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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaza: A genocide in full view of the world

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

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

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

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

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

Western complicity

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

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

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

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

Lebanon, Iran, and the expansion of impunity

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

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

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

The myth of the “rules‑based international order”

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

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

“Never again” and the collapse of Western moral authority

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

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

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

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

The death of global conscience and the rise of authoritarianism

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

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

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

A world forever changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Western complicity: From 1948 to Gaza today

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

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

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

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

Suppressing the story: Nakba denial as a Western project

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

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

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

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

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

From Nakba denial to a new form of Holocaust denial

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish voices breaking the spell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PALESTINIAN DESTINY

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

Every Israeli bullet and bomb

That genocides innocent Palestinians

That destroys their lands and homes

And seeks to send them to oblivion

Plants the seeds of a revolution

And foretells the obliteration

Of the racist Zionist ideology

It will see an end to the inhumanity

Of almost eight decades of Israeli depravity

And decades of their bigoted insanity

The day is coming when the world will see

An independent Palestinian nation

Free from Israeli domination

A time when Palestinians will be free

From the river to the sea

Because that is their destiny

* * *
 

 

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