Three years of the Gaza genocide and the West’s moral collapse

The normalization of atrocity, failure of the “rules based” international order, and complicity of the West in Israel’s criminality reveal a deep crisis at the heart of contemporary global politics. 

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

Tomorrow, October 7th, Israel will mark the third anniversary of the Hamas attack in 2023, and they along with their Western allies will hold ceremonies, vigils, moments of silence, and speeches to mark the sombre occasion. They will mourn 1,200 Israelis—including more than 300 killed by Israeli forces under the controversial “Hannibal Directive”—and they will do so with solemnity, candles, and carefully crafted political language about tragedy and resilience, and resisting terrorism. But nowhere on that day or the days that follow will they mourn or hold similar ceremonies for the 80,000 to 100,000 Palestinians murdered since October 2023. They will not acknowledge that Israel’s response was not self‑defence but a campaign of mass killing, mass starvation, and mass destruction that the world’s leading human rights institutions, Holocaust scholars, and international legal bodies have labeled as genocide.

This silence will not be accidental, just as it was not accidental on the first or second anniversaries of the October 7 attack—moments when Western leaders mourned Israeli lives with solemn ceremony while ignoring the staggering Palestinian death toll, which had already reached approximately 50,000 in 2024 and then 74,000 in 2025. The refusal to acknowledge Palestinian suffering has become a defining feature of Western political culture. It is not a lapse or an oversight, it is the predictable outcome of a decades‑long collapse of Western moral authority. Year after year, Western governments have demonstrated that their professed commitment to human rights is shallow, conditional and deeply racialized. Their silence in the face of mass murder by Israel reflects a deeply embedded structural racism and bigotry toward Palestinians, a belief—often unspoken but consistently acted upon—that Palestinian lives are less valuable, less grievable, and less worthy of protection. This prejudice has shaped foreign policy, media narratives, and public discourse, creating an environment in which atrocities committed by Israel are tolerated, rationalized, or simply ignored.

The genocide in Gaza has stripped away whatever remained of the West’s moral façade. It has exposed Western human rights rhetoric as performative, its commitment to international law as meaningless, and its political leadership as morally bankrupt. The same governments that invoke international law to condemn Russia or China for their human rights abuses have spent years shielding Israel from accountability, supplying it with weapons, providing it with diplomatic cover over the decades, and especially since October 2023, as tens of thousands of Palestinians—mostly children and women—were killed, starved, displaced, and buried beneath the rubble of their own homes. The same leaders who speak of a “rules‑based international order” have watched genocide unfold in real time and chosen complicity over courage or basic humanity, in effect endorsing Israeli criminality.

The meaning of “standing with Israel”

And this endorsement is precisely what is meant when Western leaders declare that they “stand with Israel.” When they use those words they are not making an abstract geopolitical statement. They are validating a record of Israel’s genocidal acts extensively documented by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Oxfam, Save the Children, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

By “standing with Israel” they are endorsing the killing of children and babies, and the bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and UN shelters. They are supporting the starvation of more than two million people, alongside the destruction of universities, mosques, churches, and cemeteries. They are saying they have no issue with the execution of civilians, the torture of detainees, and the burning of families in tents. They are sanctioning the assassination of journalists, the deliberate targeting of aid workers, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. And they are endorsing the use of dehumanizing rhetoric that meets the legal definition of genocidal intent.

These are not unverified allegations. They are documented facts.

When someone says they “stand with Israel,” they are standing with a state whose actions have been identified as genocidal by leading Holocaust and Jewish genocide scholars, including noted Jewish academics Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman, Raz Segal, Shmuel Lederman, Marion Kaplan, and Barry Trachtenberg. They are standing with a state whose leaders have repeatedly incited genocide by declaring their intent to “erase” Gaza, “eliminate” Palestinians, and “destroy” entire neighborhoods since atrocities began in 2023. They are standing with a state whose military has killed almost eight times more women and children in Gaza  than the Russians have killed in Ukraine since February 2022, with one estimate based on calculations by Ben Gurion University academic Yaakov Garb putting the number of women and children killed closer to 190,000.

The banality of atrocity

Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that evil becomes most dangerous not when it is committed by obvious fanatics, but when it is normalized—when it is carried out by ordinary people performing routine tasks, following procedures, and obeying orders without moral reflection. The genocide in Gaza has made her insight painfully and unmistakably relevant. What is unfolding is not only the visible brutality of bombs and bullets, but the vast, bureaucratic machinery that makes such brutality possible—the drafting of military orders, the logistical planning that determines which neighborhoods will be razed, the procurement and manufacture of weapons, the equipping of Israeli jets with missiles and bombs, the intelligence gathered and relayed to troops on the ground, the administrative systems that coordinate troop movements, fuel supplies, targeting protocols, and paying the soldiers and pilots committing mass murder. All of these seemingly mundane actions—performed by soldiers, analysts, engineers, administrators, and political officials—are integral components of Israel’s machinery of genocide.

This is precisely what Arendt meant by the “banality of evil”—the way mass atrocity becomes operational through ordinary tasks carried out by individuals who see themselves as neutral professionals simply doing their jobs. And it is why the parallel to the Nazi Holocaust machine is not rhetorical but structural. The genocide of European Jews was not carried out only by the men who pulled triggers or opened the doors of gas chambers. It depended on the clerks who processed transport lists, the railway workers who scheduled trains to the concentration and death camps, the engineers who designed the crematoria, the bureaucrats who coordinated deportations, and the administrators who ensured that every logistical detail was executed with precision. In Gaza today, the same logic is at work, not with death factories but with a military apparatus that is a mobile death factory. The genocide happens not when someone from a targeted group is deliberately killed, it is in the entire system that makes genocidal crimes possible, efficient, and sustained.

Arendt’s warning becomes even more chilling when we look beyond the machinery of genocide itself and confront the society that enables it. Bureaucratic systems do not operate in a vacuum. They require a public willing to tolerate, rationalize, or even celebrate the suffering of another people. The normalization of atrocity depends on a moral environment in which cruelty is not merely permitted but justified, defended, and woven into national identity. In Israel today, that environment is not marginal—it is mainstream.

This reality was laid bare in a June 2025 Haaretz poll that revealed the depth of the moral collapse inside Israeli society. Nearly half of Israeli Jews—47%—expressed support for exterminating all Palestinians in Gaza “down to the last child,” a phrase that evokes the most explicit form of genocidal intent. An even larger majority—82%—supported the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, endorsing the removal of an entire population from its homeland. And 56% supported ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from territories under Israeli control, effectively erasing Palestinian presence from the lands of historic Palestine altogether.

These are not fringe opinions held by extremists on the margins of Israeli society. They are mainstream political preferences, expressed openly and without shame, in a society shaped by decades of racist indoctrination, occupation, settlement expansion, militarization, and dehumanizing rhetoric. They reflect a worldview in which Israelis do not see Palestinians as human beings with rights, families, histories, or futures, but as obstacles to be removed, threats to be neutralized, or demographic problems to be solved. They reveal a society in which the machinery of genocide does not operate against the grain of public sentiment—it operates with its consent, and is fully embraced by and overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews.

And it is precisely this convergence—between bureaucratic efficiency and popular endorsement—that makes Arendt’s insight so painfully relevant today. The genocide in Gaza is not only the work of generals, politicians, and military planners. It is the product of a society that has been conditioned, over generations, to see domination over Palestinians as security, Jewish supremacy as identity, and Palestinian death as an acceptable, even necessary, feature of existence.

This normalization of unreserved cruelty is mirrored in Western political classes, media institutions, and corporate elites. The speed with which Western leaders transformed the October 7th Hamas attack into a license for genocide—ignoring decades of Israel’s brutal occupation, blockade, and mass killing—revealed a deeper structural prejudice. Palestinian suffering was stripped of context, history, and humanity. Western leaders demanded that audiences accept a fiction that the “conflict” began on October 7th, and that Israel’s actions were legitimate self‑defence rather than revenge or collective punishment.

This framing immediately foreclosed any serious moral inquiry into why a people subjected to decades of military occupation, siege, dispossession, and systematic denial of political rights might ultimately resort to violent resistance. By presenting the events of October 7th as if they occurred in a historical vacuum, Western leaders erased the long record of blocked diplomatic pathways, shattered peace processes, and deliberate prevention of Palestinian statehood. They refused to acknowledge that a population brutalized for generations, deprived of freedom, dignity, the means to shape its own future, and subjected to the longest and most brutal occupation in modern history, may reach a point where violent resistance—however tragic in its results—becomes the only remaining expression of political agency. In doing so, Western political leaders and news media transformed a complex history of oppression into a simplistic morality tale that absolved Israel of responsibility and cast Palestinians as inexplicable aggressors rather than a people responding to conditions no society could endure indefinitely.

This narrative collapse allowed Western governments to ignore proportionality, international law, and the ethical distinction between legitimate self‑defence and mass atrocity. It enabled them to treat Palestinian deaths as unfortunate but acceptable, a grim arithmetic in which erasing tens of thousands of civilian lives could be rationalized. This moral calculus echoes the ambivalence Western nations showed toward Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s—an era when political convenience, racial prejudice, and geopolitical interests outweighed the imperative to protect human life. Today, the same dynamic is at work, and Palestinian suffering is acknowledged only insofar as it does not disrupt Western alliances, strategic priorities, or domestic political narratives.

The collapse of the post‑war human rights system

The post‑World War II human rights system—built on the ashes of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Nanjing, and Hiroshima—was designed to prevent states from committing mass atrocities with impunity. The UN Charter (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), and the Geneva Conventions (1949) were meant to restrain state violence and protect vulnerable populations.

What the Gaza genocide has revealed is that Western powers—the very architects of the post‑war order—no longer believe in the principles they created. They have abandoned the Genocide Convention’s obligation to prevent and punish genocide. They have ignored and failed to enforce the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza. They have dismissed the findings of the UN Special Rapporteur, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry’s that Israel is committing genocide.

Instead, over the past three years they have armed Israel, funded Israel, and provided diplomatic cover for a genocidal state. They have shielded Israel from accountability at the UN Security Council. They have attacked and even jailed human rights advocates who have spoken out in defence of Palestinian rights. They have refused to join South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ, and in the case of Canada and the US attacked that nation for launching the case. And they have continued business as usual with Israel while Gaza has been turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

This selective application of international law exposes the racial, religious and geopolitical biases at the core of the so‑called “rules‑based order.” It reveals that Western governments do not oppose genocide as a principle—they oppose genocide only when committed by their enemies. When committed by an ally, they tolerate it, excuse it, and enable it.

Canada’s moral collapse

Canada’s response to the Gaza genocide has been a case study in moral collapse. Despite repeatedly claiming to champion human rights and the rule of law, the Canadian government has continued selling weapons and weapons components to Israel—despite a parliamentary resolution calling for a halt to such sales—even as the death toll in Gaza climbed into the tens of thousands. It has provided diplomatic cover for Israeli actions at the United Nations, has refused to impose sanctions on Israel’s top tier of political and military leadership for grave breaches of international law and crimes against humanity, choosing instead to maintain normal relations with officials implicated in mass atrocities. Canada has also opposed or undermined investigations by the International Criminal Court and the ICJ into Israeli crimes, dismissing or downplaying the findings of genocide scholars, human rights organizations, and UN bodies that have documented the scale and intent of Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians.

Perhaps most egregiously, the Canada’s government under Mark Carney allowed Benjamin Netanyahu’s official aircraft to pass through Canadian airspace on six separate occasions while he traveled to New York City, despite publicly claiming that it was committed to enforcing ICC arrest warrants. This contradiction—professing support for international justice while quietly facilitating the travel of an individual facing allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity—captures the profound moral hypocrisy of Canada’s position.

Canada’s record on genocide is one of consistent failure. It failed to act during the Rwandan genocide and Balkans genocide in the 1990s, the Darfur genocide in the 2000s, the Rohingya genocide, and the Uyghur genocide in the 2010s. And now it is failing again in Gaza. Each of these failures reveals a pattern. Canada expresses concern, issues statements, and invokes the language of human rights, but when confronted with the need for concrete action, it retreats into political expediency with its leaders behaving like cowards.

Western media and the Palestinian exception

Western media has also played a central role in enabling—and manufacturing public consent for—the Gaza genocide. The “Palestinian exception,” the systematic marginalization of Palestinian suffering, has shaped public perception for decades. Studies by The Intercept, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, and the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring show a consistent pattern—Israeli deaths are described with emotive, humanizing language, while Palestinian deaths are reported in clinical, detached terms that strip away context and empathy. Coverage routinely erases the reality of occupation and brutality, presenting violence as if it occurs in a vacuum rather than within a decades‑long system of military domination.

Israeli government narratives are frequently amplified without verification, even when later proven to be propaganda, while Israeli crimes against Palestinians are downplayed, softened, or ignored altogether. Palestinian voices receive only a fraction of the airtime or column space afforded to Israeli officials, reinforcing a hierarchy of whose suffering matters and whose does not. Palestinian resistance is almost reflexively framed as terrorism, while Israeli state violence—no matter how indiscriminate or devastating—is framed as “self‑defence.” This asymmetry is not accidental, it is structural, embedded in editorial decisions, racist newsroom culture, and the geopolitical assumptions that shape Western journalism.

The result is a media landscape that mirrors the same tactics used by Nazi Germany to dehumanize Jews, the Roma, and other targeted populations. By consistently portraying Palestinians as either faceless victims or violent aggressors, and by sanitizing or obscuring the scale of Israeli violence, Western media desensitizes audiences to Palestinian suffering and normalizes their mass murder. It creates a moral distance that allows genocide to unfold in real time while much of the world watches passively, conditioned to see Palestinian death as inevitable, justified, or simply unworthy of outrage.

As we mark the beginning of the fourth year of genocide in Gaza, the collapse of Western moral authority, normalization of atrocity, failure of the post‑war human rights system, and complicity of Western nations in Israel’s criminality reveal a deeper crisis at the heart of contemporary global politics. What is unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated event, but the culmination of long‑standing ideological currents, historical injustices, and entrenched systems of supremacy that have shaped the international order.

To understand how a genocide of this scale became possible—and why so many powerful nations have enabled it—we must confront the deeper ideological foundations of Israel’s actions, the historical arc of Palestinian dispossession, and the structural parallels between Zionism and other supremacist movements. Only by doing this can we grasp the full magnitude of the injustice unfolding today and accept that nothing less than a fundamental transformation of international politics and the world’s moral conscience is what is required to bring justice to the most persecuted and oppressed minority in the world today.

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