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.

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.

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

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.

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