By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.
For the better part of three years, the world has watched the destruction of Gaza unfold in real time. Every major human‑rights organization—Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, the International Federation for Human Rights and others—has documented patterns of killing, destruction, and dehumanizing rhetoric. Each eventually concluded that Israel’s actions meet the legal definition of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Prominent Israeli Holocaust scholars such as Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and Raz Segal, affirmed the same. United Nations agencies have also repeatedly warned that Israel’s actions constituted genocide.
Yet despite overwhelming evidence, Canada and most of its allies refused to acknowledge the crime. Worse, they continued to supply Israel with weapons, diplomatic cover, and political legitimacy. The United States remained the primary enabler, but Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and others played indispensable supporting roles. Canada exploited a legislative loophole that allowed it to continue exporting weapons and components to Israel via the United States, even as Gaza’s hospitals, universities, refugee camps, and entire neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble.
Western governments have made the truth impossible to deny. Through both their actions and their refusals to act, they have effectively endorsed Israel’s project of erasing the Palestinian population of Gaza. Their persistent refusal to intervene anywhere in the occupied Palestinian territories—Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem—signals not neutrality or support for a two‑state compromise, but alignment with Israel’s long‑standing ambition to consolidate a “Greater Israel” cleansed of its Indigenous Palestinian population. For decades, Western leaders cloaked this alignment behind the language of a “two‑state solution,” a phrase repeated so often it became a diplomatic reflex rather than a genuine policy. In practice, it functioned as a convenient fiction—an empty slogan used to mask Western complicity in Israel’s expansionist, settler‑colonial agenda and to obscure the reality that their actions consistently advanced the very outcome they claimed to oppose.
A 78 year record of enabling Israeli impunity
If Western governments had ever
truly intended to uphold international law, the UN Charter, or the Genocide
Convention, they would have acted long before genocidal violence was initiated
by Israel in the fall of 2023. Israel’s history since 1948 is a catalogue of
violations of the very legal instruments the West claims to defend:
- Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement during the Nakba in 1948;
- Illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank and
East Jerusalem;
- Systematic
apartheid, as documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem;
- Repeated
wars on Gaza, each involving mass civilian casualties—in 2008–09, 2012,
2014,
and the ongoing Gaza genocide since 2023;
- Targeting
of journalists, medics, and children;
- Collective punishment, prohibited under the
Geneva Conventions; and
- Annexation of occupied territory, which is illegal
under the UN Charter.
For decades, Western governments responded with statements of “concern,” “regret,” or “alarm”—but never with meaningful action. No sanctions. No arms embargoes. No diplomatic isolation. No accountability.
This is not mere failure. It is deliberate policy.
The West’s unwavering support for Israel—political, military, economic, and ideological—created the conditions in which genocide could occur openly, livestreamed to the world, without consequence. In the process, the so-called “international rules‑based order” has been exposed as a selective system designed to protect Western allies and punish Western adversaries. Palestinians, like many non‑Western peoples, were never part of the moral universe that order claimed to defend.
The death of the responsibility to protect
After the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica, the UN adopted the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), committing states to intervene when mass atrocities occur. Gaza has proven that R2P is a hollow promise. If Western leaders possessed even a fraction of the humanity they claim, they would have invoked R2P the moment genocide was affirmed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, UN agencies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Israeli human‑rights groups, and leading Holocaust scholars.
Instead, Western governments did the opposite. They shielded Israel from accountability, vetoed UN ceasefire resolutions, and continued supplying weapons. The message to the world was unmistakable: Palestinian lives do not trigger Western moral obligations.
Canada’s Hypocrisy
Canada’s political class—under both the Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney governments—has perfected the art of moral posturing while enabling atrocity. Canadian leaders routinely describe Canada as a defender of human rights, a champion of the UN, and a guardian of the “rules‑based international order.” Yet Canada violated its legal obligations under the UN Charter and the Genocide Convention by refusing to take the actions required when genocide is occurring.
If Canada were truly committed to
international law, it would have:
- Imposed a full arms embargo on Israel;
- Suspended the Canada–Israel Free Trade Agreement;
- Sanctioned Israeli political and military leaders responsible for genocidal acts;
- Supported South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justicde (ICJ), as NATO allies Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkiye, along with 16 other countries have done;
- Expelled the Israeli ambassador and recalled Canada’s ambassador; and
- Launched universal‑jurisdiction prosecutions against top Israeli political and military officials.
These actions are not radical. They represent the bare minimum required under the principles of basic morality when genocide is unfolding. Yet Canada undertook none of them. Instead, it continued exporting weapons—often through loopholes—and hid behind symbolic gestures that carried no material consequence for Israel. Its belated, heavily conditioned “recognition” of Palestine, while welcomed, did nothing on the ground, offered no protection to Palestinians, and imposed no cost on Israel. Such gestures function as political theatre designed to placate public outrage while allowing Canada to maintain alignment with Israeli policy.
A Study in Racialized Morality
The clearest demonstration of Western hypocrisy is the contrast between the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Canada acted with speed and moral clarity: sanctions, diplomatic isolation, asset freezes, ICC support, and a unanimous parliamentary declaration of “genocide.” Yet when Israel began its genocide in Gaza, Canada imposed no sanctions, no arms embargo, no diplomatic isolation, no accountability mechanisms, and refused to acknowledge genocide at all.
The only difference between the two cases is the identity of the victims and the political alignment of the aggressors. Ukrainians are white, European, primarily Christian, and aligned with the West. Palestinians are Indigenous, Arab, Muslim, and colonized by a Western ally.
This is not diplomacy. It is the operationalization of a racial hierarchy—a worldview in which the rights, lives, and suffering of some peoples are treated as inherently more valuable than those of others.
A Thousand Days That Changed the World
As the world marks a thousand days of genocide in Gaza, something fundamental has shifted. The world has watched Western inhumanity and Israeli brutality exposed with a clarity that cannot be undone. The illusion of Western moral superiority—already eroding for years—has now collapsed entirely. The global South sees it. Millions across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas see it. Even within Israel, a small but courageous minority sees it.
This moment forces a reckoning. What does it mean for the future of the international system when the world’s most powerful democracies enable genocide? What does it reveal about the structures of law, morality, and global governance that were supposedly built to prevent such crimes? And what does it demand of nations like Canada, which helped make this atrocity possible?
The Gaza genocide has exposed the
end of the post‑1945 human‑rights order. It has shown that accountability for
powerful states is optional, that international law is applied selectively, and
that the principles the West claims to uphold collapse the moment they conflict
with geopolitical interests. A thousand days of genocide have laid bare a truth
the world can no longer ignore: the system is broken, and those who enabled
this crime must one day face a reckoning worthy of its scale.
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2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved,
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