How Western media manufactured consent for genocide in Gaza

Western media do not simply reflect reality they produce . . . In the context of Israel-Palestinian story telling they shape public consciousness and manufacture consent for state violence. 

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

In his seminal work Covering Islam, one of his books on the subject of “Orientalism”, Palestinian-American academic Edward Said discussed how Western news media constructs, distorts, and weaponizes narratives about Muslims, Arabs, and the Middle East. Said demonstrated that Western media do not simply misrepresent Islam and Arab societies, they also produce an entire worldview in which Muslims, and specifically Middle-Eastern societies, are rendered suspect, irrational, violent, and culturally inferior.

In his book Said showed that news media in the West through the lens of Orientalism depicts “Islam as a monolithic force”, a view shaped by ignorance, racism, bigotry, and geopolitical interests. His analysis exposed the machinery through which Western media manufacture fear, justify domination, oppression, and erase the humanity of those living under Western-backed violence. Nowhere is this structure more visible — or more lethal — than in Western coverage of Palestinian issues over the decades, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Gaza Genocide through a biased Western media lens

Said warned that Western media portray Islam and Muslims through a “hostile and belligerent” lens, reviving “discredited Orientalist views” whenever geopolitical interests demand it. That lens is now the default through which the Gaza genocide is covered. Palestinians are framed not as human beings with rights, histories, agency, and suffering, but as abstractions — “human shields,” “Hamas sympathizers,” “terrorist-adjacent populations.” Meanwhile Israeli lives are individualized, named, and mourned while Palestinian lives are recognized only through death tolls, and their narratives doubted, minimized, or erased.

This is not accidental, and has been happening for decades whenever Palestine and Israel have been discussed in the West, and more so over the past three years.  The news media have fuelled Israel’s genocide by uncritically repeating Israeli claims, suppressing Palestinian testimony, and framing Israel’s brutal violence as “self-defence” even when it has targeted hospitals, schools, journalists, and entire families. This provides credence to Said’s argument that Orientalism functions by privileging Western voices and those of its Israeli ally over those of Middle Eastern Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. For decades since its creation the Israeli narrative has been treated as authoritative and trustworthy, while Palestinian voices are treated as emotional, biased, suspect, and dangerous.

Canadian media’s coverage of Palestinians is no exception. A study by The Review of Journalism found that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) flagship program The National featured more Israeli voices than Palestinian ones in its Gaza coverage, giving disproportionate weight to Israeli perspectives and marginalizing those of Palestinians. This is Orientalism in practice, where the colonizer’s voice is legitimized, and the colonized are not spoken to as people with agency, but spoken about as if they have none.

Said emphasized that Orientalism is not only about what is said, but how it is said. Language constructs reality, and Western media’s linguistic choices when talking about Palestinians or Muslims reveals a hierarchy of human worth, with Palestinians and Muslims sitting near the bottom.

Israeli deaths are described with emotional and graphic specificity — “slaughtered,” “massacred,” “butchered.” Whereas Palestinian deaths — even when numbering in the tens of thousands — are described with passive, distancing language — “died,” “were killed,” “perished,” or the most dehumanizing of all, “casualties.”

As the independent news outlet The Maple reported in 2020, there is a “devastating” pro-Israel bias in Canadian media. Stories on mainstream Canadian news outlets have repeatedly used an active voice to describe Israeli deaths while consistently using a passive voice for Palestinian deaths, subtly implying agency when Israelis are harmed and inevitability when Palestinians are deliberately killed by Israeli forces even when they are peacefully resisting occupation. This linguistic asymmetry is not neutral but rather a moral ranking mechanism. When Israel kills Palestinians, the media ask: What did Hamas do to cause this? When Israelis are killed by Palestinians the media ask: Why did Palestinians murder Israelis for no apparent reason?

This is precisely the Orientalist logic Said identified, one where the West (and its allies) act and those in the Middle East are acted upon. Israeli violence is contextualized while almost eight decades of Palestinian dispossession, oppression, suffering and death are not.

Silencing pro-Palestinian voices is the new McCarthyism

Said wrote that Western media relies on “experts” to reinforce dominant colonial and imperialist narratives — well-known and credentialed voices who reproduce the Western worldview of power while masquerading as neutral analysts. These experts, he argued, are selected not for their insight but for their ideological reliability. That is, they tell the public the Israeli and pro-Western narrative in favourable terms, reinforcing already established Orientalist narratives. Today, this dynamic has intensified to the point of open intimidation. Journalists who are sympathetic to Palestinian narratives — especially those who report honestly on Israeli atrocities — are not merely marginalized, they are disciplined or fired. Newsrooms that once claimed to value independence and fairness in coverage now enforce ideological conformity in how Israel and the story of Palestinians are portrayed, with the rigidity of a security apparatus.

Reporters who attempt to humanize Palestinians, verify Israeli claims, or document Israeli war crimes, face investigations, suspensions, and removal from their jobs, as editors spike stories that contradict Israeli talking points. Freelance reporters lose contracts for expressing grief or sympathy over the suffering of Palestinian children or posting social media comments, and entire careers are destroyed for refusing to participate in the dehumanization of a people living under a brutal occupation for almost eight decades. This is not a marketplace of free speech as much as it is a system of control, with prejudiced and racist editors and producers controlling how Palestinian humanity is represented in stories. It is the modern incarnation of what Said identified decades ago — a media environment in which dissenting news stories are treated as threats to the dominant narrative, and truth-tellers are disciplined into silence to reinforce Israel’s anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Across Canada, journalists have been suspended, fired, or censured for expressing even mild sympathy for Palestinians or for criticizing Israeli war crimes. The Maple documents how Canadian journalists who attempted to report on the scale of Palestinian suffering were reprimanded or removed from assignments. Breach Media reports that Canadian op-ed pages have overwhelmingly published pro-Israel commentary while rejecting Palestinian perspectives long before the start of the Gaza genocide. Middle East Eye shows how Western media have “manufactured consent” for Israel’s killing of hundreds of Palestinian journalists by downplaying or ignoring these targeted assassinations.

This is not merely media bias, it is repression and censorship. It is the policing of acceptable speech by media gatekeepers, and the enforcement of a narrative that protects Israeli power and erases Palestinian humanity. Said warned that Orientalism is not merely an academic discourse but also a political weapon that promotes oppression. And that is evident today, as this weapon is being used against journalists who refuse to participate in the sanitization of Israel’s horrific crimes and the vilification of Palestinians.

The long history of Anti-Palestinian racism

Anti-Palestinian prejudice did not begin on October 8, 2023. It has been embedded in Western media and society for decades. As Rabble.ca notes, Western media have a long history of ignoring or minimizing atrocities committed by Israel, from the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 to the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019 — a weekly peaceful protest in which Palestinians in Gaza demonstrated for their right of return to the homes from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, 1967 and the decades since then. It is clear from the history of Palestinians since before Israel came into being that Western media portrayal of the Middle East is conducted through a lens shaped by “geopolitics and economic interests,” not by truth.

What has changed in how Western media portrays Palestinians over the past few years is not the scope of anti-Palestinian prejudice but its visibility. The Gaza genocide has exposed the depth of Western news media’s structural anti-Palestinian racism, particularly in major broadcasters and newspapers like CNN, BBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Mail, and others. It has revealed how deeply Orientalist assumptions are woven into Western newsroom culture, editorial decision-making, and journalistic norms. In Canada, newsrooms cling to “flawed notions of objectivity” that unquestioningly treat Israeli state narratives as authentic and truthful while Palestinian narratives are questioned and seen as biased. This is Orientalism masquerading as professionalism — a veneer of journalistic neutrality that conceals a racialized hierarchy of credibility. The result is a media environment where Palestinian suffering is filtered through skepticism and prejudice, Israeli claims are granted automatic legitimacy, and the very idea of Palestinian humanity becomes negotiable within the offices of Western news editors and producers.

Western media do not simply reflect reality they produce it claimed Said. In the context of Israel-Palestinian story telling they shape public consciousness and manufacture consent for state violence. If one looks closely at news stories in Western media about the Gaza genocide, they have played a role that is structurally analogous to the role the tabloid Der Stürmer played in Nazi Germany, not in ideology, but in function.

Der Stürmer dehumanized Jews, justified state violence, and normalized atrocity. Western media today dehumanizes Palestinians, legitimizes Israeli violence, and normalizes genocide. Western media have become a weapon in the Gaza genocide, shaping public opinion to enable mass killing, and have systematically suppressed images, testimonies, and evidence of Israeli atrocities.

When media systems consistently dehumanize a people, erase their suffering, and amplify the narratives of their oppressors, they are not neutral observers. They are participants and criminally complicit.

There needs to be accountability

If international law is to have any meaning, then institutions that materially contribute to atrocity crimes must face scrutiny and be held legally accountable. This includes media institutions whose coverage enables, rationalizes, or sanitizes genocide. While media systems — as institutions — can be complicit in mass violence, such complicity does not arise spontaneously. It is shaped and enforced by people — executives, editors, and senior decision‑makers — who determine which narratives are amplified and which are suppressed. The precedent is clear. At the Nuremberg Tribunals, Nazi propagandists were tried and convicted because their media apparatus played a structural role in enabling the Holocaust. Similarly Western media executives have played a significant role in the atrocities carried out by Israel in Gaza. The principle established at Nuremberg — that propaganda and disinformation can constitute participation in atrocity — remains relevant today. Western media have spent three years repeating Israeli talking points, reiterating its claims without verification ignoring Palestinian testimony, and denying that genocide is taking place. In effect, Western outlets have adopted Israeli military language, framing mass killing as “precision strikes” and ethnic cleansing as “evacuations,” thereby laundering and legitimizing Israeli state violence through their framing of genocidal acts.

Said taught that knowledge is never neutral and that media power always constitutes political power. When that power is mobilized to facilitate or obscure genocide, the question becomes unavoidable: what forms of accountability are necessary for institutions that help enable mass atrocity? His critique of Western media bias, once dismissed by some as academic overreach, now reads as prophetic. The analytical framework he developed is not merely relevant to the present moment, it is indispensable in understanding how the Gaza genocide has been narrated, justified, and normalized in the West.

The atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza have revealed the true nature of Western media, not as watchdogs of power, but as instruments of it, not as defenders of truth, but as manufacturers of consent, not as neutral observers, but as structural participants in atrocity. The patterns Said identified decades ago — the privileging of colonial narratives, the erasure of Indigenous voices, the racialized hierarchy of credibility — have all re-emerged with devastating clarity. They shape which deaths are to be mourned, which claims are to be believed, and which atrocities are to be rendered invisible.

Said warned that Orientalism was not a relic of the past but an active system of thought that would continue to shape Western perceptions of the Middle East unless confronted directly. The world did not listen and for the past three years, a genocide has unfolded in real time, with Western media helping to make it possible — through distortion, through silence, through selective empathy, and through the steady reproduction of the narratives that justify the dehumanization of Palestinians.

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

Israel has no "right to exist" under International law

By invoking Israel’s “right to exist,” Zionists deliberately conflate criticism of Israeli crimes into claims of genocidal intent toward Jews—a distortion as cynical as it is false.

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

In contemporary political debate, few questions are wielded like a cudgel and with more moral theatrics than “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” It is posed to those critical of Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians as a litmus test of decency, a trapdoor under which critics of Israeli policy are meant to fall. Answer with anything less than an unqualified “yes,” and you are immediately accused of antisemitism, of hating Jews, and wanting to wipe Jews off the map. Yet this question, treated as sacred and untouchable, rests on a false premise that nation states have a “right to exist.”

The truth is that under international law, no state has a “right to exist.” Rights belong to human beings and peoples, not to abstract political constructs. And Israel, given its decades of criminal actions against Palestinians and neighbouring nations, its violations of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and other international norms, certainly cannot claim an exceptional right denied to every other state in history.

International law defines statehood through factual criteria, not metaphysical entitlements. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, a cornerstone of modern international law, lists four qualifications for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. There is no clause granting any state an inherent, perpetual “right to exist.” States exist as a matter of fact, not as bearers of eternal rights. They emerge, transform, dissolve, and reconstitute themselves through revolutions, secessions, negotiated partitions, and collapses. International law accommodates these changes, but it does not forbid them.

The United Nations Charter reinforces this reality. Article 2(4) prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. This is a rule governing conduct among existing states, not a guarantee that any particular state will survive unchanged forever. Territorial integrity is protected against forcible alteration by other states, but states themselves can dissolve, merge, or split through internal processes. The Soviet Union did not violate some mystical “right to exist” when it collapsed into fifteen independent republics. Yugoslavia did not breach international law when it fragmented into multiple states. Czechoslovakia did not commit a crime when it peacefully divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. East Germany did not violate a metaphysical right when it disappeared into a unified Germany. South Vietnam, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro‑Hungarian Empire, a unified Korea, the British Empire—all of these entities once existed and no longer do. Their disappearance did not breach any legal right, because no such right exists.

If states possessed a “right to exist,” the world map would be frozen in time. The British Empire would still stretch across continents. The Ottoman Empire would still rule vast territories in the Middle East. The Austro‑Hungarian Empire would still dominate Central Europe. A unified Korea would still exist. South Vietnam would not have vanished. The Soviet Union would still be intact. History itself refutes the notion that states have an inherent right to exist. History shows that borders are not sacred. They are contingent expressions of power, identity, and consent.

The same logic applies to movements of self‑determination. Pakistan emerged from the partition of British India. Bangladesh was born from the struggle against Pakistani domination. Eritrea, East Timor, and South Sudan came into being through long, painful fights for independence. Dozens of former European colonies across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean asserted their right to self‑determination and became states. If colonial powers had possessed a “right to exist” in their imperial form, none of these nations would exist today. The very idea of decolonization would have been illegal. Yet international law recognizes the right of peoples to self‑determination, not the right of empires to perpetuate themselves.

The same principle holds in Canada. Sovereignty movements in Quebec and Alberta have been allowed to pursue independence referendums. If Canada had a “right to exist” as it is currently constituted, such referendums would be forbidden. Any attempt to alter the country’s borders or political structure would be a violation of Canada’s supposed right to exist. But that is not how international law works. Canadians have rights, but Canada as a political construct does not.

Israel is a particularly unstable example for any claim about a state’s “right to exist,” because its borders have never been legally defined, other than those agreed to with Jordan and Egypt. The 1948 armistice lines were ceasefire boundaries, not permanent borders. Since then, Israel has refused to specify its territorial limits in law. After 1967, it occupied the remainder of historic Palestine and parts of Syria, creating a situation in which the legal status of these territories remains contested and unresolved. Influential factions within Israel openly endorse the concept of a “Greater Israel” extending “from the Nile to the Euphrates”, and encompassing all of historic Palestine, as well as all or part of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Even Israel’s own political leadership cannot agree on where the state is supposed to begin or end. A state that refuses to define its borders, that expands through occupation and annexation, cannot coherently claim a “right to exist.”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly affirmed that Israel’s occupation, settlement enterprise, and annexation of Palestinian territory are illegal under international law. In its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the construction of the separation wall, the ICJ held that the wall and the associated regime “severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self‑determination” and that Israel’s measures “are contrary to international law.” In its 2024 Advisory Opinion on Israel’s 57-year long occupation of Palestinian territories the Court went further, concluding that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful, that it must end its unlawful presence as rapidly as possible, evacuate all settlers, and that all states must refrain from recognizing or assisting Israel’s illegal actions.

These are not marginal opinions. They are authoritative legal determinations by the world’s highest judicial body. They confirm that Israel’s occupation is illegal, its settlements are illegal, its annexation is illegal, and its regime in the occupied territories violates fundamental norms of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibition on transferring the occupier’s civilian population into occupied territory. A state that maintains an illegal occupation, that builds illegal settlements, that annexes territory in defiance of the UN Charter’s ban on the acquisition of territory by force, cannot plausibly claim a “right to exist” in its current form.

Yet whenever critics raise Israel’s atrocities—its bombing of civilians, its destruction of homes, its starvation of populations, its attacks on neighbouring countries—Israel’s defenders pivot to the same question: “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” This is a diversionary tactic. The goal is to shift attention away from Israel’s criminal behaviour and toward an abstract, emotionally charged claim. The question is posed most aggressively when Israel’s actions are hardest to defend—after massacres in Gaza, after airstrikes in Lebanon and Syria, after assassinations in Iran, after attacks on Yemen, after documented war crimes and crimes against humanity.

By insisting on Israel’s supposed “right to exist,” Zionists and their supporters seek to conflate criticism of a state’s policies with a desire to exterminate its people. They want the public to infer, without it ever being spelled out, that anyone who denies Israel’s “right to exist” is calling for the annihilation of Jews around the world. In this framing, even those who explicitly call for equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians are smeared as extremists. Jewish critics of Zionism, Holocaust survivors who oppose Israeli apartheid, Palestinian human rights advocates, reputable legal scholars—all are painted as enemies of Israel’s existence.

This rhetorical strategy is designed to protect a rogue state, not a vulnerable population. It is meant to shield Israel from accountability for its actions—its decades‑long occupation, its apartheid regime, its ethnic cleansing, its repeated violations of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against other states, its war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and other human rights organizations have documented Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself.

The ICJ, UN bodies, Holocaust and genocide scholars have warned that Israel’s actions in Gaza—indiscriminate bombing, deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, obstruction of humanitarian aid, and the use of starvation as a weapon—meet the threshold for genocide under the Genocide Convention. A state committing genocide cannot claim a “right to exist” in its current form. Apartheid South Africa had no right to exist as an apartheid regime. Nazi Germany had no right to exist as a genocidal state. Rhodesia had no right to exist as a white supremacist entity. Israel, whose crimes are more severe than apartheid South Africa’s, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed after visiting the occupied territories, cannot be granted a unique carve‑out.

The mistake at the heart of the “right to exist” discourse is to conflate the state with the people it claims to represent. Israelis as individuals have a right to exist. They have a right not to be oppressed, ethnically cleansed, or be subjected to genocide. Palestinians have the same right. They have a right to live in dignity, to be free from occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. But Israel as a political construct has no right to exist as an ethnocratic, apartheid, occupying, genocidal state. When a state is used to oppress another people, it becomes illegitimate. It must be reconstituted in ways that restore legitimacy by guaranteeing equal rights to all.

The Palestinians have never had a state, neither historically nor in the modern era. During the past 2000 years they have lived under the rule of the Roman Empire, various Arab and Turkic empires, the Ottoman Empire, under the British mandate, and they now live under Israeli occupation. They were excluded from the decolonization process that followed the Second World War. Their armed resistance movements—PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad—are liberation movements recognized under international law as fighting against colonial domination and occupation, despite the fact that some Western nations have labelled them as “terrorists.” The Palestinians are struggling to achieve what others have already achieved—a political framework that protects them from being oppressed, ethnically cleansed, and genocided by a state that claims to represent all Jews globally.

That framework could take different forms. It might be a Palestinian state alongside a reconstituted Israeli state, both committed to equal rights. It might be a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine, with equal citizenship for Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others. It might be a binational confederation. Whatever the arrangement, it will not possess a metaphysical “right to exist.” It will have to earn its legitimacy by serving the dignity and security of all people living within it.

Nationalism, which elevates the state above the human being, is an ideology that is at the root of many wars and conflicts since the late 1800s. It is a modern ideology that has already produced catastrophic failures—bloody revolutions, world wars, genocides, ethnic cleansings, and the dissolution of empires. Thinkers across disciplines have diagnosed nationalism as a dangerous pathology. Albert Einstein called it “an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” Erich Fromm described it as “our form of incest, our idolatry, our insanity,” with patriotism as its cult. Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt traced the origins of totalitarian movements to European imperialism and nationalism, which eroded the nation‑state system by pursuing unlimited expansion and racial hierarchies incompatible with bounded territorial politics. George Orwell, in “Notes on Nationalism,” distinguished it from patriotism, arguing that nationalism is not love of one’s country but the will to dominate others in its name.

Nationalism demands loyalty to an abstract “nation” while subordinating universal human rights to collective myths. It turns territory into “holy land,” political texts into sacred scrolls, and the state into an object of worship. It defines the stranger as an enemy rather than a neighbour. In a world of nuclear weapons, climate crisis, and global economic interdependence, this ideology is not only morally bankrupt, it is existentially dangerous.

The only legitimate foundation for political order is universal human rights. Any state—Israel, Canada, Australia, the United States, or any other—must guarantee equal rights to all people within its borders, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or origin. When a state violates those rights, it loses legitimacy. Israel’s defenders ask the wrong question. The correct question is: Do Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in equality, dignity, and safety? International law answers unequivocally “yes.”

In the end, the question that must confront the world is not whether a particular state deserves metaphysical permanence, but whether human beings—Palestinian and Israeli alike—deserve to live free from domination, dispossession, and fear. International law, history, and basic moral reasoning all point to the same conclusion—political entities are transient, but human dignity is not. Israel’s invocation of a “right to exist” is a political shield meant to obscure the reality of a genocidal apartheid regime sustained through occupation, annexation, and overwhelming military force. No slogan can erase the legal record or the human suffering inflicted by Palestinians by Israel since its creation and by Zionist terrorists before it came into existence. The future will not be secured by defending the permanence of any state, but by dismantling systems of supremacy and building a political order rooted in equality, accountability, and shared humanity. Only when the rights of people—not the privileges of states—become the foundation of our politics will a just and lasting peace be possible in historic Palestine, the wider Middle-East, and beyond.

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

Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize a slap in the face to Israel and the US

The Nobel Committee sent a message in awarding the 2026 Peace Prize. It chose the rule of law over geopolitical convenience, accountability over impunity, and principle over power.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article is available on Substack. 

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that former International Criminal Court (ICC) judge Navi Pillay would receive the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, it did far more than honour a single jurist’s lifetime of work. It issued a moral verdict on the state of international law itself. It signaled that the Gaza genocide — as identified by the UN Commission of Inquiry Pillay chaired — is not merely a regional catastrophe but a global threat to peace. And it delivered a metaphorical slap in the face to those who have spent years undermining the ICC, attacking international legal institutions, and shielding Israel from accountability — namely Donald Trump, the US government, and Israel’s political leadership.

Pillay’s award is not just a recognition of her commitment to justice and international law, it is a reminder that the world’s most powerful states cannot indefinitely suppress the truth or escape the consequences of their criminal actions.

A laureate whose work confronts power

The Nobel Committee praised Pillay for her “exceptional courage and integrity” in advancing a global legal order capable of prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This was not diplomatic boilerplate. Pillay’s career has been defined by confronting entrenched power — from apartheid South Africa to the Rwandan genocide to Israel’s decades‑long occupation of Palestinian territory.

Her most recent and politically explosive work came as chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In 2025, the commission concluded that Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza, citing four of the five acts listed under the Genocide Convention, including killing members of a protected group, inflicting serious bodily harm, and imposing conditions intended to bring about the group’s destruction.

Pillay herself emphasized that her final act before leaving the commission was delivering the report naming Israel’s actions as genocide. She expressed surprise that people praised her “courage,” asking why speaking the truth based on facts and law should require bravery. That question, which is simple, piercing, and devastating, underscores why her Nobel award matters more than other awards of recent years.

International law is under attack and we should be worried

The Nobel Committee made clear that its decision was not only about Pillay’s personal achievements but about defending the very architecture of international justice. Committee Chair Jorgen Watne Frydnes warned that international law is “under tremendous pressure” and its institutions “under attack.” Judges, he said, “guard the thin red line between order and chaos.”

This is not abstract rhetoric, but a direct response to the political reality that the UN, ICC, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) investigative bodies have been relentlessly targeted by the US and Israel whenever these institutions threaten to hold them accountable.  The US has imposed sanctions on the ICC, with senior government officials calling the court an “outlaw.” Israel has repeatedly attacked UN investigative bodies, dismissed genocide findings as “blood libels,” and denounced Pillay personally. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called her a “bigot” and accused the Nobel Committee of losing its “moral compass,” a laughable claim from a man who has shown he never had one.

By awarding Pillay the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee rejected these attacks and reaffirmed the legitimacy of international law, showing the world that the campaign to discredit the ICC, smear UN investigators, and bury the truth about Gaza has failed — and that those who stand against accountability cannot escape the judgment of the global community.

Gaza genocide as a threat to world peace

The Nobel Committee’s decision implicitly acknowledges a reality that many governments have tried to deny, that the genocide in Gaza is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe but a profound destabilizing force in global politics. Pillay’s commission concluded that senior Israeli officials — including the president, prime minister, and former defense minister — had incited genocide, identifying multiple acts that meet the legal threshold under the Genocide Convention. This finding is not only a legal assessment, it is a warning about the consequences of allowing a state to commit mass atrocities with impunity.

We should all be aware that genocide is never a local crime, but a a rupture in the international system itself. It is a tearing of the legal and moral fabric that holds global order together. It erodes norms that prevent conflict, fuels radicalization and extremism, and destabilizes entire regions. When powerful states enable, excuse, or actively support genocide, they do more than betray their professed values, they undermine the foundations of global order and world peace. They signal to other governments that international law is optional, that mass violence can be justified, and that accountability is something that only applies to the weak.

The Nobel Committee’s press release underscored this point with unusual clarity, stressing that international law is “an absolute necessity” in a world facing existential challenges and rising conflict. The implication is unmistakable — ignoring or minimizing the genocide in Gaza does not merely endanger Palestinians, it threatens the stability of the international order itself. A world that tolerates genocide is a world that invites further atrocities, accelerates geopolitical fragmentation, and weakens the institutions designed to prevent global conflict. By elevating Pillay, the committee is effectively declaring that the path to peace runs through accountability, and the refusal to confront Israel’s actions in Gaza is a direct threat to that peace.

A rejection of Trump’s anti‑ICC crusade

In his response to the award announcement Trump’s response was predictable, stating that he should have received the Nobel Peace Prize. His grievance‑laden response was met with Pillay’s dry humour when she quipped that she might share the prize with him “if you clap a little bit more,” a remark that simultaneously punctured Trump’s self‑aggrandizement and underscored the absurdity of his claim to a peace legacy. Her joke was light, but the political symbolism behind the moment was anything but.

Because the deeper meaning of the Nobel Committee’s decision goes far beyond Trump’s wounded ego.

Trump’s administration waged one of the most aggressive campaigns in modern history against the International Criminal Court. He sanctioned ICC officials, threatened prosecutors, and sought to block investigations into US war crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in Palestine. His government treated the ICC not as an institution of justice but as an enemy to be neutralized. In that context, the Nobel Committee’s choice to honour a former ICC judge — one who has consistently defended the court’s independence and insisted on accountability for powerful states — is a direct and unmistakable repudiation of Trump’s efforts to dismantle international legal mechanisms.

It is also a rejection of the broader US policy of shielding Israel from scrutiny, a policy that has enabled the Gaza genocide by ensuring Israel faces no meaningful consequences for its actions. For decades, successive American administrations have used diplomatic pressure, veto power, and political intimidation to block investigations, suppress UN reports, and delegitimize any attempt to hold Israel accountable. This patter has intensified during Trump’s time in office but it predates his administrations.

By awarding Pillay the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee effectively declared that this era of impunity must end. It signaled that the world sees through the political theatre, understands the stakes, and refuses to accept a global order in which international law does not apply to the most powerful nations in the world. The prize is not just a celebration of Pillay’s work in the cause of justice. It is also a rebuke to those who have tried to bury the truth, undermine the ICC, and protect Israel from facing justice for its genocidal actions in Gaza.

A rejection of Israel’s campaign against accountability

Israel’s reaction to Pillay’s award was furious. Its foreign ministry called the decision a “grotesque exploitation” and compared international reactions to “Goebbels’s applause from hell.” Netanyahu accused Pillay of inventing “blood libels.”

Israel’s reaction to Pillay’s award was immediate and predictable. Its foreign ministry denounced the Nobel Committee’s decision as a “grotesque exploitation,” even going so far as to compare international praise for Pillay to “applause from hell” by Joseph Goebbels—Hitler’s Nazi propaganda minister.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escalated the rhetoric further, accusing Pillay of fabricating “blood libels” — a phrase deliberately chosen for its historical weight and its role in Israel’s longstanding strategy of portraying any criticism of its actions as inherently malicious and antisemitic. These attacks were part of a well‑rehearsed and frequently repeated political script designed to discredit anyone who documents Israel’s criminal actions and violations of international law, and they attacks are not merely rhetorical.

They reflect a decades‑long pattern in which Israel responds to legal scrutiny not with evidence or engagement but with smear campaigns, delegitimization, political intimidation, and propaganda. Whether directed at UN rapporteurs, human rights organizations, ICC prosecutors, or genocide scholars, Israel’s strategy has been consistent — attack the messenger to bury the message. Pillay’s award disrupts that strategy. It exposes the hollowness of Israel’s accusations and demonstrates that the world is no longer willing to accept its reflexive dismissal of every investigation as biased or hateful. The Nobel Committee’s decision affirms that the genocide findings are serious, credible, and grounded in international law — and that no amount of political pressure or rhetorical escalation can erase the documented reality of Israeli atrocities being committed in Gaza.

By elevating Pillay, the Nobel Committee has effectively insulated her work from Israel’s attempts to discredit it. It has placed her findings within the moral authority of the Nobel tradition, making it far more difficult for Israel to dismiss the genocide determination as fringe or politically motivated. The award signals that the global community recognizes the gravity of the crimes documented in Gaza and refuses to be intimidated by Israel’s efforts to silence accountability. In doing so, it underscores the message that when a state responds to genocide findings with insults rather than evidence, it reveals more about its own culpability than about the integrity of those who investigate it.

The ICC is under siege by the US and Israel

Pillay’s career has been intertwined with the ICC and other international tribunals. She served as a judge at the ICC, presided over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and has continued to work as an ad hoc judge at the ICJ. Her Nobel Prize is therefore also a tribute to the ICC itself — an institution under unprecedented political attack by the US and Israel. As Pillay noted in her Nobel interview, the award is “huge recognition” for all those who work quietly to uphold international law, especially “in the climate of the ICC being under threat.”

The Nobel Committee has effectively declared that defending the ICC is essential to defending peace. Its decision is a challenge to states that claim to support international law but hesitate when powerful allies violate it — Canada being one of many that fall into that category. UN Secretary‑General António Guterres said the award is “a tribute to all those working to uphold and defend international law.” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa praised Pillay’s “progressive contributions” to peace and human dignity.

These statements underscore a widening and increasingly consequential divide in global politics between states that believe international law must apply universally, and those that behave as though they stand above it — treating the law not as a binding framework for all nations, but as a weapon to wield against adversaries while shielding themselves and their allies from scrutiny. This divide is no longer theoretical. It is shaping the future of global governance, determining which institutions survive, and defining whether the international system retains any credibility at all.

The Nobel Committee has made clear which side it is on. In choosing Navi Pillay as the 2026 laureate, it chose the rule of law over geopolitical convenience, accountability over impunity, and principle over power. By awarding the prize to a jurist who has confronted states accused of genocide — including Israel — and defended the independence of the ICC, the committee did more than honour her work. It sent a message to the international community that the integrity of international law is inseparable from global peace and stability.

It also affirmed the genocide findings in Gaza as credible and urgent; reasserted the ICC’s indispensable role in upholding international law; rejected US and Israeli efforts to undermine international justice; signaled that the Gaza genocide threatens global peace; and encouraged nations committed to international law to stand firm.

This was not a neutral or apolitical decision. It was a moral intervention — a reminder that peace cannot exist without justice, and justice cannot exist without accountability. In honouring Pillay, the Nobel Committee has reminded the world that silence in the face of genocide is complicity. And it has issued a warning — the future of world peace depends on defending the institutions that protect humanity from its darkest impulses.

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

Three years of the Gaza genocide, Zionist supremacy, and the global struggle for justice

The genocide is the culmination of decades of policies designed to erase Palestinian culture and history, and ensure that they remain vulnerable, powerless, and stateless.

 
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article is available on Substack.

As we enter the fourth year of genocide in Gaza, it becomes impossible to understand the present without confronting the deeper ideological and historical forces that made such a crime possible. The genocide did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the culmination of a century‑long political project rooted in Zionist ethnonational supremacy, colonial conquest, anti-Palestinian hate, and the dehumanization of an indigenous population. To grasp the full magnitude of what has unfolded, we must look at the ideological foundations of the Israeli state, the historical arc of Palestinian dispossession, and the global structures that have enabled Israel’s violence for generations.

Zionism’s racialized foundations

Zionism emerged in late‑19th‑century Europe, shaped by the same intellectual climate that produced colonialism, racial hierarchy, and ethnonationalist ideologies. It was born in an era when European powers carved up continents, justified conquest through pseudo‑scientific theories of racial superiority, and viewed indigenous populations as impediments to their imperial ambitions. Theodor Herzl, often described as the father of modern Zionism, envisioned a Jewish state in Palestine as a European outpost—modern, rational, and superior to the “barbaric” indigenous population. His writings framed Palestinians not as a people with agency, political rights, history, or sovereignty, but as obstacles to be managed, displaced, or subordinated.

This worldview contained structural similarities to other European ethnonationalist movements of the era. It embraced ethnic cleansing, territorial exclusivity, and a racial hierarchical vision of society in which Jewish supremacy was seen as natural and necessary. These ideas later crystallized into policies within the Zionist movement that prioritized Jewish demographic dominance over Palestinians and a goal to control the territory of historic Palestine.

Zionism’s anti-Palestinian, racialized logic was not merely theoretical. It shaped the strategies of early Zionist militias, informed the political decisions of Israel’s founding leaders, and laid the groundwork for a state built on exclusion, displacement, and mass murder. The seeds of apartheid, segregation, and ethnic cleansing were planted long before 1948 since they were embedded in the ideological DNA of the movement itself.

The Nakba and the architecture of Zionist supremacy

The Nakba of 1948—the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians, the massacre of thousands, and the complete erasure of more than 500 Palestinian villages—was not an aberration. It was the foundational moment in the creation of the Israeli supremacist regime. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was deliberate, systematic, and essential to establishing a state with a Jewish demographic majority. It was carried out through massacres, forced expulsions, destruction of towns and villages, and psychological terror designed to empty the land of its indigenous inhabitants.

After the expulsions, Israel enacted laws to ensure that Palestinians could never return. The Absentee Property Law confiscated the homes, farms, orchards, and businesses of those who had fled or been expelled, transferring their land to Jews arriving from Europe, and entrenching a system of dispossession. The Nakba was not simply a historical event. It was the beginning of a political and social order built on Jewish ethnosupremacy, Jewish exceptionalism, Palestinian exclusion, and the start of a campaign to permanently erase Palestinian presence, culture and history in the land where they and their ancestors had lived for millennia..

Following the 1967 war, Israel extended this architecture of domination into the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The occupation entrenched a dual legal system, one where illegal Israeli settlers lived under Israeli civil law, enjoyed full political rights, and received state protection, while Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land seizures, arbitrary detention, and torture. Human rights organizations—including Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International—have concluded that this constitutes a regime of apartheid, “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

This system is not incidental. It is the architecture of an ethnosupremacist state, designed to maintain demographic dominance, territorial control, and political power at the expense of an indigenous population whose rights are systematically denied at every turn.

Dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through language. Israeli political leaders have repeatedly used rhetoric that erases Palestinian identity and strips Palestinians of humanity. Palestinians are often referred to not as Palestinians but as “Arabs,” a linguistic move that denies how they identify themselves and frames them as a generic, undifferentiated mass. Senior officials have used dehumanizing language that casts Palestinians as inherently threatening—for example, statements describing Palestinian children as “little snakes” that needed to be exterminated. This supremacist thinking is not restricted to the political class but has become common within Israeli society. A year ago Israeli model Sarai Givati justified the killing of Palestinian children “because they will grow up to be terrorists. While Israeli TV producer Elad Barashi posted on social media in May 2025, "I can't understand the people here in the State of Israel who don't want to fill Gaza with gas showers . . . or train cars . . . and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza."

This rhetoric is not accidental. It is part of the indoctrination process that Jewish youth in Israel and the diaspora are put through during their school years where they are programmed to see Palestinians as subhuman.  This prepares them defend Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, and prepares Zionist Jews to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, and brutal large‑scale military assaults against a defenceless population, normalizing violence and making atrocity acceptable and justifiable. When a population is consistently portrayed as subhuman, dangerous, or undeserving of rights, the moral guardrails to mass killing are eroded. Dehumanization becomes a cultural norm that shapes public opinion, political discourse, and military strategy. The result is a society in which cruelty is tolerated and justified, and in which the suffering of Palestinians is viewed as either irrelevant and normal. This cultural environment is essential to sustaining a system of domination, because without it the machinery of occupation and genocide would not function.

The Gaza Genocide as a continuation of history

The ongoing genocide in Gaza—which has killed more than 80,000 Palestinians, destroyed hospitals, universities, mosques, churches, cemeteries, and civilian infrastructure, and weaponized starvation—is the latest chapter in a long history of Israeli depravity. It reflects the same logic that drove the Nakba, the occupation, the illegal settlement enterprise, and decades of military assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and beyond.

Israel’s actions in Gaza are not a deviation from their decades-long racist policy, they are the fulfillment of it. The siege imposed on Gaza since 2007, the repeated bombardments, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, and the use of starvation as a weapon all stem from the same ideological foundation—Palestinians are a population to be controlled, contained, and eliminated when necessary to fulfill the Zionist agenda.  The genocide is the culmination of decades of policies designed to make Palestinian life unbearable, to fragment Palestinian society, erase their culture and history, and to ensure that Palestinians remain stateless, powerless, and vulnerable. It is the logical endpoint of a system built on Zionist supremacy and sustained through violence.

Western complicity and the collapse of international law

Western powers have enabled this system for generations. The United States has provided more than $150 billion in military aid to Israel since 1948, supplying the weapons, intelligence, and diplomatic cover that make Israel’s crimes possible. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada have supplied arms, defended Israel at the UN, and undermined efforts to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This complicity has destroyed the credibility of the post‑war international legal order. The Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were designed to prevent atrocities like those unfolding in Gaza. Yet Western governments have ignored ICJ rulings, opposed ICC investigations, and only enforced international law selectively—condemning adversaries while excusing allies. The message couldn’t be more clear—international law applies only when it is politically convenient, Human rights are conditional and racialized, justice is selective, and geopolitical interests override moral and legal obligations.

Media complicity and the Palestinian exception

Western media has reinforced this system through biased coverage that marginalizes Palestinian suffering and amplifies Israeli narratives. Studies show that Palestinian deaths are reported as statistics, stripped of humanity, while Israeli deaths are described with emotive language that evokes sympathy and outrage. Palestinian voices are marginalized, Israeli claims are amplified without verification, and historical context is erased.

In addition, Palestinian resistance is almost reflexively framed as terrorism, while Israeli state violence—no matter how indiscriminate—is framed as “self‑defence.” This asymmetry mirrors propaganda tactics used by the Nazis to dehumanize Jews and other targeted populations. It desensitizes audiences to Palestinian suffering and normalizes their slaughter.

The result is a media landscape that manufactures consent for genocide, shaping public opinion in ways that protect Israel from accountability and obscure the reality of Palestinian oppression.

The global struggle for justice

Despite Western complicity, global momentum for Palestinian justice and freedom is growing. More than 149 countries recognize Palestinian statehood. Millions have marched in the streets around the world demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. Scholars, activists, and human rights organizations have demanded accountability. The International Court of Justice has issued provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocide, and the International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

This global movement reflects a deeper truth which shows that justice for Palestinians is inseparable from the struggle to rebuild the international legal order. It requires dismantling the structures of supremacy, ending Western military and diplomatic support for Israel, and confronting the anti-Palestinian racialized biases that shape Western foreign policy.

The post‑war human rights system was created because those who witnessed the horrors of World War II understood that nothing less than an entirely new moral architecture was needed to prevent humanity from descending again into barbarism. It was built by people who had seen genocide with their own eyes, who understood the cost of indifference, and who believed that universal human rights must be protected through binding international law. But those architects of the post‑war order—along with the generation that carried their memory forward—are now gone. With their passing, the moral clarity that animated the system has faded, and the institutions they built have been left in the hands of leaders who neither share their historical experience nor uphold their ethical commitments.

In the absence of those witnesses, the system they created is now collapsing, if it has not already collapsed. The principles forged in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Nuremberg have been hollowed out by decades of selective enforcement, geopolitical self‑interest, and the willingness of powerful states to ignore international law when it constrains their geopolitical ambitions. Gaza has made this collapse undeniable. The very nations that once championed “Never Again” have tolerated, enabled, and rationalized a genocide in real time. The moral architecture built to prevent atrocity has been abandoned, not because it failed, but because those entrusted with preserving it chose convenience over conscience.

Rebuilding it requires ending Western support for states like Israel that commit genocide, reconstructing international institutions capable of enforcing human rights, holding media corporations accountable for promoting dehumanizing narratives, supporting global movements for justice, recognizing Palestinian humanity and rights, and dismantling structures of ethnosupremacy wherever they exist.

The crossroads

As the fourth year of the Gaza genocide begins humanity stands at a crossroads. One path leads back to the barbarism of the mid-20th century, where human life is expendable and genocide is accepted. The other leads back toward justice, where human rights are universal and protected. The genocide in Gaza has become the moral crisis of our time. It has exposed the collapse of Western moral authority, the failure of international law, and the absolute fragility of human rights. It has shown that the preservation of human dignity requires not neutrality but courage—the courage to confront injustice, to speak truth to power, and to demand accountability from those that consider themselves as above the law.

As American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead reminded us, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Her words tell us that the future will not be shaped by presidents or prime ministers but by ordinary people who refuse to be neutral, who refuse to accept a world where genocide is normalized and human dignity is negotiable.

The choice is ours on which path we take, and history will remember whether we forced out leaders to meet this moment with courage or allowed them to watch a world slide, once again, into darkness.

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