The West’s performative condemnation of Israel’s crimes is another sign of the death of the international order

Western hypocrisy exposed the racial, geopolitical, and ideological biases behind the so called “international rules based order” which has allowed Israel to commit horrific crimes with impunity.

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can also be found on Substack.

The joint statement issued on August 20, 2026, by the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom condemning Israel’s decision to publish construction tenders for a new settlement project is yet another example of Western performativity masquerading as moral outrage. It is a carefully calibrated piece of public relations designed to signal “concern” while ensuring that nothing changes on the ground. After decades of Israeli settlement expansion, apartheid policies, ethnic cleansing, and — since October 2023 — the genocide in Gaza, this statement is not only hollow; it is an indictment of Western complicity.

The statement declares that Israel’s decision is “unacceptable,” that settlements are “illegal,” and that the project threatens the “territorial contiguity” of the West Bank — something which is already the case. It notes “unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against civilians” and warns domestic businesses in each country which might submit proposals to be part of the project of “legal and reputational consequences.” And yet, despite the gravity of these words, the governments issuing them have done nothing — absolutely nothing — to penalize Israel politically, economically, or militarily for its decades-long criminality. They have watched Israel build hundreds of thousands of Jewish‑only housing units, now home to more than 750,000 settlers, many of whom have terrorized Palestinians with impunity by stealing land, destroying homes, burning orchards, killing livestock, and murdering unarmed civilians.

This is not new. Western governments have perfected the art of expressing “grave concern” while enabling Israel’s crimes through military aid, diplomatic protection, and economic partnerships. Their statements are not expressions of moral courage, they are examples of geopolitical cowardice.

The collapse of Western credibility

Since October 2023, Israel has carried out what dozens of international legal bodies, human rights organizations, genocide scholars, and even former Israeli officials have explicitly called genocide. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. It is a legal and scholarly determination made 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, among others.

When genocide is unfolding in real time, and when the perpetrators are openly declaring their intent to destroy a people, statements like the August 20 joint communiqué are inadequate and laughable.

Settler violence enabled by the Israeli state

The joint statement acknowledges “unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against civilians.” This is an understatement. Settler violence is not episodic, it is systemic, organized, and often coordinated with the Israeli military. Human Rights Watch has documented settlers burning homes, destroying olive groves, killing livestock, and attacking Palestinian villages with firearms. Amnesty International has reported multiple incidents where settlers murdered Palestinians, including the killing of 19‑year‑old Qusai Matan in 2023 and the torching of homes in Turmus Ayya. B’Tselem has recorded settlers shooting unarmed Palestinians, burning orchards, and carrying out pogroms in towns like Huwara.

These crimes are not committed by “extremists.” They are committed by settlers who enjoy full legal, military, and political protection from the Israeli state. And Western governments know this. They have known it for decades. Yet they have done nothing to stop it.

Western complicity has enabled decades of Israeli crimes

The response to the Israeli announcement is part of a long pattern of Western governments issuing sternly worded condemnations while continuing to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield Israel. Western apathy is not passive—it is active complicity.

Consider the facts: Canada continues to export weapons and components to Israel, even as Israel commits genocide; the United States provides billions in military aid annually, including weapons used in Gaza; the UK, Germany, Italy, and France maintain defense contracts and intelligence cooperation with Israel; the EU refuses to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel, despite clear violations of human rights clauses; and no Western government has imposed sanctions on Israel for settlement construction, apartheid policies, or genocide.

These governments and their western allies have watched Israel violate: UN Security Council resolutions; the Fourth Geneva Convention; the Hague Conventions; the Genocide Convention; and the UN Charter, repeatedly for decades. And their response has been to issue statements like the one on August 20 — statements that are designed to create the illusion of action while ensuring that nothing changes.

The galling hypocrisy of the West

The most galling aspect of this performative outrage is the stark contrast with the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Within days of that attack, Western governments unleashed sweeping sanctions, froze assets, expelled diplomats, mobilized international institutions, and poured massive military aid into Ukraine. They acted decisively and forcefully — and they were right to do so.

But when Israel commits genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and apartheid, those same governments retreat into the familiar language of “grave concern” while continuing business as usual. No sanctions. No arms embargoes. No diplomatic isolation. No meaningful consequences of any kind.

This hypocrisy exposes the racial, geopolitical, and ideological biases at the core of the so‑called “international rules‑based order.” The West’s selective application of international law has shattered its credibility and effectively destroyed the post‑World War II international system. And it is not Russia or China that killed it. It is Western governments — led by the United States — through their unwavering complicity in Israel’s crimes.

Public relations, not policy

The August 20 statement is a textbook example of Western PR. It contains all the familiar elements: condemnation of settlement expansion; affirmation of international law; expressions of concern about violence; calls for Israel to “retract” its plans; warnings to domestic businesses; and the tired refrain of their commitment to a “two‑state solution.” But it lacks the only thing that matters, which is a commitment to taking action against Israel.

There is no threat of sanctions, suspension of arms sales, diplomatic consequences or economic penalties. There is also no mention of international legal action, support for ICC or ICJ prosecutions, or mention of any consequences.

Israel knows this and has known it for decades. That is why it continues its violations of every international law, convention or treaty to which it is a party.  It knows that the West will do nothing.

The only solution is coercive international action

If Western governments are unwilling to take meaningful action against a state that has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for the international laws that bind all nations — if they refuse to stop the commission of war crimes and genocide through economic sanctions, arms embargoes, diplomatic isolation, and yes, if necessary, military intervention — then their statements expressing outrage are worthless. Words without consequences are not diplomacy, they are complicity.

Unless the world confronts Israel with real coercive force, the coming decades will descend into international anarchy. Other states with territorial ambitions or internal ethnic hierarchies will look to Israel as a model for how to behave toward their neighbours or toward minorities under their control. They will violate international law, commit atrocities, ignore UN resolutions, and rely on international paralysis to shield them from accountability. The international order cannot survive if genocide is tolerated. And right now, it is being tolerated openly, brazenly, and with full knowledge of those nations that have the power to stop it.

The joint statement is not a sign of moral leadership. It is a sign of moral collapse — the collapse of Western credibility, the collapse of the post‑war legal order, and the collapse of any claim these governments have to defending human rights or international law. It is the diplomatic equivalent of watching a house burn and issuing a press release about the importance of fire safety.

© 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.

Evil in our time: The West is living the “banality of evil” (Part 1/2)

Evil poses the greatest danger when it is rendered ordinary, when ordinary people see themselves as just living normally and doing jobs they were given that promote evil or inflict evil. 

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

Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt developed the idea of the “banality of evil” while observing the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the central administrators of the Holocaust. Her insight—that immense cruelty can be carried out by ordinary people performing routine tasks—has shaped how many of us understand evil today. From her writings, from the lessons of history, and from our own experiences, we have come to accept that evil is not abstract. It exists, and we recognize it long before we can explain it.

Most of us sensed this even as children. We learned about good and evil through stories—superhero cartoons, comic books, films. There was always a hero protecting the innocent and a villain bent on destruction, indifferent to the suffering they caused. Perhaps that is why hundreds of millions around the world have flocked to theatres to watch superhero films since the genre exploded in popularity in the early 2000s. People want to see good triumph over evil, because in the real world that victory feels increasingly rare.

The collapse of childhood morality

As we grew older, the simplicity of childhood morality gave way to a harsher truth. Evil was not an abstraction. It was not confined to fictional villains or imaginary worlds. It was a real force—systemic, organized, and embedded in institutions, policies, and individual acts that inflict pain and suffering on innocent people. Like many raised in the West, we were taught a comforting moral vocabulary, that democracy triumphs over tyranny, rule of law over brutality, human rights over barbarism. But the lessons of history tell a very different story.

History catalogued humanity’s depravity and the catastrophic capacity of states and individuals to degrade, dispossess, exterminate, with acts that are inherently evil. We learned about the genocide of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, the evils of European colonial empires, the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the many other atrocities of the previous two centuries. We were taught how Cold War geopolitics led both blocs to support ruthless dictators, how propaganda laundered cruelty into necessity, and how the language of morality became political camouflage—allowing governments and leaders to commit acts that, at the level of individual conscience, most of us would find abhorrent and unacceptable.

The myth of Western innocence

In Canada, these lessons were never distant abstractions. We learned about the treatment of Indigenous peoples by colonial authorities and later by the Canadian state—how government policies, disease, displacement, and deliberate neglect produced a demographic collapse so severe that roughly 95% of Indigenous people died from the time of first contact with Europeans to the end of the 19th century. We learned how these policies were not accidental or peripheral, but central to the project of building Canada.  They included land seizure, forced starvation, residential schools, the pass system, and the suppression of Indigenous governance, and were all instruments of a state determined to eliminate Indigenous presence as a political and cultural force.

And the brutality did not end with the 19th century. Explicitly genocidal policies—child removal, cultural destruction, coerced assimilation, and systemic land dispossession—remained in place well into the late 20th century, with some saying they continue today. The history we inherited made clear that evil was not confined to foreign regimes or distant eras. It was woven into the institutions, laws, and administrative practices that shaped Canada, and it operated within living memory. This country’s national story is often told as one of peace, order, and good government, but the record shows a state willing to inflict organized suffering on a massive scale when Indigenous lives stood in the way of its political goals.

Despite this history most of us likely assumed—naively—that Western societies contained less evil than their rivals. These were the nations that defeated Hitler and ended World War 2, championed civil liberties, enshrined human rights, and built institutions, like the International Court of Justice, dedicated to accountability (at least on paper). We came to believe that the West was less compromised, less willing to inflict mass suffering as policy. We believed its leaders lived by a higher morality and were constrained by law, ethics, and democratic norms.

We were very wrong.

How Western institutions normalize cruelty

In recent years, many in the West have begun to understand that evil is not something that only happens “over there.” It can take root within Western political classes, media ecosystems, academic institutions, and corporate boardrooms. We have learned—sometimes gradually, sometimes through shocking events—that these institutions seek to profit from aggression and injustice, both politically and economically. Whether we want to accept it or not evil can manifest itself in our society among elites who decide what counts as truth, whose suffering is acknowledged, and what forms of violence can be justified or ignored. And once embedded within these structures, once normalized and reinforced by power, it becomes remarkably resilient.

What changed things for many was a single event—the way Western political, media, and corporate elites responded to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel—and the uncritical support they offered for the Israeli campaign of retribution that followed in Gaza. Rage and grief after the attack were expected, even without acknowledging the context in which it occurred—decades of oppression and mass killing of Palestinians, and the Israeli blockade and siege imposed on Gaza since 2007 that had turned the territory into the world’s largest concentration camp.

What was not expected was the speed and certainty with which Western political and media elites transformed one terror attack into a sweeping license for Israel to wage a campaign of genocide against Palestinians. The world witnessed not simply support for Israel’s right to defend itself, but an almost reflexive embrace of a war of vengeance—a refusal to de-escalate, and a demand that everyone accept the fiction that the Israel-Palestine “conflict” began on October 7th, as if decades of Israeli occupation, dispossession, and brutality toward Palestinians could be erased without consequence.

Western framing—and the deliberate elimination of history and context—did real work. As it shut down moral inquiry. By stripping away the historical conditions that preceded the Hamas attack and erasing the political reality in which Palestinian suffering has been sustained for generations, Western leaders and media outlets created a narrative in which only one side’s pain mattered. This framing implied that Western audiences need not consider proportionality, civilian harm, international law, or the ethical distinction between legitimate self-defence and collective punishment. When history can be dismissed so casually and so completely, almost any atrocity in the present becomes permissible.

Bureaucratic violence and the banality of atrocity

This instinct—violent aggression as the default moral position when Western interests or alliances are implicated—is not new. A clear look at the post‑9/11 era shows a consistent pattern, one where Western powers, especially the United States, have been responsible for some of the worst violence committed globally in the last quarter century. The “War on Terror” did not merely fight terrorism, it built a global war machine. Invasions, occupations, drone assassination campaigns, proxy wars, and sanctions regimes devastated entire societies. The stated rationales were variations of the same idea—catastrophic harm to innocent people is justified when done in the name of security, stability, and self‑defence.

The Brown University Costs of War project estimates that post‑9/11 wars have killed more than 4.5 million people, directly and indirectly—more than 90% of them Muslim. This is not an accident of geography. It is the outcome of deliberate decisions, where bombers and fighter jets are dispatched, where troops occupy civilian populations, where sanctions choke societies, where proxies are funded, and where legal constraints on government are treated as obstacles rather than safeguards.

The war in Afghanistan, launched under the justification of hunting Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, evolved into a two-decade-long occupation that ultimately killed up to 360,000 civilians. The war in Iraq—sold to the world through the lie of weapons of mass destruction—became a destabilizing catastrophe where an estimated 600,000 people were killed according to the British medical journal The Lancet. Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, and other countries were pulled into the orbit of Western coercion through the language of counterterrorism and national security. American drone strikes killed thousands of innocent civilians with bureaucratic impunity, and US torture sites proliferated across the globe. International law was not shattered in one dramatic moment, but eroded through a steady stream of exceptions, reinterpretations, and executive decisions—the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.

What stands out is not only the brutality but the moral gymnastics utilized to rationalize what can only be called acts of depravity. The violence was framed as defensive rather than predatory—an effort to protect the innocent rather than an attempt to impose geopolitical order through devastation. But if the West can call mass destruction, the destruction of entire societies, and mass murder “self‑defence” often enough, then self‑defence becomes a loophole with no ethical limits.

Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil has become disturbingly relevant in our time. What stands out in the post-9/11 era is not only the scale of violence, but the way Western governments, institutions and leaders normalized it through bureaucratic language, administrative habit, and moral disengagement. Evil did not announce itself with grand declarations. It seeped into policy recommendations, security memos, public speeches, and the quiet decisions of officials who believed they were simply doing their jobs in trying to defend “Western values.”

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American drone assassination campaigns across the Middle East and Africa, and the network of torture sites that spread across the globe were all justified through technical vocabulary—“precision strikes,” “enhanced interrogation,” “collateral damage,” “security imperatives.” These terms sanitized brutality, turning mass death into a matter of procedure. The machinery of state violence became so routine that killing innocent civilians, destroying entire societies, and shredding international law were treated as administrative necessities rather than the moral catastrophes they were.

This is precisely what Arendt warned about.  Evil poses the greatest danger when it is rendered ordinary, when acts of evil are carried out not by fanatics or monsters, but by professionals, government functionaries, and ordinary people who see themselves as moral individuals just doing the job they were given. In this situation cruelty becomes a normal part of day to day tasks. Atrocity becomes a line item, and moral responsibility dissolves into the anonymity of institutional process where people are “just following orders.”

This is the true horror of the banality of evil. Not that monstrous acts are committed by monstrous people, but that they are committed calmly, without guilt and with little afterthought by people who see themselves as having a moral compass—the way an Israeli sniper shoots a Palestinian child in the head and then celebrates with his comrades over a meal afterwards at a job well done.  And unless we confront that fact directly—the normalization of evil—we risk living in a world where atrocity is not the exception, but the norm. 

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

Israel’s war in Lebanon is another example of the criminal impunity of a rogue, terrorist state

Israel’s actions have destabilized Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. They have inflamed regional tensions, fuelled extremism, and undermined diplomatic efforts.  

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

While the genocide in Gaza continues unabated Israeli leaders have now expanded their war crimes regime to Lebanon, where the 2026 invasion is not an aberration, not a sudden eruption of violence, and certainly not a defensive reflex. It is the latest chapter in a decades‑long pattern of criminal impunity—an extension of the same tactics, doctrines, and policies that have devastated Gaza. What is unfolding today in southern Lebanon is not merely a “spillover” from Gaza or a confrontation with Hezbollah. It is the exportation of the Gaza model of military aggression—the systematic destruction, mass displacement, territorial engineering, and steady normalization of Israel’s annexationist ambitions that have animated its leaders’ strategic thinking for decades.

Since the beginning of the Israeli invasion Lebanese authorities have reported more than 4,300 killed and over 12,000 wounded, with over one million displaced—roughly one‑fifth of the country forced from their homes. Israel has conducted thousands of airstrikes, bulldozed entire villages, bombed the suburbs of Beirut, and expanded operations far beyond its self‑declared “Yellow Line,” pushing up to ten kilometers into Lebanese territory. These are not temporary incursions, and this has been confirmed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in conversations with Israeli soldiers. They are in effect the creation of “facts on the ground,” the same methodical approach Israel has used for decades in the West Bank to transform an illegal occupation into a permanent presence.

The Gaza model exported

Israel’s military leaders have openly described their Lebanon campaign as a replication of tactics used in the Gaza genocide. Defence Minister Israel Katz referenced the “Rafah and Beit Hanoun model,” promising to demolish homes, flatten neighborhoods, and prevent civilian returns until Israel’s objectives are met. Soldiers have told reporters they are “operating exactly as we do in Gaza,” with daily destruction quotas and target lists.

Satellite imagery confirms the scale of devastation. Villages such as Bint Jbeil, Ayta al‑Shaab, and Khiam have been razed through controlled demolitions and bulldozing of buildings, mirroring Gaza’s obliterated districts. Additionally, Israel has struck civilian infrastructure—bridges over the Litani River, water facilities near the Qaraoun Dam, hospitals, schools, mosques, and farmland—all considered war crimes under international law. Furthermore, reported use of white phosphorus against civilian targets—already documented extensively in Gaza—have emerged again in Lebanon.  Another instance of Israel committing a war crime.

These actions are neither counterterrorism nor acts of self-defence. They are collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and territorial reconfiguration intended to support long-term occupation. It is the Gaza doctrine applied against a sovereign state.

A historical pattern of territorial ambition

While Israel’s defenders insist that these operations are purely defensive, aimed at neutralizing Hezbollah, the scale, the systematic razing of villages, the infrastructure destruction, and the establishment of a de facto occupied buffer zone suggest something far more ambitious, demographic engineering with the intent of effectively annexing territory.

This ambition is not new. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, again in 1982, and occupied southern Lebanon until 2000. It launched a massive war in 2006, destroying swaths of the country. Each time, Israeli leaders spoke of “security zones,” “buffer areas,” and “temporary measures.” Each time, those measures hardened into long‑term territorial claims.

These actions align with a broader ideological project often referred to as “Greater Israel”— a maximalist vision proposed by Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl, rooted in biblical nationalism and embraced by elements of Israel’s political and religious right. This project imagines Israeli control stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, and from Turkey to northern Saudi Arabia. While not official state policy, its influence is unmistakable in settlement expansion, annexation rhetoric, and repeated military incursions into neighboring states.

Lebanon, characterized by political fragmentation, deep economic crisis, a weak military and the overwhelming impact of incessant and highly destructive attacks by Israel, is uniquely vulnerable to such ambitions. Israel’s current operations—creating cleared zones, establishing military outposts, and preventing civilians from returning to their homes and properties—mirror the early stages of territorial absorption seen in the West Bank. The logic is clear. Israel weakens the state, depopulates strategic areas, and normalizes Israeli presence, all in violation of international law.

Crimes under international law

The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment, the destruction of civilian property and infrastructure, and the forcible transfer of populations—precisely the kinds of actions Israel has carried out in Lebanon. The Rome Statute defines war crimes as intentional attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and crimes against humanity as widespread or systematic assaults on civilian populations. Israel’s conduct in Lebanon falls squarely within these prohibitions.

The mass displacement of over one million people, the razing of villages, the destruction of essential infrastructure, and the establishment of a de facto occupation zone constitute grave breaches of international law. Additionally, UN experts and human rights organizations have warned of ethnic cleansing and potential crimes against humanity.  These warnings echo those issued during Israel’s Gaza campaign, where the International Court of Justice found a “plausible risk of genocide” and ordered provisional measures to prevent further atrocities. Enabled by its Western allies, the US in particular, Israel ignored them.

US backing fuels Israeli impunity

Israel’s ability to commit these crimes repeatedly—and expand them into new theaters—rests on one foundation: unconditional US support.

The United States provides billions in military aid annually, vetoes UN resolutions calling for ceasefires or accountability, and shields Israel from sanctions or international prosecution. This support persists regardless of the severity of Israeli crimes. It persisted through the flattening of Gaza, the mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and the destruction of hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, and it now continues with Israeli crimes in Lebanon.

The contrast with Western responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is staggering. Russia’s aggression triggered sweeping sanctions, diplomatic isolation, ICC arrest warrants, and massive military support for Ukraine. Israel’s aggression in Gaza triggered statements of “concern” and “alarm” followed by expedited weapons shipments. This double standard is not merely hypocrisy—it is blatant complicity. Under international law, states that knowingly provide material support enabling war crimes share responsibility for those crimes.

Israel as the region’s most destabilizing force

Israel’s defenders claim that as the only “democracy” in the Middle-East it is a stabilizing force in a volatile region. However, decades of evidence suggests the opposite.

Israel has launched major wars or invasions against Lebanon (1978, 1982, 1996, 2006, 2026), Gaza (2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023–26), and repeatedly escalated tensions with Syria and Iran. It maintains an apartheid system in the West Bank, enforces a siege on Gaza, and conducts regular strikes across the region.  No other Middle Eastern state has initiated as many cross‑border conflicts, displaced as many civilians, or destroyed as much infrastructure in neighboring countries. No other state has repeatedly violated international law with such impunity, and yet the world has done nothing to stop them.

Israel’s actions have destabilized Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. They have inflamed regional tensions, fuelled extremism, and undermined diplomatic efforts. And because Israel can influence US military policy—through lobbying, intelligence partnerships, and political pressure—it can and has dragged the world’s most powerful military into regional escalations.

A state that repeatedly violates international law, destabilizes its neighbors, and wields disproportionate influence over US foreign policy is not merely a regional threat. It is a potential threat to world peace.

The biker gang analogy

If a biker gang rolled into a town, torched buildings, murdered residents, and declared parts of the territory off‑limits, the full weight of law enforcement would descend. No appeals to “self‑defence” against adversaries would excuse systematic destruction.

Yet when Israel does the same—flattening villages, displacing millions, occupying foreign soil—the international response has been muted, and there has been no effort to hold its leaders accountable. This selective enforcement of law reveals the moral bankruptcy of the so‑called international “rules‑based order” which Western nations so often invoke against their adversaries

Israel’s war in Lebanon is not an isolated conflict. It is part of a decades‑long pattern of aggression, territorial ambition, and criminal impunity. Without accountability—through sanctions, arms embargoes, ICC prosecutions, and diplomatic pressure—the cycle is bound to continue.

The world cannot remain passive in the face of Israeli exceptionalism. The credibility of international law, the stability of the Middle East, and even the prospects for global peace depend on ending this impunity and holding Israel’s leaders fully accountable.

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

1000 days of genocide: A world after the Gaza Genocide (Part 3/3)

A thousand days of genocide in Gaza have revealed the truth about our world—Israel has committed the crime of crimes, the pinnacle of contemporary evil, and Western governments have enabled it.

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

This article can also be found on Rabble.ca.

A thousand days of genocide in Gaza has not only exposed the brutality of Israeli policy and the complicity of Western governments, it has also revealed the machinery that made such violence possible, and part of that machinery is the propaganda apparatus needed to sell genocide to Western publics. No genocide in history has unfolded without such a system to sanitize the violence and dehumanize the victims. In Rwanda, it was Radio Mille Collines. In Nazi Germany, it was Der Stürmer. In Gaza, it has been Western news media.

Across Canada, the United States, and Europe, major outlets softened or erased the reality of Israeli atrocities. Canadian networks—CBC, CTV, Global—and the country’s major newspapers consistently reproduced Israeli government narratives while obscuring Palestinian suffering. They refused to call genocide by its name. They framed mass killing as “conflict,” deliberate starvation as “shortages,” and ethnic cleansing as “evacuation.” This was not a matter of journalistic misjudgment or unconscious bias. It was media complicity. It was the manufacturing of public consent for atrocity, the ideological scaffolding that allowed political leaders to act without accountability. Media executives, editors, and owners bear moral responsibility for this distortion of reality—and if justice ever prevails, they may one day bear legal responsibility as well.

While Western governments and media shielded Israel, the global South took a radically different path. South Africa led the genocide case at the International Court of Justice, invoking the very legal framework the West once claimed as its moral legacy. Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and others condemned Israel’s actions without hesitation. Millions marched across Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America protesting and showing an unmistakable divide—one where the West defended genocide, while the global South and those Westerners with a conscience defended international law. This moment marks a profound geopolitical realignment. The Gaza genocide has accelerated the decline of Western influence and the rise of a multipolar world in which Western moral authority no longer carries the weight it once did. Nations that once deferred to Western leadership have seen enough.

The consequences for Western legitimacy are severe and irreversible. The genocide has shattered the West’s credibility on human rights, revealing that its commitment is conditional, racialized, and politically selective. It has exposed the hollowness of its claims to uphold international law, which it seemingly applies only when convenient and discards the moment it threatens Western interests or those of an ally. It has undermined the integrity of Western democracy, as leaders ignored overwhelming public support for a ceasefire, criminalized anti-genocide protests, smeared human rights activists, and attempted to silence dissent. In doing so, it has destroyed any remaining claim to moral leadership on the global stage.

Rebuilding any semblance of a moral order requires accountability—not symbolic gestures, not rhetorical condemnations, but real consequences for nations that commit horrific crimes. That means broad sanctions on Israel, comprehensive arms embargoes, prosecutions at the International Criminal Court, enforcement of the International Court of Justice’s rulings, universal‑jurisdiction cases against perpetrators, reparations for Palestinians, and political consequences for Western leaders who enabled genocide. Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and other nations must all face a legal and moral reckoning for their complicity in genocide. Without accountability, the international system will remain what Gaza has revealed it to be, a structure designed to protect the powerful and abandon the vulnerable.

Yet despite the devastation, Palestinians remain resolute, still holding fast to the dream of freedom from Israeli oppression and occupation. Israel has destroyed their homes, schools, hospitals, archives, museums, mosques, and churches. It has tried to erase Palestinian culture, history, and memory. It has targeted intellectuals, artists, journalists, and educators in an effort to extinguish the very sources of cultural continuity. But it has failed. Instead of erasing Palestinian consciousness, it has strengthened it—creating not only a generation of Palestinians more determined than ever to assert their identity, but an international community of supporters who refuse to let their struggle be forgotten.

Palestinian identity endures through oral history, literature, art, music, resistance, and global solidarity. A people cannot be erased as long as they continue to proclaim their existence and tell their story. The resilience of Palestinians—under conditions that would have shattered most societies—stands as one of the most extraordinary expressions of collective endurance in modern history.

A thousand days of genocide in Gaza have revealed the truth about our world. One where Israel has committed the crime of crimes, the pinnacle of contemporary evil. Western governments have enabled it, Western media have sold it, and international institutions have failed to stop it. The global South has risen in moral leadership, while Palestinians have shown extraordinary courage and resilience. The genocide in Gaza is not just a crime against a people—it is a crime against the idea of humanity itself.

The world that emerges from this moment will not resemble the world that existed before it. The West’s moral authority is gone. The human rights system it built is broken. The international legal order it claimed to steward is discredited beyond repair. And Palestinians—despite unimaginable suffering, trauma, and the erasure of entire family lines—remain unbowed. Their endurance has become a moral indictment of the global powers that armed their oppressor and a testament to the human capacity to resist annihilation. History will remember who acted, who remained silent, and who chose complicity over humanity. It will remember the governments and politicians that defended a genocidal state, the media institutions that sanitized its crimes, and the millions who marched in defiance of both. It will remember who stood with the oppressed when the cost of doing so was high.

 

The path forward begins with the truth—unvarnished, unfiltered, and unsoftened. The truth of what happened in Gaza. The truth of who ordered it, who carried out the orders, who enabled it, and the truth of how the world allowed it to continue long after the scale of the atrocity was undeniable. That truth must be followed by accountability, real consequences for those who committed, supported, financed, or justified genocide. Accountability for the political leaders who armed the killing, for the institutions that normalized it, and for the states that obstructed justice at every turn. And it must end with justice for the thousands upon thousands of Palestinian dead, for the families erased from the civil registry, for the tens of thousands of children left orphaned, maimed, and traumatized. It must end with justice for a people who have endured dispossession, occupation, apartheid, and mass killing for generations—a people who are, by every measure, the most persecuted minority of the modern era, not just in the land of historic Palestine but also in the diaspora in Western nations.

 

Without truth, accountability, and justice, Gaza will not be the last genocide. It will be the template for other megalomaniacal leaders to follow. It will mark the beginning of a world in which the powerful kill with impunity and the international community looks away. A world where human rights are a slogan, not a standard. A world where law is a weapon wielded by the strong against the weak. The stakes could not be higher. What happens after the Gaza genocide is finally stopped will determine the moral trajectory of the twenty‑first century—whether humanity chooses a future grounded in justice and universal rights, or whether it descends into an era defined by brutality, impunity, and the normalization of mass atrocity.

 

We must ensure that this moment leads us toward a more just world, not a darker one. Gaza must become the turning point, a beacon, the moment when humanity finally confronts the systems that made genocide possible and chooses to build something better. The world after Gaza is unwritten, and it is ours to shape.

  

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