a humanitarian aid mission, many scholars argue that this conduct is the very definition of state piracy and state terrorism.

This is not the first time Israel has done this and it won’t be the last given how Israel’s leaders see their nation as above the law. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) case study on the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla notes that Israeli forces killed nine activists in international waters while enforcing the Gaza blockade, raising serious questions under international humanitarian law and the law of the sea. The Global Sumud operation thus fits a long‑standing pattern. Israel uses its navy to project coercive power and unwarranted aggression far beyond its territorial waters to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza, and to send a message of deterrence through fear and terrorist violence.

Torture, sexual violence, and humiliation in Israeli custody

The testimonies emerging from the 2026 flotilla participants are harrowing and remarkably consistent. Reports by news media noted that activists were subjected to “humiliation and violence,” including forcing women to remove their hijabs, keeping detainees in painful positions, shooting them with rubber bullets, beatings and other forms of torture. One news report recounts how New Zealand activist Mousa Taher was stripped naked, bound with zip ties so tight he cried out in pain, stomped on, beaten unconscious, and forced to crawl on the ground “to make us feel like we are nothing.” 

Newsweek quotes Australian activist Juliet Lamont describing a boat where 180 people were “systematically bashed and beaten” resulting in 40 with broken bones and ribs, people being “tasered in the face,” and multiple incidents of sexual assault. Al Jazeera, NBC and other major news outlets all report that flotilla organizers documented at least 15 cases of sexual assault, including rape, humiliating strip searches, groping, pulling of genitals, and even “forcible penetration by a handgun” on a converted prison vessel lined with barbed wire and shipping containers.

Associated Press and NBC‑syndicated reports describe activists being punched, kicked, dragged by their hair, held in containers, shackled with iron chains, and surrounded by attack dogs. Canadian activist Ehab Lotayef from Montreal told CBC he was beaten for days, had his ribs injured, glasses broken, and his hand stabbed by a guard while trying to distribute water to other detainees. 

Israel’s prison service has denied all allegations, calling them “false and entirely without factual basis.” Yet the convergence of testimonies—from Canadian, Turkish, Italian, Brazilian, Australian, French, and other activists, documented by rights groups like Israel’s Adalah and scrutinized by prosecutors in Italy and elsewhere—strongly suggests systematic abuse and torture rather than isolated misconduct. UN officials have called these accounts “disturbing” and insisted that those responsible must be held to account. 

These practices mirror long‑documented patterns of torture and ill‑treatment of Palestinian prisoners—stress positions, beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, denial of medical care, and abuse of minors. Human rights organizations have for years concluded that such treatment violates the Convention against Torture and the Geneva Conventions’ protections for detainees. The flotilla activists, in effect, were briefly exposed to the perverse justice regime that Palestinians have endured on a chronic basis for decades. 

Decades of occupation, apartheid, and Gaza’s strangulation 

To understand why many now describe Israel as a rogue state that uses terror as an instrument of policy, the flotilla must be placed in the broader context of Israel’s rule over Palestinians since 1967. 

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion concluding that Israel’s prolonged occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza was unlawful, and that its Jews only settlements violate Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. The Court emphasized that Israel’s policies breach Palestinians’ right to self‑determination and require third states not to recognize or assist the illegal situation. 

Human Rights Watch’s 2021 report “A Threshold Crossed” found that Israeli authorities are committing crimes against humanity, apartheid and persecution, through systematic discrimination, land confiscation, movement restrictions, and fragmentation of Palestinian territory. Amnesty International has similarly concluded that Israel’s settlement project and legal regime amount to apartheid, and that the settlements themselves are illegal under international law. 

Gaza, under a land, air, and sea blockade since 2007, has been described by the ICRC and UN bodies as being subjected to collective punishment, prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The blockade severely restricts movement of people and goods, crippling the economy and health system (which is now destroyed during the genocide). The UN Fact‑Finding Mission on the 2008–2009 Gaza conflict (the Goldstone Mission) documented attacks on civilians, homes, schools, hospitals, and UN facilities, concluding that serious violations of international humanitarian law and possible war crimes had been committed. Subsequent operations—2012, 2014, 2021, and the post‑October 2023 assault—have repeated the same patterns of disproportionate force and targeting of Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure. 

In the current phase, the ICJ, in the case brought by South Africa, has found that there is a plausible risk that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and has ordered provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent genocidal acts and enable humanitarian aid—all of which Israel has ignored. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has warned that Israel’s assault on the foundations of international law “must have consequences,” stressing that starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is unlawful. The International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor has opened a file on the “Situation in Palestine,” investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity by all parties, and has sought arrest warrants for senior Israeli and Palestinian leaders. 

Taken together, Israel’s decades-long list of crimes—unlawful occupation, apartheid, collective punishment, repeated large‑scale attacks on civilians, and now a case of genocide—this record depicts a state whose leaders systematically violate core norms of humanity and the international order and rely on impunity guaranteed by powerful allies like the US. The violent attack on participants in the Global Sumud flotilla is a microcosm of that larger system.

Israel as a rogue state using state terror

“Rogue state” is not a formal legal category, but it captures a political reality—a state that persistently defies international law, disregards UN resolutions and court decisions, and uses violence against civilians to achieve political ends.

When a state:
*  Maintains an unlawful occupation and apartheid regime despite ICJ and UN findings;
*  Enforces an illegal blockade that starves and impoverishes a civilian population;
*  Conducts military campaigns that UN bodies and respected human rights voices say amount to war crimes and genocide;
*  Intercepts humanitarian flotillas in international waters, abducts hundreds of civilians, and subjects them to torture and sexual violence;

it is reasonable for advocates, scholars, and affected communities to argue that such a state is acting as a rogue actor and employing terrorism as a weapon. The purpose of the flotilla abuses was not military necessity, but rather to terrorize activists and deter future attempts to break the blockade. As one activist put it, this felt like a “planned campaign of violence” designed to ensure they never return.

This is why many Palestinians and their allies describe Israel not merely as a state committing isolated violations of international law, but as a rogue, terrorist state whose policies are structurally violent. Whether one adopts that terminology or not, the legal and moral implications for third states like Canada are profound.

Canada’s legal and moral obligations

Canada is not a neutral bystander in all of this. It is a party to the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute of the ICC, and UNCLOS. It has domestic legislation—the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act—that incorporates international crimes into Canadian law and allows for prosecution on the basis of universal jurisdiction. 

The Canadian government has already put out statements condemning the flotilla abuses. Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand condemned the “appalling abuse” of Canadians and summoned the Israeli ambassador after videos showed Israeli cabinet minister Itamar Ben‑Gvir taunting kneeling, zip‑tied activists. Prime Minister Mark Carney called the treatment “abominable.” But condemnation without actions that have meaningful consequences in response to Israeli crimes risks becoming complicity. 

Given the evidence and the findings of international bodies, a strong case can be made that Canada has at the least the following obligations:

Implement targeted sanctions on Israeli political and military leadership:
Under its Magnitsky sanctions legislation and in light of declarations by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the United Nations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the ICJ’s findings on the illegality of the occupation and the plausible risk of genocide, Canada can and arguably must impose asset freezes and travel bans on all senior Israeli political and military officials responsible for the crimes committed against Palestinians, the Gaza blockade, large‑scale military assaults against civilians, and the flotilla interdictions.

Criminal investigations and universal jurisdiction:
Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act grants it universal jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute individuals present on its soil for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide—regardless of where those acts occurred. Given the scale of alleged violations in Gaza and the flotilla incidents, Canada has both the legal authority and the moral responsibility to open investigations into any Israeli officials or soldiers within its territory when credible evidence links them to such crimes. A bolder step—such as automatically detaining anyone who has served in the Israeli military since 2023, including Canadian citizens—would send a clear signal that Canada is serious about enforcing its own laws and upholding international humanitarian standards.

Closing loopholes for arms and dual‑use exports:
Canada has obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty and customary international law not to transfer weapons where there is a clear risk they will be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law. In light of ICJ and UN findings, and declarations respected human rights organizations, continuing any form of arms or dual‑use exports that could support Israeli military operations in Gaza or enforcement of the blockade is increasingly difficult to reconcile with those obligations. Closing loopholes and imposing a full embargo on military exports and technology transfers to Israel would be a concrete step toward compliance.

Diplomatic measures: expulsion and recall of ambassadors:
Expelling the Israeli ambassador and recalling Canada’s ambassador from Tel Aviv would signal that the relationship cannot proceed as normal while Israel defies the ICJ, the ICC, and UN bodies, and while Canadian citizens are tortured and sexually assaulted in Israeli custody. Such measures have precedent in responses to other states accused of atrocity crimes (like Iran). 

Support for international accountability mechanisms:
Canada should fully support the ICC’s Palestine investigation, refrain from political pressure on the Court, and actively cooperate with any arrest warrants issued, including against Israeli officials. It should also back UN mechanisms documenting violations in Gaza and the flotilla incidents, and endorse the ICJ’s advisory opinion and genocide case orders, as well as join South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ which now has 20 nations supporting it, including NATO members Belgium, Iceland, Netherlands, Spain and Turkiye, as well as trading partners Mexico and Ireland. 

These steps are not radical. They flow from Canada’s own treaty commitments and its self-professed support for a rules‑based international order. To continue business as usual with a state credibly accused of apartheid, war crimes, and genocide, and now documented torture and sexual abuse of Canadian and international activists, would be to erode those very rules.

From outrage to responsibility 

The Global Sumud flotilla was a simple proposition. Civilians from around the world sailing to deliver food and medicine to a population deliberately starved and bombed. Israel’s response—armed interception in international waters, mass abduction, beatings, torture, and sexual violence—lays bare the nature of its regime and the depth of its depravity.

Whether one chooses the language of “rogue terrorist state” or prefers strictly legal terminology, the core reality is the same. Israel has, for decades, violated fundamental norms of international law with near impunity, and the flotilla abuses are part of that pattern. For Canada, the question is no longer what is happening, but what it is prepared to do about it, especially after more than two and a half years of genocide in Gaza where a conservatively estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed by Israel as of April 2026, according to international medical specialists, Israeli academics, and others. 

Silence and symbolic statements will not protect Palestinians, nor will they protect Canadians and others who risk their lives to bring them live saving aid. Sanctions, arms restrictions, criminal investigations, and diplomatic downgrades are the minimum steps consistent with Canada’s legal obligations and moral claims. Anything less is a choice to live with atrocity—and to be remembered as being on the side of those who watched and did nothing to hold Israel accountable for its criminal actions.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

We are living through a new age of evil

Israel’s actions in Gaza and its general brutality towards Palestinians is what evil looks like in the 21st century—a state committing mass atrocity crimes in full view of the world and nothing is done to stop them.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

We are living through a new age of systemic evil—an era whose moral contours resemble the 1930s more than any period since. Then, as now, powerful states normalized cruelty, stripped entire populations of rights, and justified mass violence through the language of security, racial hierarchy, and national destiny.

Then, as now, the world’s so‑called democracies watched, equivocated, or actively enabled the perpetrators. However, the lesson humanity had learned from that history—”Never Again”—has been hollowed out, reduced to a slogan invoked selectively, applied to only one people, rather than applied as a universal moral principle.

Unlike the 1930s and World War Two where the Nazis tried to hide their genocidal crimes, today’s evil in Gaza is not hidden.

What distinguishes this moment is not only the scale of destruction unleashed on Palestinians, but the brazenness with which Western nations—the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France—the self‑appointed guardians of the post-World War Two order have chosen to enable, rationalize, and arm that destruction. The governments that claim to champion human rights and the sanctity of civilian life are now the primary suppliers of weapons, diplomatic cover, and political legitimacy to a state—Israel—that is accused by leading genocide and Holocaust scholars, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UN bodies of committing genocide.

And yet, when most people are asked to describe “evil,” they do not think of these polished, articulate leaders of Western democracies. They think of serial killers, violent criminals, perpetrators of child exploitation, or historical tyrants like Hitler and Pol Pot. They might mention contemporary authoritarian figures such as Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. But few would think to include Western presidents and prime ministers who deliver eloquent speeches about human rights while simultaneously providing arms and political protection to a state committing genocidal crimes.

This disconnect is itself a symptom of the age of evil we inhabit. Evil is imagined as something distant, monstrous, and obvious—not something carried out through bureaucratic memos, arms export permits, diplomatic vetoes, and press conferences delivered in calm, reassuring tones. But if this profound moral inversion does not qualify as an era of systemic evil unseen since the 1930s, then what would? When the machinery of the “rules‑based order” is deployed to protect the aggressor, while the victims’ suffering is minimized or ignored by the most powerful nations in the world, labelled a “complex issue,” the boundary between those who claim to defend “good” and those branded as “evil” dissolves.

A May 2025 survey conducted by the Israeli research firm Geocartography for Penn State University, and reported in Haaretz, revealed a stark reality— support for extreme policies is not confined to Israel’s political and military elites. According to the poll, 82% of Israeli Jews endorsed the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, while nearly half supported the Israeli military “killing all Palestinians in Gaza.” A majority—56%—favoured expelling every non‑Jew from all territories under Israeli control. These are not fringe views held by a radical minority of elites, they reflect attitudes that have become normalized across broad segments of Israeli society. Such findings underscore a critical truth, that systemic evil does not emerge solely from leaders. It is sustained, legitimized, and amplified by the public they represent that accepts, endorses, or demands it.

And this is not a matter of rhetorical exaggeration. In 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars—the preeminent professional body in the field, including numerous Israeli Holocaust specialists—ratified a resolution affirming that Israel’s policies and operations in Gaza meet the criteria of genocide under the 1948 Convention. The resolution passed with 86% support. This was not a fringe opinion. It was a deliberate, rigorous assessment by experts whose scholarship centres on mass atrocities, including the Holocaust itself.

A growing body of academics and jurists in genocide studies, Holocaust studies, historiography, and international law have reached similar conclusions. Their analyses are grounded in decades of research into the crime of genocide, codified into international law after the Second World War precisely to prevent the recurrence of the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. And it is not only scholars. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry, established by the Human Rights Council, has determined that Israel bears responsibility for genocide in Gaza since October 2023, and that high‑ranking Israeli officials have incited such acts.

In the 1930s, the world claimed it did not know what was happening. Today’s leaders lack this defence. Today, the world knows—and chooses not to act. The Gaza conflict has been termed “the most transparent genocide in human history” precisely because victims and perpetrators have live streamed its horrors. Israeli personnel have disseminated footage of devastation and mistreatment they have inflicted; Palestinians have chronicled the systematic erasure of homes, hospitals, schools, and entire neighbourhoods in real time. Global audiences, including Western officials, have witnessed this annihilation on their phones and screens, yet global leaders have done nothing to stop it.

To understand how we arrived here, we must confront the historical foundations of Palestinian dispossession. The Nakba of 1948 was not an unfortunate byproduct of war; it was a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in terror from the lands of historic Palestine, as Zionist terrorist militias and later the Israeli army ethnically cleansed over 400 towns and villages, murdering thousands, and then eventually erased the communities from the map, by planting forests in their place or building over them. This was not a spontaneous collapse of a society; it was the intentional creation of a new demographic reality, documented by Israeli historians and preserved in UN archives. The new state of Israel then barred these refugees from returning, despite UN Resolution 194 affirming their right to go home. The message was unmistakable: Palestinians were to be erased from their land, their history, and their future.

The dispossession did not end in 1948. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza (the second Nakba), launching what has become one of the longest and most brutal military occupations in modern history. Palestinians were subjected to land seizures, settlement expansion, home demolitions, checkpoints, curfews, and a dual legal system that privileges Jewish settlers while criminalizing Palestinian existence. The occupation was not a temporary security measure; it was a structural project of domination designed to fragment Palestinian territory and prevent the emergence of a viable, sovereign state.

Gaza became the laboratory for a new form of control. After Israel’s 2005 redeployment and withdrawal of settlers from that territory came the blockade, imposed in 2007, which transformed the strip into what human rights groups called “the world’s largest open‑air prison.” Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the sea, the population registry, and even the caloric intake of Gaza’s residents. The blockade is not about security, it was collective punishment aimed at breaking the will of a people. Generations of Palestinians have grown up under siege, deprived of basic rights and freedoms, economic opportunity, and the ability to imagine a life beyond confinement.

This is the architecture of Palestinian dispossession—ethnic cleansing, occupation, blockade—and it is the essential context for understanding the horrors of the present. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is not an aberration. It is the logical continuation of a system fed by an ideology of Zionism built on the domination and brutal oppression of Palestinians, with Western complicity.

Defenders of Israel’s actions invoke the familiar refrain: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” But this claim collapses under even minimal scrutiny when applied to an occupying power. Under international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying state does not possess a right of self‑defence against the population it occupies. It has obligations—to protect civilians, to refrain from collective punishment, and to ensure the welfare of the occupied population. Moreover, self‑defence cannot justify the levelling of entire neighbourhoods, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the destruction of hospitals and universities, or the ethnic cleansing of an entire people. These are not acts of defence; they are acts of domination and control, and can be considered war crimes.

Once this rhetorical shield is stripped away, the reality becomes impossible to deny. Since October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children. Entire neighbourhoods have been erased. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and cultural institutions have been bombed. UN experts warn that Gaza may soon become uninhabitable. And yet, instead of restraining Israel, Western governments—especially the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—have continued weapons transfers, with the US blocking ceasefire resolutions, and defending Israel at every international forum.

This is not passive complicity. It is active participation. The US has shipped thousands of bombs, artillery shells, and precision‑guided munitions, even as its own officials privately acknowledge the likelihood of war crimes. The UK continues arms exports despite parliamentary warnings. Despite claiming to support international law Canada is still approving military export permits through a loophole despite a Parliamentary vote, supported by a large majority of MPs calling for the suspension of arms shipments. Germany frames its support as a moral obligation rooted in its own history, even as it arms a state committing atrocities against a defenceless people.

The horrors of what has taken place in Gaza are documented in a widely cited study, based on Israeli military data by Professor Yaakov Garb of Ben-Gurion University, published on Harvard University’s Dataverse. It estimates that more than 377,000 Palestinians are missing and presumed dead — roughly 17% of Gaza’s pre-war population. Around the same time, Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya concluded in their analysis that the actual death toll likely ranges between 680,000 and 700,000.

The consequences of Israeli actions extend far beyond Gaza. Israel’s military operations have expanded into Lebanon, displacing hundreds of thousands and destroying civilian infrastructure. In Iran, Israeli attacks have escalated regional tensions and risked a broader war. These are not isolated incidents; they are part of a coherent strategy of regional dominance, enabled by Western powers that refuse to impose consequences.

This is what systemic evil looks like in the 21st century. A powerful state commits mass atrocity crimes against civilians in full view of the world, and the nations that claim to uphold international law supply the weapons and political cover that make those atrocities possible.

The phrase “international rules‑based order” has become a hollow incantation. It is invoked by Western leaders selectively, applied inconsistently, and weaponized to justify geopolitical interests rather than universal principles.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Western leaders spoke passionately about violations of international law and the UN Charter, and the inviolability of civilian life. When Israel flattened Gaza, committing crimes no different than Russia’s, those same leaders spoke of “complexity,” “restraint,” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.” The double standard is not subtle; it is structural.

And so we return to the central question: Why are we here?

We are here because Western governments have treated Palestinian lives as expendable, and see Palestinians as sub-human. Because they have prioritized geopolitical alliances over human rights. Because they have allowed Israel to act with impunity for decades. Because they have refused to confront the root cause of the conflict: the ongoing denial of Palestinian self‑determination, and decades of obstructionism preventing the Palestinian people from having a free and independent state of their own.

The Nakba is not a historical footnote. It is an ongoing crime of ethnic cleansing and genocide which has been rolled out over 78 years. It is the moral and political origin of the present crisis. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every home demolished in the West Bank, every refugee denied the right to return, every child killed in Lebanon, every escalation in Iran—these are all chapters in the same story.

But it is also a story of resistance. Palestinians have refused to disappear. They have insisted on their humanity, their history, and their right to live in freedom and dignity. And around the world, millions have joined them, demanding an end to the violence and an end to the complicity that sustains it.

The question is no longer whether we know what is happening.

We clearly do.

The central question is whether Western leaders can finally confront their entrenched anti-Palestinian racism, push back against the outsized influence of the pro-Israel and Zionist lobbies that have long dominated the West’s Middle East policy, and rediscover their moral compass. Only then can they muster the courage to halt a state whose act of evil—marked by decades of systematic violence, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment—echo the gravest atrocities committed by Germany and Japan during World War Two.

History will harshly judge those leaders who continue with a business as usual attitude in their dealings with Israel. As the racist, apartheid, genocidal regime continues its assault against Gaza and Lebanon, as it continues to commit genocide and torture detainees, it is shredding the post-World War Two international order—the very framework built to prevent future horrors and honour the millions who perished in that war. The architects of that order, if they could see it today, would be outraged that the sort of evil they tried to prevent is happening again, and that the system they built is being deliberately destroyed by the actions of a single fascist state supported and shielded by powerful Western patrons.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Gaza genocide has shown that Western “humanity” is an illusion

The Gaza genocide has shattered the illusion of Western humanity, exposing the moral bankruptcy of the Western alliance, and revealed the selective nature of the “rules based order.”

 
By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

For nearly eight decades, Western governments have portrayed themselves as the architects and guardians of the post‑World War Two international order—a system built on the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention. These instruments were meant to ensure that the horrors of the mid‑20th century would never be repeated, and that all peoples, regardless of geography or political alignment, would be protected from mass atrocities.

Yet the genocide in Gaza since October 2023—and the broader pattern of Israeli and American military aggression in Lebanon and Iran—have exposed a devastating truth. That the Western alliance does not uphold the universal principles it claims to defend. Instead, it applies them selectively, shielding allies even when they commit grave violations of international law. The result is a profound crisis of legitimacy for the so‑called “rules‑based international order,” and a shattering of the illusion of Western moral leadership.

The Gaza genocide, and the refusal of Western states to stop or even meaningfully condemn it, has revealed a system built not on universal human rights but on geopolitical interests. It has exposed the complicity of Western governments in atrocities committed by Israel and the United States, and it has accelerated the erosion of global conscience and morality.

Gaza: A genocide in full view of the world

The scale and nature of the destruction in Gaza have been documented extensively by UN agencies, humanitarian organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and Holocaust scholars like Raz Segal, Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg. By early 2024, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported tens of thousands of civilian deaths, widespread destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and water systems, and the displacement of nearly the entire population of Gaza. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese even cited a study by Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya which calculated that the Palestinian dead toll is more then 680,000.

In March 2024, Albanese concluded that Israel’s actions constituted a “genocide in progress,” identifying all five prohibited acts under Article II of the Genocide Convention, The report further stated that the genocide was “enabled by the failure of third states to prevent it,” directly implicating Western governments that continued to arm and support Israel.

In June 2024, the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry reached a similar conclusion, finding “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel was committing genocide and that senior Israeli officials bore responsibility. The Commission also noted that states providing weapons or diplomatic cover to Israel risked violating their own obligations under the Genocide Convention.

These findings were not fringe opinions. They were the conclusions of official UN bodies, supported by legal analyses from major human rights organizations. In November 2023, a coalition of legal scholars from the University Network for Human Rights, Yale Law School, and other institutions published a comprehensive report concluding that Israel was committing genocide and that third states were complicit through arms transfers and political support.

The evidence was overwhelming. The world saw the destruction unfold in real time. And yet Western governments did nothing to stop it.

Western complicity

The Genocide Convention imposes a clear obligation on all states: the duty to prevent genocide. This duty is triggered not when genocide is proven in court, but when there is a serious risk of genocide — a threshold that UN bodies and legal experts argued had been crossed early in the conflict.

Despite this, Western governments continued to supply Israel with weapons, intelligence, and political protection. The United States alone approved billions of dollars in military aid during the conflict, including expedited shipments of bombs and artillery shells. The United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and other NATO members also continued arms exports, even as their own legal advisers warned of potential violations of international law.

Diplomatically, Israel’s Western allies repeatedly blocked or watered down UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire. The United States used its veto power multiple times to shield Israel from international scrutiny, even as humanitarian conditions in Gaza deteriorated to catastrophic levels.

This pattern of behaviour—continued arms transfers, diplomatic obstruction, and public messaging that minimized or justified civilian casualties—moved Western governments from passive bystanders to active enablers. As the UN Special Rapporteur noted, “genocide is a collective crime,” and the failure of third states to prevent it constitutes a breach of their own legal obligations.

Lebanon, Iran, and the expansion of impunity

The crisis of Western complicity extends beyond Gaza. Israeli military aggression in Lebanon, including strikes that killed civilians and destroyed infrastructure, raised serious concerns under international humanitarian law. Yet Western governments offered little more than muted expressions of “concern,” while continuing to affirm Israel’s “right to self‑defence.”

Similarly, joint US-Israeli operations against Iran in June 2025 and subsequently in 2026—including targeted assassinations, attacks on civilian infrastructure, and cross‑border strikes—have been criticized by legal scholars as violations of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. These actions risked escalating the conflict into a regional war, yet Western governments largely supported or justified them.

The message was clear, when Israel or the United States uses force, even in ways that appear to violate international law, Western allies will not intervene. This double standard undermines the very foundation of the post‑war legal order.

The myth of the “rules‑based international order”

Western leaders frequently invoke the phrase “rules‑based international order” to describe the system they claim to defend. Yet their response to Gaza reveals that this order is not based on universal rules at all. It is based on power. When adversaries violate international law, Western governments demand accountability, impose sanctions, and mobilize international institutions. But when allies commit similar or worse violations, those same governments offer weapons, diplomatic protection, and political support.

This selective application of international law is not merely hypocritical. It is destructive. It erodes the legitimacy of global institutions, fuels resentment and instability, and encourages other states to disregard international norms. As one legal scholar noted, “A rules‑based order that applies only to enemies is not a legal order. It is an instrument of geopolitical power.”

“Never again” and the collapse of Western moral authority

The Holocaust gave rise to the Genocide Convention and the universal promise of “Never Again.” But Gaza has revealed that this promise was never truly universal. It was conditional—applied selectively, depending on the ethnic or religious identity of the victims and the interests of powerful states.

The genocide in Gaza does not match the Holocaust in scale, but in other respects it is uniquely horrifying:

• It unfolded in full public view, live streamed to the world.
• Western governments knew exactly what was happening.
• They had the power to stop it.
• They chose not to.

This betrayal of “Never Again” has profound implications. It signals to the world that the West’s commitment to preventing genocide is not based on principle but on politics. It reveals that some lives, particularly Palestinian lives, are valued less than others. As the UN Special Rapporteur wrote, “The failure of powerful states to prevent genocide in Gaza marks a collapse of the international system’s moral foundation.”

The death of global conscience and the rise of authoritarianism

The Gaza genocide has also accelerated a broader trend—the erosion of human rights norms and the rise of authoritarian tendencies within Western democracies. Across Europe and North America, governments have cracked down on pro‑Palestinian protests, censored dissenting voices, and targeted journalists, academics and ordinary citizens who criticize Israeli actions.

Human rights organizations have warned that these measures represent a dangerous slide toward authoritarianism, driven by the desire to suppress criticism of Western foreign policy. The result is a shrinking space for democratic debate and a growing climate of fear.

This internal repression mirrors the external abandonment of human rights principles. Together, they signal the emergence of a “post‑human rights world,” in which the universal values proclaimed after World War Two are being systematically dismantled.

A world forever changed

The Gaza genocide has shattered the illusion of Western humanity. It has exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Western alliance, revealed the selective and self‑serving nature of the “rules‑based order,” and demonstrated the willingness of powerful states to tolerate — and even enable — mass atrocities when it suits their interests.

The consequences will be long‑lasting. The credibility of international law has been gravely damaged. The promise of “Never Again” has been betrayed. And the global moral order that emerged after World War Two is now in deep crisis.

Whether the world can rebuild a genuine, universal system of human rights remains uncertain. But one thing is clear: the illusion of Western moral leadership will not recover from the atrocities committed in Gaza.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Reflections on the 78th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region—the creation of Israel on stolen land, and its repercussions—is addressed.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

As Palestinians and their allies mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba we need to reflect on how the world arrived at this moment in history and what it means. 

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Western governments watched Nazi Germany’s escalating persecution of Jews with a mixture of indifference, appeasement, and self‑interest. That moral failure helped clear the path to the Holocaust. Today, a parallel pattern of ambivalence, active support for Israel, and deep anti‑Palestinian racism among Western political elites is enabling another catastrophe in full view of the world—the ongoing Nakba and the Gaza Genocide being perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians.

This is not rhetorical excess. It is what emerges when one takes Palestinian history seriously, listens to the growing number of Jewish and Israeli voices breaking from Zionist orthodoxy, and examines the historical record—including the United Nations’ own documentation of its permanent responsibility on the question of Palestine, and its role in creating the situation of the Palestinian people.

The reality is the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic— never ended. It refers to the mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing and dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war and the erasure and depopulation of more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages. For decades, Western discourse treated this as an unfortunate but closed chapter, a tragic birth pang of a necessary state. But for Palestinians, the Nakba is not a date, it is an ongoing structural injustice that has affected generations of their people.

The UN itself acknowledges that the Nakba was not merely a by-product of war but a systematic process of displacement and dispossession that created one of the world’s largest and longest‑standing refugee populations. The UN’s “About the Nakba” page explicitly states that the events of 1948 “resulted in the displacement of more than half of the Palestinian Arab population” and that the consequences of this displacement “remain unresolved to this day.”

Palestinian writer Aziz Abu Sarah describes the Nakba as having “a dual meaning”—both the razed villages and refugee camps of 1948, the daily reality of land confiscation in the years and decades that followed, settlement expansion, family separation, and legal discrimination that continues to this day. His parents cannot legally live in the house they built just outside Jerusalem without losing their Jerusalem IDs, while nearby illegal Jewish settlers enjoy full rights. Every checkpoint, every denied permit, every demolished home is experienced as a renewed Nakba.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV) reinforces this understanding, arguing that the Nakba is “not a historical event but an ongoing process,” one that has evolved from ethnic cleansing in 1948 to what they describe as genocide in Gaza today. Their analysis emphasizes that the logic of elimination—removing Palestinians from their land—has been consistent since the creation of Israel.

Human rights organizations and Palestinian institutions now explicitly frame Israel’s current genocide in Gaza as a continuation of that same project of displacement and replacement. The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights calls the present war “a renewed Nakba manifested in a genocidal war,” noting mass killing, starvation, siege, and the displacement of nearly two million people in Gaza as part of an “ongoing colonial policy based on population replacement, land control, and the erasure of Palestinian national identity.”

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made the same point: “The Nakba of 1948 and today’s Nakba in Gaza are not two separate events, but an ongoing process of Palestinian displacement and replacement.”

The truth is that to call Israeli oppression of Palestinians merely “a conflict” is to participate in the erasure of Palestinian history and almost eight decades of Palestinian suffering.

Western complicity: From 1948 to Gaza today

The Nakba was not only the work of Zionist terrorist militias and the Israeli army. It was made possible by Western powers—particularly the United States—that endorsed partition of historic Palestine, recognized the new state created on lands beyond the UN partition plan, and then looked away as refugees were barred from returning by Israel in defiance of international law.

Ardi Imseis, in his 2024 UN‑commissioned study The Nakba and the United Nations’ Permanent Responsibility for the Question of Palestine, argues that the UN bears a unique and ongoing responsibility because it played a direct role in partitioning Palestine and then failed to enforce the rights of the displaced population. Imseis notes that the UN’s responsibility is “not episodic but permanent,” rooted in the fact that the organization “helped create the conditions that made the Nakba possible.”

UN Resolution 194 affirmed the right of Palestinian refugees to return or receive compensation, but Western governments never seriously enforced it. Their strategic interests—Cold War positioning, oil, and alliance with a self‑styled “outpost of the West”—took precedence over Palestinian rights.

The same pattern is evident today. As Gaza is bombed into ruins, with hundreds of thousands killed and many more maimed or starved, Western states continue to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield Israel. Legal experts, UN rapporteurs, and civil society groups have warned of a serious risk, and ultimately, the reality of genocide. Just as Western governments once found reasons to downplay or rationalize Nazi persecution of Jews until it was too late, they now supply endless justifications to excuse or minimize Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life. Then, the rationales centered on fear of refugees, antisemitism, and geopolitical calculations. Now, they invoke “counter-terrorism,” “self-defence,” and the imperative to stand with an ally—no matter what that ally does.

Suppressing the story: Nakba denial as a Western project

The Nakba is not only being continued on the ground, it is being suppressed in classrooms, parliaments, and media studios across the West.

In the United States, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy barred Palestinian‑American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from holding a Nakba commemoration at the Capitol after lobbying from the Anti‑Defamation League, forcing the event to move to a different room offered by Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Jacky Rosen condemned the very idea of calling Israel’s establishment a “catastrophe” as “deeply offensive,” erasing the lived catastrophe of Palestinians in favour of a sacrosanct (albeit false) state narrative.

The Jewish Currents newsletter that reported this incident drew a sharp parallel between this discomfort with Nakba education and white uneasiness about teaching Black history in the United States. It described a “collective narcissism” that reads any expression of Palestinian identity—flags, commemorations, the kheffiya Palestinian scarf, even grief—as an attack on Jews, and noted that Israel‑advocacy organizations are increasingly using the charge of antisemitism to preemptively repress Palestinian speech, from the U.S. to Germany, where Berlin police have repeatedly banned Nakba Day protests.

Inside Israel, the state has passed laws penalizing public institutions that commemorate the Nakba, and Palestinian educators face constant pressure. Abu Sarah notes that the Israeli government not only ignores Palestinian history but “is also trying to force Palestinians to forget their own narrative, by forbidding commemoration of the Nakba.” Organizations like Zochrot, which work to educate Israeli Jews about the Nakba and Palestinian return, have been marginalized and attacked, even as they collaborate with groups like BADIL to bring Nakba testimony to international audiences.

In the U.S., Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Facing the Nakba” curriculum exists precisely because mainstream Jewish and general education has erased this history. The curriculum explicitly teaches that the Nakba “began with Israel’s establishment, and continues to this day,” and is designed to help U.S. Jews confront why they were never taught this story and how that omission shapes their politics. It is initiatives like this that are attempting to resist the Zionist attempt to deny the reality of what Palestinians have endured.

From Nakba denial to a new form of Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is not only the crude claim that the gas chambers never existed. It is also any attempt to relativize, justify, or erase the systematic destruction of European Jewry. We rightly treat such denial as a moral red line.

Yet when it comes to Palestinians, Western political and media elites routinely engage in analogous forms of denial. They:

• Erase the original crime by refusing to acknowledge that Israel’s creation involved mass expulsion and dispossession.

• Justify ongoing violence as unfortunate but necessary “self‑defence,” even when it clearly targets civilians on a massive scale.

• Suppress testimony by banning Nakba commemorations, criminalizing Palestinian solidarity, and smearing critics as antisemites or terrorist sympathizers

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made explicit what Palestinians have long said: “The Nakba is an enterprise of displacement and replacement of people that continues to this very day,” and Gaza’s people now face a choice between “displacement, subjugation, or death—in other words, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide.” To deny this reality, or to insist that it cannot be named because it offends Western sensibilities, is to participate in a form of historical and moral erasure that echoes the mechanisms once used to minimize the Holocaust while it was unfolding.

Jewish voices breaking the spell

One of the most hopeful developments is that more Jewish and Israeli voices are publicly challenging the myths that sustain this denial. The Al Jazeera feature on Jewish voices around Nakba Day highlights historians like Avi Shlaim, who calls Israel “a pariah and a war criminal state” whose brutality in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have created a crisis with world Jewry. Within Jewish communities, projects like “Facing the Nakba” and the work of Jewish Currents, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others are insisting that Jewish ethics demand confronting Palestinian dispossession, not denying it.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada adds that confronting the Nakba is not only a moral obligation but a necessary step toward ending what they describe as Israel’s “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.

Their message is simple: acknowledging the Nakba and opposing genocide in Gaza is not anti-Semitic, it is a Jewish obligation grounded in the very lessons of the Holocaust that Western elites claim to honour.

Justice for Palestinians: The defining human rights struggle of our time

Because the Nakba is ongoing, justice for Palestinians is not one issue among many, it is the central test of whether the international human rights system means anything at all.

The UN’s own language now recognizes that 1948 and Gaza are part of a single process of displacement and replacement.[5] Anthropologists describe Israeli institutions, including universities, as “settler universities” embedded in a 78‑year project of ethnic cleansing and “Judaization.” Palestinian and international human rights groups document patterns of apartheid, persecution, and now genocide.

If the world cannot—or will not—stop a state that openly talks of a “second Nakba,” that has destroyed every university in Gaza, that starves children and then blames their parents, then the post‑1945 promise of “never again” has been hollowed out and is meaningless, not only for Jews, but for everyone.

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region is addressed—the creation of a state on stolen land, the exclusion of its indigenous people, and the ongoing attempt to erase their presence. 

The UN’s worst decision and what it would mean to undo it

In hindsight, the UN’s endorsement of the partition of historic Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state in a region where Palestinians were the majority may be the single most disastrous decision it made in the 20th century. Not because Jews did not deserve safety after the Holocaust, but because that safety was pursued through the dispossession of another people rather than through de‑Nazification, open borders, and genuine global responsibility for refugees.

Ardi Imseis argues that the UN’s failure to uphold Palestinian rights after partition created a “permanent responsibility” that the organization has yet to fulfill. The turmoil, wars, occupations, and cycles of violence that have followed are not unfortunate side effects, they are the predictable consequences of building a state on a foundational injustice and then refusing, decade after decade, to confront it.

The Nakba was not an accident. It was a choice. Continuing it is also a choice.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

PALESTINIAN DESTINY

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

Every Israeli bullet and bomb

That genocides innocent Palestinians

That destroys their lands and homes

And seeks to send them to oblivion

Plants the seeds of a revolution

And foretells the obliteration

Of the racist Zionist ideology

It will see an end to the inhumanity

Of almost eight decades of Israeli depravity

And decades of their bigoted insanity

The day is coming when the world will see

An independent Palestinian nation

Free from Israeli domination

A time when Palestinians will be free

From the river to the sea

Because that is their destiny

* * *
 

 

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.