Gaza Genocide and the US-Israeli War on Iran signal the collapse of the “international rules-based order”

We are witnessing a repeat of the 1930s, where the League of Nations collapsed because it could not—or would not—restrain the aggression of its powerful members.

 

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

For nearly eight decades, the global community has been lectured on the sanctity of the “international rules-based order.” We were told that the post-World War Two framework—built upon the wreckage of the Holocaust and codified through the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Conventions—was a shield for the vulnerable and a leash for the powerful. This order was founded on the promise of “Never Again,” a solemn vow that the industrial-scale extermination of a people would never be permitted to recur.

 

However, as we enter the 31st month of Israel’s genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—with a so-called ceasefire proving illusory and the slaughter continuing unabated—that shield has been revealed as a sieve, and the vow as a hollow ethno-specific mantra. Compounding this betrayal is the US-Israeli illegal war of aggression launched against Iran on February 28, 2026. In both instances, the two nations have flagrantly violated the aforementioned treaties and conventions, and the fundamental norms of international law. Together, these atrocities signal the effective collapse of the international rules-based order and the myth of universal human rights.

The discrepancy between the “official” reality and the truth on the ground in Gaza is the first indication of this collapse. As of January 2026, mainstream Western outlets cautiously cite a Palestinian death toll topping 75,000. Yet rigorous academic and epidemiological analyses reveal a far more harrowing reality. Peer-reviewed studies and models, including those by Australian scholars Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, Israeli academic Yaakov Garb’s analysis published by Harvard, and The Lancet’s projections, demonstrate that when accounting for bodies buried under millions of tons of rubble, indirect deaths from the total collapse of healthcare, starvation, and untreated disease, the true toll exceeds 680,000 lives—primarily women and children—as of April 2025, with the figure climbing further into 2026 as the Israeli assault continues.

If we accept the figures from these studies—derived from the same scientific methodologies used in other global conflicts—the scale of the slaughter rivals or exceeds the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Yet unlike Rwanda, which the West later lamented as a failure of intervention, the Gaza genocide is a willful failure to intervene in the most transparent genocide in human history. The “rules-based order” is not failing because it’s weak. It is failing because its architects are the primary financiers of the carnage being inflicted on the Middle-East.

The United States has funnelled over $21 billion in military aid to Israel since October 2023, with billions more arriving from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. These nations, which frequently invoke international law to sanction adversaries, have simultaneously provided the diplomatic cover and the weapons required to systematically level 80% of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. By weaponizing international law against the powerless while suspending it for their allies, the Western alliance has exposed the “order” as a criminal cabal that prioritizes geopolitical hegemony over human life.

This betrayal is rooted in a profound, institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia that permeates Western institutions and discourse. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians—who have endured more than a century of occupation, dispossession, and Zionist settler-colonialism—has been crucial in sustaining Western silence and complicity amid the ongoing horrors in Gaza.

A stark illustration of this double standard emerged in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023. The killing of 1,195 people during the Hamas-led attacks triggered swift, intense moral outrage across the Western world, with leaders and media outlets universally condemning the violence as an atrocity. Yet as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza climbed to ten, fifty, and eventually hundreds of times that number—reaching catastrophic scales through relentless bombardment—the same Western leaders responded with only tepid, “measured” appeals for restraint, even as they continued supplying Israel with massive quantities of bombs, missiles and other munitions.

Investigations, including reports from Israeli sources like Ha’aretz and international bodies such as the UN Commission of Inquiry, have since revealed that the October 7 death toll included casualties from Israeli forces’ application of the controversial Hannibal Directive in multiple locations. This procedure, aimed at preventing captures of Israeli Jews at all costs (even if it risked or caused the deaths of Israelis), was invoked during the chaos, leading to incidents that killed hundreds of civilians and potentially endangered others. Despite these complexities and the acknowledgement in some accounts that not all deaths were solely attributable to Hamas, the Western reaction remained one-sided--unqualified horror at Palestinian-perpetrated violence contrasted sharply with muted or enabling responses to Israel’s far deadlier genocidal campaign.

This selective outrage underscores how deeply entrenched biases allow the West to rationalize or overlook massive Palestinian suffering while amplifying lesser-scale violence against Israelis, perpetuating a hierarchy of human worth that has enabled the ongoing catastrophe.

The moral abyss is further deepened by the “visibility” of this genocide. Unlike the Holocaust, which the Nazi regime attempted to hide in isolated camps like Auschwitz, the annihilation of Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide in human history. We see the emaciated frames of starving children and the obliteration of entire families in high definition on our smartphones. We see Israeli soldiers filming their own war crimes for social media, mocking the ruins of schools and mosques. The world watches in real-time as a population of approximately 2 million is squeezed into “safe zones” that are then systematically bombarded.

The fact that this transparency has prompted no meaningful intervention from the powers that defeated the Nazis is a devastating indictment of those nations and our era. It suggests that the “international community” is not a collective of nations bound by law, but a hierarchy of human value where Palestinian blood is deemed “lesser” than that of those within the Western sphere of influence.

The invocation of “Never Again” has been particularly perverted. Originally intended as a universal promise to protect all of humanity from the “crime of crimes,” it has been narrowed into a tool of Jewish exceptionalism. Every year, Western leaders hypocritically stand at Holocaust memorials and pledge to uphold justice, even as they provide the white phosphorus and intelligence used to displace 99% of Gaza’s population. This victim-perpetrator inversion, where the state committing genocide is shielded from accountability by the memory of a previous genocide, is a moral perversity that the international legal system cannot survive.

We are witnessing a repeat of the 1930s, where the League of Nations collapsed because it could not—or would not—restrain the aggression of its powerful members. Today, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice are being rendered obsolete not by their own design, but by the brazen defiance of the United States and its allies. When the ICC seeks warrants for war crimes, it is threatened with sanctions by Washington. When the UN General Assembly votes for a ceasefire, it is ignored.

The betrayal extends directly to the US-Israeli war against Iran. On February 28, under President Donald Trump and in coordination with Israel, the United States launched unprovoked strikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and leadership—including the assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his family. A girls’ elementary school in Minab was deliberately hit, killing at least 165 children, alongside strikes on hospitals and civilian areas with no military value. These actions constitute a blatant and criminal war of aggression with no UN Security Council authorization and no valid claim of imminent self-defence under the UN Charter. Additionally, diplomatic talks with Iran were making significant progress hours before the strikes, and leaks from within the US intelligence establishment confirmed no imminent Iranian threat or nuclear warhead capability.

Under the Geneva Conventions, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian objects qualifies as war crimes. Israeli and American hypocrisy is blatant and staggering in this regard when compared to the war in Ukraine. The same nations that imposed sanctions on Russia for its 2022 invasion of that nation and condemned it for bombing schools and hospitals, offered complicity, muted criticism, or outright endorsement for identical violations against Iran. This selective enforcement—condemning aggression when committed by adversaries but exempting allies—lays bare the double standards that have defined the international order from its inception in the late 1940s.

Both the Gaza genocide and the aggression against Iran directly contravene the foundational principles established by the Judgment at Nuremberg (1945-1946), the bedrock of all international law created after World War Two. The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that “to initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” It established individual accountability for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—principles that directly birthed the UN Charter (prohibiting aggression), the 1948 Genocide Convention (acts with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as Israel’s systematic killings, starvation policies, and destruction of life conditions in Gaza fulfill), the Geneva Conventions (civilian protections violated in both Gaza’s bombardment and Iran’s school and hospital strikes), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By committing these crimes with impunity, the US and Israel have not merely violated these instruments, they have demolished the post-war legal order built explicitly on Nuremberg’s vow to prevent such atrocities from recurring.

In his special address at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invoked Thucydides’ dictum that “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” He declared that the rules-based international order was “fading,” a “fiction,” an “illusion,” and no longer functioning “as advertised.” He acknowledged that nations like Canada had prospered under it for decades, but “we knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false—that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.”

Carney urged middle powers to accept the reality—a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic and military might as a weapon of coercion. This speech inadvertently confirms the core truth—that the order Carney described was never universal or impartial. It primarily benefitted the West and aligned powers—delivering prosperity and security to Canada, the US, and Europe—while adversaries and the Global South were its perpetual victims, subjected to occupation, sanctions, regime-change wars, economic colonialism, and now live-streamed genocide and unprovoked aggression.

Carney’s own actions and those of his government powerfully illustrate the selective nature of the rules-based order he described in Davos—one that privileges Western powers and their allies while leaving others to bear the consequences of the actions of the powerful. In the immediate aftermath of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, Carney quickly voiced support for the actions, framing them as necessary to prevent Iran from completing construction of nuclear weapons and to curb threats to regional stability, even as the UN and international law experts condemned the illegality of the actions. He has similarly refused to issue any outright condemnation of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been condemned as such by genocide and Holocaust experts, and respected human rights organizations.

This pattern of selective outrage extended further when Canada joined European allies in condemning Iran’s actions in blocking or threatening the Strait of Hormuz—actions that disrupted global oil shipments—while remaining conspicuously silent on the longstanding and intensified US economic measures against Cuba, including an effective oil blockade that has exacerbated humanitarian hardships on the island without comparable international push back. Such inconsistencies reveal the hypocrisy Carney himself stated in his Davos remarks.

Palestinians and Iranians, positioned as non-Western and comparatively “weak” actors in this hierarchy, were always intended to endure the system’s double standards. Exemptions granted to the powerful—through sustained US arms shipments to Israel, repeated vetoes of accountability at the UN, selective enforcement of international norms, and diplomatic or rhetorical endorsement of aggressive actions like the Iran strikes—have ensured that the order was intended to serve Western hegemony rather than universal principles of humanity or equity. The unfolding realities in Gaza and Iran stand as irrefutable evidence. What was once presented as a principled global framework was, in practice, a mechanism of power that the dominant nations of the world discard or bend whenever it suits their interests.

The evidence that the rules-based order is now non-existent is overwhelming. After 30 months of ongoing genocide in Gaza, the most powerful nations of the world (primarily the US and NATO nations) have done nothing to stop Israel’s slaughter, which continues despite a so-called ceasefire that came into effect in October 2025. Billions in military aid flowed uninterrupted, International Court of Justice orders were defied, and UN resolutions vetoed. The same superpower that frequently lectured the world on abiding by international law enabled the carnage in Gaza, and then pivoted to fresh aggression against Iran without justification and without consequence.

The Gaza genocide and the US-Israeli war against Iran have shattered the illusion of a global conscience and of the international “rules based order.” They have shown that “Western humanity” is a bedtime fable, a “sick joke” told to citizens who want to believe their governments are the “good guys.” In reality, the “rules” only apply when they serve the interests of the powerful. For the Palestinian and Iranian people, the international order has not been a protector, but a jailer, an executioner, and a propagator of narratives of hate.

As the ruins of Gaza continue to smoulder and the skies over Iran fill with the smoke of an illegal war of aggression, these scenes stand as stark monuments to the end of the post-World War II era. We can no longer speak of “universal human rights” with any credibility while the world’s most powerful nations actively underwrite the systematic erasure of entire peoples. The so-called international rules-based order did not fade away gradually or die of natural causes—it was deliberately murdered in the streets of Gaza and the cities of Iran, with the full knowledge, material support, and diplomatic cover provided by the very nations that once positioned themselves as its chief guardians and moral exemplars.

Any hope for a genuine future of global justice cannot be rebuilt on the shattered, hypocritical foundations of this broken system. The mass graves in Gaza and the fresh rubble across Iran hold far more than the hundreds of thousands of victims claimed by US- and Israeli-led crimes; they also entomb the long-standing pretenses of Western moral authority. The comforting fairy tale—that a system of international laws applies equally to all nations—has been exposed as a dangerous illusion. We now confront a harsh moral abyss, thrust upon the world by the very powers that long preached restraint and accountability. In this new reality, the United States and Israel operate like unchecked gunslingers in a lawless frontier, casting themselves as the corrupt sheriffs determined to “clean up” the Middle East on their own terms, regardless of the human cost or the wreckage left behind.

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

On international day to eliminate racism Canadian politicians’ PR performances demonstrate their hypocrisy

Commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Racism is political theatre for Canadian politicians. It costs nothing, changes nothing, and allows politicians to virtue-signal.
 

By Fareed Khan 

A version of this can be found on Substack.

Every year on March 21, Canadian governments at all levels solemnly mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Flags fly, statements are issued, and anti-racism programs are highlighted as evidence of governments’ actions to fight racism. Yet this annual ritual rings hollow when right-wing politicians and media outlets actively enable hate by refusing to condemn white supremacists or platform them for political gain.

As Islamophobia explodes according to Statistics Canada data, as academic research documents a surging white supremacist movement, and as Donald Trump normalizes bigotry from the White House, the gap between rhetoric and reality exposes a profound hypocrisy. Despite public commitments and taxpayer dollars poured into anti-racism efforts, Ottawa and the provinces have failed to adequately confront the hate poisoning Canadian society. Their deafening silence on the Gaza genocide—now formally acknowledged by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and leading Holocaust scholars including Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, and Amos Goldberg—has only fuelled anti-Palestinian racism at home.

A report from the National Council of Canadian Muslims reports a shocking 1,300% spike in hate crimes targeting Muslims since October 7, 2023, with independent monitors documenting surges as high as 1,800% in some regions. These are not abstract statistics, they reflect real terror—vandalism of mosques, death threats, workplace discrimination, and violent assaults. Academic studies from institutions tracking far-right networks reveal a parallel surge in white supremacist organizing. Groups like the Active Clubs and networks tied to figures such as Jeremy MacKenzie have shifted from online echo chambers to street rallies, propaganda campaigns, and recruitment drives across Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. Their messaging—explicitly supremacist, xenophobic, and often intertwined with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab tropes—has moved from fringe forums into mainstream conservative discourse. Right-wing media outlets amplify this poison daily, framing immigrants, Muslims, and racialized communities as existential threats while platforming politicians who wink at the rhetoric.

Trump’s return to power has supercharged the trend. His casual bigotry—racist rants against migrants, praise for white nationalist ideas, and relentless dehumanization of Palestinians, and racist social media rants—provides a global template. Canadian right-wing politicians and commentators echo the same language, importing MAGA-style division into our politics. The result is a toxic feedback loop—hate crimes rise, white supremacist groups grow bolder, and governments respond with performative gestures rather than decisive action.

The federal government and provinces trumpet their anti-racism funding—grants for community programs, task forces, and funding for security around mosques and synagogues. Yet these efforts remain superficial. They fund workshops and awareness days while ignoring root causes. Police-reported hate crimes continue to climb because enforcement is lax and data collection severely under counts the crisis. In the most recent federal election which returned the Liberals to government the issue of fighting racism wasn’t even discussed.

Online hate proliferates unchecked on platforms that profit from division and fuels violence. Most alarmingly, successive governments have refused to address how their own foreign policy stokes domestic racism. The Gaza genocide—documented in exhaustive reports by international human rights organizations and noted genocide scholars has been met with equivocation at best, complicity at worst.

Additionally, Canada’s leaders have offered tepid calls for Israeli “restraint” while maintaining arms exports, diplomatic cover, and economic ties, unlike Ireland, Norway, Spain and other nations, which have taken much stronger and principled stands against the Gaza genocide. This failure to unequivocally condemn the systematic destruction and horror in Gaza—potentially more than 680,000 dead, entire family lines erased, infrastructure reduced to rubble, conditions deliberately calculated to make life unlivable—has direct domestic consequences, and legitimizes anti-Palestinian racism. When Palestinian voices are silenced on campuses, in workplaces, and in public debate, when pro-Palestine protesters face disproportionate policing while hate marches receive kid-gloves treatment, the message is clear--some lives matter less. Anti-Palestinian bigotry, often disguised as “criticism of Hamas,” has surged alongside Islamophobia. Jewish Canadians who oppose the genocide are smeared as self-hating, Arab and Muslim Canadians are collectively demonized, and the Charter rights of Palestinian Canadians are systematically violated. The government’s inaction turns what should be a human rights consensus into a wedge issue that divides communities and emboldens racists and bigots.

The hypocrisy deepens when we examine specific leaders. Mark Carney, Doug Ford, François Legault, and their counterparts continue to deny Palestinians the full protection of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They refuse to recognize the inherent racism embedded in Zionist ideology—an ethno-supremacist framework that privileges one group’s national rights over another's in the same land, justifying dispossession, settler-colonialism, occupation, and now genocide.

These politicians speak of “shared values” and “two-state solutions” in platitudes, yet they block calls for accountability, label Palestinian solidarity as extremism, and equate anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel with antisemitism, a claim vehemently rejected by progressive Jewish organizations in Canada and the US. They meet with the leaders of legacy Jewish community organizations to condemn antisemitism while ignoring or marginalizing Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voices pleading for consistency. They fund anti-racism programs with one hand and undermine them with the other by refusing to apply Charter principles universally.

When sincere anti-hate advocates—civil society groups, scholars, and affected communities—offer concrete recommendations (stronger hate speech enforcement, independent oversight of policing, ending arms sales linked to genocide, public recognition of anti-Palestinian racism as a distinct category, and genuine consultation with impacted groups), the response is lip service. Photo-ops and press releases substitute for structural change. Leaders nod solemnly on March 21, then return to policies that protect the status quo.

Commemorating the International Day for the Elimination of Racism under these conditions is political theatre. It costs nothing and changes nothing. It allows governments to virtue-signal while right-wing enablers stoke division, white supremacy groups organize openly, Islamophobia explodes, and the Gaza genocide’s spillover hatred festers unchecked. True commitment demands more--unequivocal condemnation of all racism, including the ethno-supremacist ideology driving the Gaza genocide—full Charter protections for all, accountability for foreign policy failures, and implementation of community recommendations rather than performative gestures.

Canadians deserve better than annual hypocrisy. Until governments match their anti-racism rhetoric with courage—confronting right-wing hate, addressing surging white supremacy and Islamophobia, and ending complicity in genocide abroad—the International Day will remain an empty ritual. Hate will not be eliminated by press releases and political platitudes. It requires moral consistency, political will, and the recognition that Palestinian rights are human rights. Anything less is mere theatre, not justice.

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

It’s time for regime change in the United States and Israel to restore international law

A global regime-change campaign against lesser violators rings hollow without confronting the architects of global impunity—the United States and Israel.

By Fareed Khan 

A version of this can be found on Substack.

In the pantheon of post-World War Two violators of international norms, no two states rival the United States and Israel in the scale, frequency, or the sheer impunity of their actions. As Noam Chomsky has powerfully documented in works such as Hegemony or Survival and his essay The Dangerous Rogue States Operating in the Mideast, these nations function as twin rogue powers, freely resorting to aggression, terror, and systematic violations of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention.

While other states, like Russia and China, have undoubtedly committed grave offenc

es, some on multiple occasions, none approach the breadth of America's and Israel's combined record—illegal wars, prolonged occupations, orchestrated coups, false-flag operations, and destabilizing interventions spanning continents. If a genuine global campaign is ever needed to enforce accountability through regime change, it must begin with Washington and Tel Aviv.

This is not hyperbole but the logical extension of analyses by Chomsky, William Blum in Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two, Ilan Pappé in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Norman Finkelstein in Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. Their scholarship lays bare a pattern that demands action to address the problem at the source.

Since 1948, when it was created on stolen Palestinian land, Israel’s violations form a continuous arc of territorial conquest and collective punishment. It has occupied and bombed every nation on its borders—Egypt in 1956 and 1967, Jordan in 1967, Syria repeatedly (seizing the Golan Heights in 1967 and annexing it illegally in 1981, in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 497), and Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 2006, and beyond. Palestinian lands have remained under constant and brutal occupation for almost six decades, violating the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibitions on settlement and collective punishment, as well as UN resolutions 242 and 338 demanding withdrawal. Pappé meticulously chronicles this as incremental ethnic cleansing, while Finkelstein demonstrates how Gaza’s siege and repeated assaults meet the Genocide Convention’s criteria of intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.

The International Court of Justice’s ongoing proceedings and UN experts’ findings underscore these breaches. Israel’s actions have displaced millions, killed more than 680,000 in Gaza alone according to one study, and flouted the Universal Declaration’s guarantees of self-determination and freedom from arbitrary deprivation of life. No other state since 1945 has maintained such prolonged, illegal occupations while rejecting UN authority with US protection and complicity.

The US ledger is even longer and more global. Blum’s Killing Hope catalogues over fifty CIA-orchestrated coups, invasions, and destabilizations—the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government (Operation Ajax); installing the Shah as his replacement and sowing seeds for decades of resentment; the 1954 coup in Guatemala that unleashed genocidal civil war; the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende, ushering in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet; interventions in Africa in Congo, Ghana, Angola and Mozambique; Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia); and Latin America (Nicaragua’s Contras, Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989). These are just a few of the operations that routinely violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter banning threats or use of force against territorial integrity or political independence.

The 2003 Iraq War stands as a textbook case of an illegal and unjust war. Launched on fabricated claims about weapons of mass destruction—blatant lies exposed by the Downing Street Memo—without Security Council authorization, it resulted in more than a million Iraqis killed, destabilized the region, and birthing extremist groups like ISIS. Chomsky labels this the hallmark of a “failed state” that exempts itself from the rules it imposes on others.

Both nations have weaponized false flags and covert coups to rationalize their criminal actions. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, later admitted as fabricated, propelled US escalation in the Vietnam War, costing millions of innocent lives. Proposed but unexecuted schemes like Operation Northwoods (1962) relating to Cuba, reveal a pattern of manufacturing pretexts to achieve geopolitical objectives. Israel’s history includes alleged provocations in border conflicts, while joint US-Israeli intelligence has fuelled coups from Tehran to Santiago.

These tactics erode sovereignty, as Blum details—sovereign governments toppled not for security or in response to aggression but for resource control and ideological conformity. The destabilizing fallout has been catastrophic, resulting in civil wars, refugee crises impacting millions, and economic collapse. The war in Iraq fragmented the Middle East, Latin American coups entrenched inequality, African interventions prolonged proxy conflicts. Such chaos, orchestrated by these two rogue nations, repeatedly violated the UN Charter’s core purpose—maintaining international peace and security.

Today, this pattern continues in the unprovoked US-Israeli assault on Iran, launched February 28, 2026. What began as airstrikes under “Operation Epic Fury” and “Roaring Lion” has resulted in the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, targeted nuclear research and missile sites, civilian infrastructure, all in pursuit of regime change. Experts at the UN have condemned it as “flagrant violation of international law” and an “act of aggression,” executed while the US was in diplomatic negotiations with Iran, where progress was being made. Legal scholars and analysts describe their actions as illegal under the UN Charter, lacking Security Council approval or a credible self-defence claim. Iranian retaliation followed, yet the initiators’ stated goal—overthrowing a sovereign government—mirrors the very interventions Blum and Chomsky have chronicled for decades.

This war, with civilian deaths mounting, including strikes on schools and hospitals, exemplifies the hypocrisy often displayed by both the US and Israel—powers that lecture on nuclear non-proliferation while violating it themselves through nuclear ambiguity (Israel) and pre-emptive force (both).

Critics rightly note that other states also have blood on their hands, but none approach the quantitative and qualitative dominance and aggression of the US-Israeli axis.  The US maintains over 800 overseas bases in 70 countries, projects power globally, and has vetoed UN resolutions dozens of times to shield Israel from being held accountable for its criminal actions.

Israel, as Chomsky observes, acts with impunity and with US support, rejecting International Atomic Energy Association inspections while demanding them of Iran. Their combined interventions have reshaped the destiny of nations around the globe, through coups (Iran, Guatemala, Chile), illegal wars (Iraq, Vietnam), and occupations (Golan, West Bank, Gaza blockade). The Genocide Convention, invoked against others, applies here also. Finkelstein’s inquest into Gaza and Pappé’s settler-colonial framework reveal systematic intent. The Universal Declaration’s rights to life, self-determination, freedom from torture are trampled daily at the hands of the leaders of these two nations. No rival tally is comparable.  China’s or Russia’s actions, while serious and at times egregious (Russia's war with Georgia and China's crackdown on democracy protests over the decades), lack this post-1945 breadth of extraterritorial subversion.

A global regime-change campaign against lesser violators rings hollow without confronting the two top architects of global impunity. Chomsky urges recognizing US exceptionalism as the obstacle to peace, while Blum demands dismantling the intervention machine. Pappé and Finkelstein join them with calls to end Israeli apartheid and occupation, with external force if needed. Extending their logic, the world must mobilize and apply universal sanctions, arms embargoes, ICC prosecutions for American and Israeli leaders, support domestic movements to rebuild democratic institutions, and amplify BDS-style isolation for the two nations. Regime change here will mean empowering peoples to reclaim sovereignty—through non-violent pressure where possible, and other means where necessary. Only then can the UN Charter regain meaning, the Genocide Convention deter future atrocities, and human rights become universal rather than selective. The alternative is a world trapped in perpetual hypocrisy—one where the most powerful nations proclaim universal rules while brazenly violating them, sowing the seeds of endless conflict and instability.  

 

Through decades of meticulous scholarship and irrefutable evidence, thinkers such as Chomsky, Blum, Pappé, and Finkelstein have demonstrated beyond doubt that no other states since 1945 have matched the United States and Israel in the sheer scale, duration, and audacity of their violations of international law, human rights, and the foundations of global order, all but making the case for regime change in these two nations.

 

True justice demands that we finally turn the lens inward. Rather than selectively punishing lesser violators while shielding the architects of impunity The international community must summon the resolve to launch a sustained, principled global campaign aimed at regime change in Washington and Tel Aviv, the very epicentre of systemic global lawlessness. Nothing less will restore credibility to the United Nations Charter, halt the cycle of aggression, and secure the survival of a rules-based international order worthy of the name.

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

The Iran war is negatively impacting national economies, and will have severe impacts on real estate

Beyond higher interest rates and inflation, wars cause jobs to dry up, slow construction, and increase unemployment. 

By Fareed Khan 

A version of this can be found on Substack.

Regional wars that break out far from Canada can still send strong ripples through the economy and impact every sector in the economy, particularly real estate and housing. The current war on Iran instigated by the United States and Israel, which started on February 28, shows exactly how this happens. Rising oil prices, higher everyday living costs and the Bank of Canada keeping interest rates elevated all make it tougher for average families to buy homes, slow down sales and push house prices lower. The longer these conflicts last, the more damage they do.

Canada’s real estate sector stands out as one of the largest parts of the national economy, accounting for roughly 13.2% of GDP – the biggest single slice of the national economic pie. This covers the value of people living in their own homes, rental properties, commercial leasing and the work of real estate agents and brokers. It also accounts for jobs in construction, banking and related services, which fuels much of the consumer spending that keeps the economy moving. When this sector takes a hit, the pain spreads quickly, touching everything from the more than one million mortgage renewals due in 2026, to plans for the construction of new homes and condos across the country.

The way these economic shocks reach Canada's shores is straightforward—and it plays out the same way with every major global conflict. Wars in the Middle East hit particularly hard because the region produces a substantial share of the world's oil supply; under normal conditions, countries there (including key Gulf producers) account for roughly 30 per cent of global output, and critical routes like the Strait of Hormuz carry about one-fifth of seaborne crude trade.

When fighting disrupts production, threatens tankers or blocks key shipping lanes—as has happened dramatically since the current conflict escalated—oil prices surge quickly. That higher cost flows straight into everyday expenses—gasoline at the pump gets pricier, home heating bills climb, and even the price of fruits and vegetables rises because so much modern farming relies on oil-based fertilizers and fuel for transport. Even though Canada is a net exporter of oil and produces more than it consumes domestically, the country isn't shielded from these international swings. When global oil prices jump, the cost of living rises for everyone, no matter where they live, pushing up inflation and pressuring central banks to respond.

To stop prices from spiralling out of control, the Bank of Canada holds off on cutting interest rates or raises them if needed, thus making mortgages more expensive, especially the variable-rate ones many households carry. According to the International Monetary Fund Canadians already carry some of the heaviest household debt in the world relative to their income, consistently ranking at or near the top among developed nations. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, Canadians held approximately $1.77 in credit market debt for every dollar of disposable income, according to Statistics Canada data released in March 2026.

In the current market, with housing affordability already a major problem, and households struggling under these heavy debt burdens, even modest rate increases make buying a home feel out of reach for many. In such a scenario, many owners would likely decide to stay put rather than sell and take on a costlier new mortgage, while first-time buyers find entering the market even more difficult. 

This pressure has been building for years.  Since 2021, consumer insolvencies—including bankruptcies—have risen annually, with 2025 recording the second-highest annual volume on record since tracking began in 1987, a 16-year high. Consumer bankruptcies specifically increased by 4.3% compared to 2024, driven largely by persistent inflation, higher debt servicing costs from elevated interest rates, and growing debt loads, particularly on credit cards.

These trends leave families more vulnerable when external shocks like rising energy prices from a distant war push borrowing costs higher, turning what might be a temporary squeeze into longer-term financial strain that further cools the real estate market.

Building new homes becomes noticeably more expensive too, because oil plays a central role in producing many construction materials—asphalt for roads and roofing, plastics for pipes and wiring, paints, and insulation—while also raising the price of trucking those supplies across vast distances to building sites. At the same time, when wars disrupt global supply chains and sows widespread uncertainty about the economy, people considering entering the housing market or moving to a bigger home, along with investors eyeing properties, often choose to pause and wait for a more stable situation. That collective hesitation quickly becomes visible in the market as fewer homes sell, activity slows sharply, and house prices flatten or begin to trend downward. 

If a conflict ends quickly, things can usually return to normal fairly soon once oil supplies stabilize and interest rates come down. But when the fighting drags on—as appears increasingly likely in the current US-Israel operations against Iran, now in its third week with no immediate end in sight—the elevated costs take root as the new everyday reality.  Borrowing remains expensive for an extended period, and the harm to home values grows deeper and more persistent, affecting markets nationwide from high-rise condos in Vancouver and Toronto to single-family houses in Halifax and communities in between.

During the six long years of the Second World War, Canadian factories turned almost entirely to producing weapons, vehicles, and other military supplies, left civilian construction—including new homes—severely limited. With building materials rationed and labour redirected to the war effort, the number of homes added to the market was far below what was needed. As the conflict dragged on, cities swelled with workers drawn to wartime jobs and, later, with returning soldiers eager to start new lives. The result was a sharp housing shortage that left families crammed into overcrowded apartments, shared homes, or whatever shelter they could find.

Because the disruption lasted so many years, the housing market could not begin to recover until well after the fighting ended in 1945. Only then, with the help of government programs such as those run by the newly created Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation, did large-scale home building finally take off and ease the pressure. Even though Canada was never bombed or occupied, the long diversion of resources and attention to the war effort still created a deep and lasting housing crunch for ordinary families across the country.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War and the oil embargo that followed also brought years of rising prices and economic pain to Canada. Fuel costs quadrupled, pushing up the price of almost everything. To fight the surge in living costs, the Bank of Canada pushed rates higher, eventually topping 20% by the early 1980s. Mortgage payments became crushing for many families, sales slowed dramatically and home prices stagnated or fell when measured against inflation. The effects lasted well into the 1980s because the oil shock did not fade quickly, showing how a distant conflict can keep housing under pressure for years even when Canada was not directly involved.

The 1990-1991 Gulf War lasted only months but still helped trigger a recession that weighed on Canadian real estate+ for several years afterward. Oil prices spiked at first, inflation rose and consumer confidence cratered. The Bank of Canada eventually cut rates, but the damage had already been done as sales weakened, new building slowed and average house prices dropped noticeably in many parts of the country. The short duration of the war allowed an eventual rebound, yet it proved that even brief regional wars can create extended drags on the market through higher costs and lost confidence.

The Russia-Ukraine war, now entering its fourth year, offers a recent warning of how drawn-out fighting keeps hurting economies far away. Energy and food prices jumped as a direct result of the Russian incursion into Ukraine, forcing the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates within a week after the invasion began, driven by fears of runaway inflation and soaring commodity prices. Housing sales volumes cooled, affordability worsened and price growth slowed across the country even in strong markets like Toronto and Vancouver. The conflict’s length has prevented a full recovery, leaving higher borrowing costs and uncertainty in place far longer than a quick resolution would have allowed.

The current situation with Iran is already showing early signs of the same pressures. Since the strikes began in late February, oil prices have climbed to more than US$100 per barrel, with gas prices topping $2.00 per litre in British Columbia, approaching $1.70 per litre in Ontario and Quebec, and reaching $1.80 per litre in Atlantic Canada. Bond yields have moved higher because investors worry about lasting inflation, making mortgage rates firmer just as hundreds of thousands of Canadian families face renewals. Economists note that if the conflict stretches on, the Bank of Canada may have to increase rates and keep them elevated longer, delaying the relief many home buyers were counting on for the spring market.

Wars create extra layers of harm beyond higher interest rates. Construction jobs dry up when building slows because of costly materials and hesitant buyers, leaving tradespeople out of work, and more families are forced to sell homes quickly—sometimes at a loss—to cover bills. This extra supply on the market pushes prices down even further in already soft conditions.

Overseas investors who once saw Canadian real estate as a safe place to park money are also likely reassess their investing and with many of them looking at investment opportunities in other countries. With uncertainty rising, capital will flow elsewhere, cutting demand sharply in cities where foreign buyers play a large role in the market—cities like Toronto and Vancouver—and will cause noticeable price drops in certain neighbourhoods. The simple fear of what might happen next will freeze the market in place, as families put off buying their first home or moving up, while sellers who can afford to wait hold off until the market improves. Fewer deals mean that prices will drift lower as the lack of activity itself signals trouble to everyone watching.

Looking back at past conflicts makes the pattern clear. During the early 1990s slowdown linked to the Gulf War, Canadian real estate took a particularly heavy hit, with property values declining sharply in many rmarkets once lending tightened and confidence vanished. The 1973 oil crisis produced similar years of flat or falling prices once inflation was taken into account. These repeated drops show how deeply wars can wound the housing market even in a peaceful country like Canada.

Notable is that the economic damage does not stop when the shooting ends. It often takes years for confidence to return fully, for rates to settle and for large numbers of buyers to feel secure enough to jump back in. During that slow recovery period, many families watch their biggest asset—their home—lose ground or fail to grow, eating into retirement equity and overall wealth that most Canadians count on. This long-lasting drag is why experts stress that extended wars are especially dangerous for the housing sector.

Real estate’s large role in the Canadian economy makes these blows land harder. It not only drives a big share of GDP but also supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, and lets families tap into home equity for everything from children's education to daily spending. When wars disrupt that foundation through higher interest rates, increased costs, fewer sales and lower values, the effects reach far beyond individual homeowners to slow growth across the national economy.

Taken together, history and the present situation prove the point clearly. Regional wars send shocks through energy prices and interest rates that reach Canada regardless of any direct involvement. Short conflicts may cause only brief dips, but longer ones—like the multi-year oil crises of the 1970s, the lingering effects of the Gulf War recession or Ukraine’s ongoing drag—embed higher costs, greater uncertainty, and sustained pressure on real estate prices.

The new Iran conflict, with its potential to push oil prices to new record highs, and keep inflation elevated, risks repeating the worst of those patterns if it continues. Mortgage payments could stay at painful levels, new construction could remain stalled, and buyer confidence could remain shaky, leading to clear declines in real estate values nationwide. The longer such wars go on, the more severely Canadian real estate and housing values suffer—a reminder of how connected even a peaceful country’s biggest asset class is to distant conflicts.

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