Standing with Israel after three years of genocide in Gaza means standing with evil

Siding with a rogue, terrorist, genocidal state is no different than standing with the worst criminal states of the last century that have inflicted inhumane crimes on an unimaginable scale.

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

In two weeks, the Western world will hold official ceremonies and issue solemn government statements to mark the third anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel — an event in which 1,200 Israelis were killed, including more than 300 Jews who were killed by the Israeli military under the controversial “Hannibal Directive.” As Western politicians prepare to centre their grief on those deaths while ignoring the genocide Israel launched in response, it is worth asking a simple, unavoidable question: What does it truly mean when someone says they “stand with Israel” or a government says they support Israel?

What it means is: I stand with shooting children, killing babies, raping women, demolishing homes, and bombing hospitals. It means supporting the torture of Palestinian detainees, the burning of families in tents, and the execution of unarmed civilians. It means endorsing leaders who openly orchestrate and advocate the genocide of Palestinians. It means supporting mass starvation, the use of illegal weapons, and the assassination of hundreds of journalists. It means ignoring state‑sponsored sexual violence and the total disregard for international law. It means defending crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.

This is what it means. It means supporting and defending the actions of a racist, apartheid, fascist, genocidal state that has violated international law with impunity for decades. And it means that those who “stand with Israel” and support it are choosing to stand with the sort of evil not seen since World War II — because there is no other word that can describe a state that commits genocide with impunity, and uses the same language when referring to Palestinians that the Nazis used when talking about Jews during the Holocaust.

For decades, Israel has violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Hague Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Vienna Conventions, and the UN Charter — not occasionally, not accidentally, but systematically, deliberately, and without apology. It has done so while killing tens of thousands of Palestinians since its creation, ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands more, and entrenching a regime of racist apartheid recognized by leading human rights organizations.

Since October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has been described as genocide by dozens of respected international institutions, legal bodies, human rights organizations, and Jewish genocide and Holocaust scholars. This is not hyperbole but rather a legal determination grounded in evidence about mass murder, mass starvation, deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, and explicit statements of genocidal intent by Israeli political, military and religious leaders.

Since the fall of 2023, a broad and authoritative consensus has emerged: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This conclusion has been reached by the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry; the UN Special Committee; the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; Israeli human rights group B’Tselem; Physicians for Human Rights Israel; Doctors Without Borders; Oxfam; Save the Children; the International Federation of Human Rights; the International Association of Genocide Scholars; leading Israeli Holocaust scholars Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman, Raz Segal, and Shmuel Lederman; as well as the 30 nations supporting South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Together, these bodies, experts, and states represent the most significant legal, humanitarian, and scholarly institutions in the world, and they have all reached the same devastating conclusion.

When someone says they “stand with Israel,” they are standing with all of this — with a state whose actions have been identified as genocidal by the world’s most respected human rights institutions and genocide scholars. They are standing with a system of violence that extends far beyond the battlefield and deep into the daily lives of Palestinians.

They are standing with settlers who burn Palestinian homes, destroy olive groves tended to for generations by Palestinian families, kill Palestinian livestock, and attack Palestinian villages with firearms — crimes documented extensively by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem. They are standing with settlers who murdered 19‑year‑old Qusai Matan in 2023, who torched homes in Turmus Ayya, and who carried out pogroms in Huwara. And they are standing with a state that protects these settlers, arms them, and integrates them into its military operations — a state whose violence is not incidental, but systematic, sanctioned, and central to its occupation, domination and oppression of Palestinians.

They are standing with a government that has ignored every UN Security Council resolution demanding an end to settlement expansion, every ruling of the International Court of Justice, every obligation under the Geneva Conventions, and every principle of international humanitarian law. They are standing with a state that has situated more than 750,000 illegal Jewish settlers into the West Bank, many of whom terrorize Palestinians with impunity.

They are standing with a state that has bombed hospitals, schools, refugee camps, UN shelters, ambulances, journalists, and aid workers — all documented by international monitors. They are standing with a state that has deliberately starved more than two million people in Gaza, blocked humanitarian aid, and used starvation as a weapon of war — a war crime under international law. They are standing with a state whose leaders have repeatedly declared their intent to destroy Gaza, “erase” entire neighborhoods, and “eliminate” the Palestinian people — statements that meet the legal definition of genocidal intent.

And they are standing with Western governments whose performative condemnations — like the August 20, 2026 joint statement by Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom — are nothing more than public relations exercises designed to create the illusion of moral concern while ensuring that nothing changes.

These governments have armed Israel, funded Israel, protected Israel diplomatically, and shielded Israel from accountability for decades. They have watched Israel violate every major international legal instrument meant to keep the peace and protect human rights, and responded with statements of “grave concern” instead of sanctions, arms embargoes, or diplomatic isolation. Their complicity has enabled Israel’s crimes, and continues to do so.

The hypocrisy of these and other Western governments is staggering. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Western governments unleashed sweeping sanctions, froze assets, expelled diplomats, mobilized international institutions, and poured military aid into Ukraine within days. But when Israel commits genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and apartheid, those same governments retreat into the familiar language of “concern” while continuing business as usual.

This selective application of international law exposes the racial 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 their allies, they tolerate it, excuse it, and enable it. 

So yes — standing with Israel means standing with evil. And as Western governments prepare their anniversary speeches, their candlelight vigils, their choreographed displays of solidarity with Israeli victims, they will once again erase the more than 80,000 of thousands of Palestinians killed since October 2023. They will mourn 1,200 Israelis while refusing to acknowledge that Israel has killed more than fifty times that number of Palestinians, many of them children, and that hundreds of Israelis died not at the hands of Hamas but under Israel’s own Hannibal Directive. Standing with Israel today means choosing to sanctify one group’s suffering while denying another group’s humanity. It means choosing to defend atrocity rather than defend life.

So yes — standing with Israel means standing with sheer evil. And as Western governments prepare their anniversary speeches, their candlelight vigils, their choreographed displays of solidarity with Israeli victims, they will once again erase the more than 80,000 thousand Palestinians killed since October 2023. They will mourn 1,200 Israelis — 300 of them killed by Israeli forces — while refusing to acknowledge that Israel has killed more than fifty times that number of Palestinians, a third of them children, and that hundreds of Israelis died not at the hands of Hamas but under Israel’s own Hannibal Directive. Standing with Israel today means choosing to sanctify one group’s suffering while denying another group’s humanity. It means choosing to defend atrocity rather than defend life.

Standing with Israel, especially in this moment, is not a moral position. It is the abandonment of morality and humanity itself.

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

Evil in our time: The West is living the “banality of evil” (Part 2/2)

Violent oppression produces resistance. Brutality provokes retaliation. Violence creates more violence—not because the oppressed desire it, but because it is the only remaining path to survival when all peaceful avenues are blocked.

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

In her writings about the “banality of evil” Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that when evil becomes normalized, when it is rendered ordinary, carried out not by fanatics or monsters, but by professionals, government functionaries, and ordinary people, who see themselves as moral, and neutral executors of policy, that is when we have reached the peak of evil in a society. 

After almost three years of Israel committing genocide in Gaza, we must accept that this is what has happened in Israel, as well as in the Western nations that continue to support it and enable its genocidal crimes.

The cruelty visible in Israel’s actions in Gaza is not confined to the state or its military. It is reflected in the attitudes that have taken hold within significant parts of Israeli society. When a Haaretz poll in June 2025 reported that 47% of Israeli Jews supported exterminating all Palestinians in Gaza “down to the last child,” that is the normalization of evil. When 82% supported the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, that too is the normalization of evil. And when 56% supported expelling all Palestinians from territories under Israeli control, it reflected a society in which dehumanization of Palestinians has become routine. Each of these positions constitutes a violation of international law, yet they are expressed as ordinary political preferences.

 

This is what happens when cruelty becomes embedded in daily life. It is normalized, rationalized, and stripped of moral consequence. In such an environment, moral responsibility does not merely weaken — it dissolves.

Whatever one thinks about the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 the reality that followed exposed a deeper structural evil—not only in Israeli society but also in the West—where Palestinian dehumanization is accepted, and where Israel’s genocide has been enabled almost entirely by Western power. The United States under President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the United Kingdom under Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Germany under Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, France under Emmanuel Macron, and Canada under Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney all continued supplying weapons, ammunition, and military components to Israel throughout the most intense periods of Israel’s genocide— arming a state as it carried out what major human rights organizations, along with Holocaust and genocide scholars have described as the crime of genocide.

This is not a case of passive complicity. It is active participation in the crime of crimes.

The scale of destruction is staggering. According to a study by Ben Gurion University professor Yakov Garb, published through Harvard Dataverse, more than 377,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by May 2025. And in July 2025, Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya published a study in Arena concluding that Israel had killed more than 680,000 Palestinians in Gaza, directly and indirectly.

These numbers are not abstract. They represent human beings—families, children, elders, entire communities—obliterated.

Israel, supported by Western governments, tried to lable their actions as “self‑defence.”  But self‑defence does not typically include starving a besieged population, bombing hospitals, destroying universities, mosques and churches, killing journalists, and sustaining mass killing over extended periods. The repeated use of the term is an attempt to prevent moral scrutiny—language functioning as a shield for inhumane policy.

Consider what Western support has meant in practice. Western governments supplied the weapons used to level neighbourhoods and destroy civilian life. They offered diplomatic cover that neutralized international accountability. They obstructed ceasefire efforts. They ignored rulings and warnings when those rulings threatened the continued flow of arms or the maintenance of strategic alliances. They treated genocide allegations raised by scholars and human rights organizations as politically inconvenient noise.

Where evil is concerned silence is not neutral. Silence is a form of governance and action. When Western institutions refused to name what is happening in Gaza as genocide even when credible experts and major human rights organizations did—the West communicated to Israel that it would tolerate mass murder, mass destruction, minimize it and eventually normalize it—the result is that violence on this scale becomes easier the next time, not harder.

Evil thrives on normalization. Once cruelty becomes routine—embedded in procedures, justified through euphemisms, and stripped of historical context—it clears a path for even greater evils, including war.

The Nuremberg Tribunal understood this with chilling clarity. In its final judgment, it declared: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world... A war of aggression is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

War is horrific. Yet Western elites have increasingly treated war not as a moral failure but as a policy instrument—something to be managed, rationalized, and deployed when convenient. They speak of “precision,” “deterrence,” and “security imperatives,” as if technical language can erase the bodies floating in rivers of blood beneath it. This rhetorical distancing matters as it allows decision-makers, commentators, and bureaucrats to observe suffering from a safe distance while pretending that sanitized terminology absolves them of responsibility.

In this way, Arendt’s warning about the “banality of evil” becomes unmistakably relevant. When violence is normalized through language and procedure, when moral judgment is replaced by administrative habit, evil does not merely persist—it expands. And war becomes its most devastating expression.

Whether it’s in war or like what Israel has done in its decades-long occupation of the Palestinian people, oppressed people who resist are often condemned as “terrorists” or “extremists” without acknowledging what preceded them: occupation, dispossession, blockade, and systematic dehumanization. Meanwhile, the violence of those with state power is excused as strategic necessity.

Violence has a history. Oppression produces resistance. Brutality provokes retaliation. Violence generates more violence—not because the oppressed desire it, but because it becomes the only remaining path to survival when every peaceful avenue has been blocked and when their oppressor uses every legal, political, and military tool available to prevent justice. People cling to nonviolence as long as they can, but when survival itself is threatened, nonviolence becomes impossible as a practical matter. To ignore this context is not moral seriousness; it is moral evasion.

To confront evil properly, one must look at its genealogy. In the case of the Palestinian cause there is a history of betrayal stretching back over a century—British duplicity during World War 1, the Balfour Declaration, the suppression of uprisings, immigration policies the mass migration of Jews into Palestine, the UN partition granting Jews a majority of the land of historic Palestine despite being a minority of the population, and the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians.

After that came decades of apartheid-like practices, military occupation, land theft, settlement expansion, and systemic dehumanization. For generations, Palestinians have been treated not as human beings with rights but as demographic threats to be contained, controlled, displaced and ultimately exterminated. For people living under siege—whose homes are taken, whose movements are restricted, and whose lives are governed by violence—the ethical appeal to “use peaceful means” is not a legitimate moral argument. It is a refusal to acknowledge reality.

The Gaza genocide has shattered the illusion of Western moral superiority. It has exposed human rights discourse as selective—racialized, politicized, and contingent on geopolitical interests. It has revealed that Western empathy is not universal; it is filtered through alliances, strategic calculations, and narratives designed to protect power rather than people.

What has emerged is not merely hypocrisy but something more corrosive: a profound moral incapacity within Western institutions to see Palestinians as fully human. Their suffering is suppressed by major media outlets, minimized in elite discourse, and reframed or ignored by political leaders. Their voices are sidelined in academia and public life. Their persecution is met not with outrage by the elites but with diplomatic cover, continued arms shipments, and bureaucratic indifference.

This is why evil cannot be understood solely as the actions of one army or one government. It resides in the systems that enable those actions while shielding their architects from accountability. Genocide is never the work of a single individual. Hitler did not carry out the Holocaust alone; he set the direction, but thousands of bureaucrats, officers, industrialists, propagandists, and collaborators operated the machinery of death. Likewise, the Gaza genocide is not solely the responsibility of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his cabinet, his advisers, or his military commanders—though they bear immense culpability. It is also the responsibility of the Western leaders who armed them, the diplomats who protected them, the media figures who sanitized their actions, and the bureaucrats who processed the shipments, approved the transfers, and maintained the infrastructure of destruction.

Evil becomes most powerful when it is distributed across institutions—when it is normalized, rationalized, and made routine. Gaza has revealed that this machinery exists throughout Western societies and certainly in Israel and the US.  It is embedded in the political, military, and bureaucratic systems that make atrocity possible and then shield those responsible from accountability.

It must be noted that this pattern is not unique to the West. The same institutional logic underlies Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine and the U.S.–Israeli military operations against Iran. These are not the actions of lone individuals but of entire systems of power, ideology, and obedience. Evil on this scale requires thousands of hands—politicians, generals, analysts, media figures, and administrators—each performing their role, each contributing to a larger architecture of violence.

And when systems of power operate this way, oppressed peoples eventually reach a point where surviving on their knees is worse than resisting and possibly dying on their feet. After decades of brutal oppression Palestinians reached that point long ago. The West—through its weapons, its propaganda, its indifference, and its diplomatic obstruction—has ensured that they had no path toward safety and survival other than through violent resistance. When institutions normalize injustice, armed resistance becomes not a choice but a last remaining means of survival.

Evil exists in Moscow and Beijing, yes. It exists wherever power dehumanizes the vulnerable. But it also exists in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa, Tel Aviv—and wherever Western institutions decide that some lives are less deserving of protection, less deserving of rights, and less deserving of international enforcement of the law. Evil is not confined to adversaries; it flourishes wherever systems of power treat human beings as expendable.

Until the West confronts its own role in perpetuating global violence—until it dismantles the incentives, narratives, and institutional mechanisms that make atrocity easy—it cannot claim the moral high ground. Where evil exists, it must be named and called out, without exception or euphemism. And where it is in recent decades—too often—it has been Western. Refusing to confront this reality is not neutrality, it is complicity. A society that will not face the evil it enables inevitably slides back toward barbarism and anarchy, because unacknowledged evil does not disappear—it grows.

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