Zionist racism and Palestinian dehumanization are the foundations of Israel’s moral character

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned a racist Jewish state as a “civilizing” outpost of Europe in Palestine —  implicitly superior to the “barbaric” indigenous population.  

  

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

From its earliest formulations in late‑19th‑century Europe, Zionism imagined a political order in historic Palestine built around the supremacy of one ethnonational group—Jews. Over the decades, that vision hardened into a state structure that one Israeli human rights organization—B’Tselem—has described as a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Other groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous scholars of genocide and settler colonialism have concluded that Israeli governance across all of historic Palestine constitutes apartheid, and in the eyes of some genocide scholars an unfolding genocidal process.

This is not a claim about Judaism or Jewish identity. It is a claim about state power, ideology, and structures of supremacy. And it is a claim increasingly made by courageous Israelis who defy the powerful interests of a state committing genocide.

Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard captured this internal reckoning with painful clarity when he said, “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism and hatred, and at some of their elders, who are their spiritual mentors and implant in them toxic notions of Jewish supremacy… How did we produce from among us the replicas of our persecutors?”

Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of occupation, settlement, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy and dehumanization of Palestinians has become normalized, even valorized.

Zionism’s racialized and fascist foundations

Zionism emerged in the same intellectual climate that produced European colonialism, racial hierarchy, and the early currents of ethnonationalism that would later culminate in fascist movements. Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, envisioned a racist Jewish state in Palestine as a civilizing outpost of Europe. In Der Judenstaat and Altneuland, Herzl described the future Jewish society as modern, rational, and European—implicitly superior to the “backward” native population.

Herzl’s writings repeatedly framed Palestinians not as a people with political rights, but as an obstacle to be managed, displaced, or subordinated to the Zionist agenda. His admiration for European colonial models—particularly British rule in South Africa—reveals a worldview steeped in racial hierarchy.

Critics and scholars have argued that Herzl’s political imagination contained proto‑fascist elements, including: a belief in demographic engineering; a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations.

These elements do not make Herzl a fascist. But they place him within the intellectual family of European racial nationalism, a genealogy that later fed into the fascist ideologies that dominated Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. If one removes the Jewish identity component, Herzl’s framework shares structural similarities with other European ethnonationalist movements of his era—movements that came to dominate politics in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Portugal.

This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but a recognition that Herzl’s political imagination was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time, namely settler colonialism, racialized progress, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into policies within the Zionist movement that promoted Jewish demographic dominance and territorial control over Palestinian rights.

The making of a supremacist regime

The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass displacement, village destruction, and the permanent exclusion of over 750,000 Palestinian refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment. Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed could never return to their homes, while their land was transferred to Jewish ownership.

After 1967, the occupation entrenched a dual legal system, one where Israeli settlers in the West Bank 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, and arbitrary detention. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” effectively making Israel an apartheid state.

Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political dominance through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws.

Along with a similar report by Amnesty International in 2022, these claims of Israel being an apartheid state are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions, and are supported by research by human rights scholars.

Dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through dehumanizing language. Israeli political leaders have long deployed rhetoric that erases Palestinian identity and strips Palestinians of their humanity. They rarely refer to Palestinians as “Palestinians” at all, choosing instead the generic term “Arabs,” a deliberate linguistic move that denies a people their name, their history, and their nationhood. This erasure is reinforced by explicit dehumanization. Senior officials have repeatedly used language that casts Palestinians as subhuman or inherently threatening. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked notoriously described Palestinian children as “little snakes,” even calling for the killing of Palestinian mothers to prevent future generations. Such rhetoric is not incidental; it is part of the ideological machinery that makes domination thinkable and violence permissible.

Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, and large‑scale military assault.  Also, settler violence, often carried out with impunity and the support if Israeli authorities, reinforces this logic. Sfard’s comparison of extremist settlers to the Ku Klux Klan is not hyperbole but a reflection of vigilante terror used to enforce ethnic hierarchy.

This dehumanization has intensified during Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza over the years. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Marion Kaplan, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases of forced displacement, destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass killing, and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.

Holocaust survivors and descendants have echoed these warnings, arguing that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories. Their testimony cannot be dismissed as it is rooted in lived experience and scholarly expertise.

For decades, Israel enjoyed near-total impunity in the international legal system. That era is ending. Cases before the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court have forced a global reckoning with the legal and moral implications of prolonged occupation and systemic discrimination. Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since gone silent. Their earlier support for state violence—rather than for the universal principles of human rights—reveals a troubling willingness to subordinate anti‑racist commitments to ethnonational loyalty.

As critics have noted, this silence is a betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.

Parallels between Zionism and white supremacy

We must also confront the fact that Zionism, as practiced by the Israeli state, shares structural parallels with white supremacy. Both are systems of domination built on similar foundations. Each constructs a superior in‑group understood as uniquely entitled to land, sovereignty, and political power. Each justifies the dispossession of an Indigenous or subordinate population through narratives of civilizational advancement or historical destiny. Both rely on demographic engineering to secure permanent control, deploy stories of cultural or racial superiority to legitimize exclusion, and normalize segregation, unequal citizenship, and the systematic denial of rights. These are not incidental similarities. They reflect the underlying architecture of two regimes organized around maintaining the dominance of one group over another.

In the United States, “manifest destiny” justified the displacement of Indigenous peoples. In Israel, the Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Academic work in Holy Land Studies and other journals describes Zionism as a racial regime that reproduces whiteness through land control and exclusion of Arabs and non‑European Jews.

A society shaped by ethnosupremacy

Haaretz has documented how Jewish supremacy has fractured Israeli society itself, empowering extremist settlers and far‑right movements that now dominate national politics.  The Oslo era did not moderate these forces, it entrenched them. Settlement expansion accelerated, Palestinian territory fragmented into disconnected enclaves, and the logic of domination became normalized. Jewish self‑determination has been transformed into a system of supremacy that denies Palestinians equivalent rights.

This is not a fringe view. It is increasingly the consensus among scholars of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism. Recognizing the supremacist structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish Jewish suffering or deny the trauma of antisemitism. It does not delegitimize Jewish collective identity or aspirations for safety. But it does demand a reckoning with the reality that no people can secure their freedom by denying another’s.

Ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews. They are acts of fidelity to universal principles of justice.

As Sfard asked: How did we produce replicas of our persecutors? The answer lies not in Jewish identity, but in the corrosive power of Zionism, an ideology of ethnonational supremacy. The task now is to build a political order grounded not in domination, but in equality.

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

Anti-Palestinian racism in Canada: The Nakba exhibit as a national test of truth and power

The Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is far more than a cultural installation, it is a direct test of Canada’s willingness to uphold universal human rights, justice, and equality.

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

The opening of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) on June 27, 2026 marked a watershed moment in Canadian public memory. For Palestinian Canadians—many of whom contributed family artifacts, testimonies, and archival materials—the exhibit represented something long denied to them—recognition that their history of ethnic cleansing is part of Canada’s human rights story, not a political controversy to be managed. Yet the ferocious backlash from Zionist Jewish organizations and the political pressure exerted on federal officials revealed a deeper truth—that anti‑Palestinian racism is very deeply embedded in Canadian institutions, shaping whose suffering is acknowledged and made public and whose is erased.

The controversy surrounding the exhibit did not emerge spontaneously. It exposed a long‑standing pattern in which Palestinian narratives are treated as dangerous, conditional, or illegitimate—while Zionist organizations assert a proprietary right to define how Palestinians and their history may be represented. The Nakba exhibit thus became more than a cultural installation. It became a test of whether Canada is willing to uphold truth, justice, and equality in the face of political interference and racialized suppression.

A campaign to silence Palestinian memory

Opposition to the exhibit began even before its doors opened. Several Zionist organizations—including the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA)— publicly attacked the exhibit, claiming it lacked “balance” and failed to include their perspectives. Heritage Minister Mark Miller even demanded that certain “omissions” and “errors” be “rectified.” His specific complaint was the absence of references to Hamas (an organization that didn’t exist until the early 1990s), echoing the talking points of those lobbying to undermine the exhibit. His intervention signaled a willingness to revisit the museum’s independence and to reframe Palestinian narratives through a Zionist lens.

The implications are unmistakable: Palestinians, whose lived experiences form the foundation of the exhibit, are not considered legitimate stakeholders in telling their own history. Instead, Zionist organizations asserted that they were the ones “directly impacted” by an exhibit documenting Palestinians’ history of dispossession, and pressured Miller to intervene.

CIJA escalated its objections, accusing the museum of “engaging extreme political activists” and failing to consult “communities directly impacted by its content.” This framing suggested that Palestinian testimony is inherently suspect unless validated by Zionist and Jewish voices—voices representing the very ideology responsible for the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Palestinians in 1947-48.

The hostility escalated further when Shurat HaDin, an Israel‑based legal organization, threatened legal action against the CMHR, claiming that the exhibit “erases Jewish history” and “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination.” Such accusations rest on a deeper racialized logic: the presumption that Palestinian narratives are inherently destabilizing to Jewish identity. Beneath the surface, this framing implies that the very act of Palestinians recounting their history, indeed, their existence itself, is a provocation.

Asymmetry of memory: The Holocaust vs. Palestinian erasure

The material imbalance between Jewish and Palestinian narratives at the CMHR is stark. The Holocaust exhibit occupies more than 4,500 square feet, while the Nakba exhibit occupies less than three percent of that space. Canadian governments also funds three standalone Holocaust museums—in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver—each dedicated to ensuring that Nazi crimes are remembered, studied, and taught.

When those institutions were created, no one demanded that Nazis or Nazi sympathizers be consulted to provide “context or “balance” for those institutions. Yet in the case of the Nakba exhibit, Zionist and Jewish organizations insisted that their perspectives be built into the curatorial process. This asymmetry exposes a deeper truth in Canada—that Holocaust memory is treated as unquestionable moral ground, while Palestinian memory is treated as dangerous and conditional.

The is no argument that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, commemorated annually, and memorialized.  The massive amount of cultural and academic knowledge that has been produced since World War Two through museums, monuments, films, and an enormous body of academic research, makes it one of the most studied and memorialized events in modern history. But the contrast with Palestinian history is profound. The Nakba—during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and thousands massacred by Jewish terrorist militias and subsequently by the Israeli army in 1948—has received a very small fraction of the institutional attention devoted to the Holocaust. There are no publicly funded Nakba museums, no national commemorations, and no high school curricula dedicated to Palestinian history.

The CMHR exhibit is the first of its kind in a major Canadian institution. Its modest scale is in contrast to the enormous outrage it provoked within segments of the Canadian Jewish community, demonstrating that Palestinian suffering is not merely ignored or forgotten, it is actively suppressed.

A systemic pattern of anti‑Palestinian racism

The reaction to the Nakba exhibit aligns with findings from major studies on anti‑Palestinian racism in Canada. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) April 2022 report defines anti‑Palestinian racism as systemic discrimination that includes:

• denying Palestinian existence, history, and identity;
• suppressing or punishing Palestinian narratives;
• portraying Palestinians as inherently violent or antisemitic;
• erasing the legitimacy of Palestinian suffering.

Research by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) similarly documents widespread patterns of media bias, political suppression, and institutional hostility toward Palestinian advocacy.

The backlash against the Nakba exhibit is a textbook example of these dynamics. Legacy Jewish organizations’ insistence that Palestinian narratives be “balanced” with Zionist perspectives—especially in a human rights museum—reflects a racialized hierarchy in which Palestinian testimony is treated as incomplete or dangerous unless validated by those who helped produce the conditions of Palestinian dispossession.

This is not neutral “context.” It is a demand that Palestinians be denied the right to narrate their own history.

Zionist Organizations and Supremacist Logic

Zionist organizations’ efforts to shut down, dilute, or reframe the Nakba exhibit reveal the depth of anti‑Palestinian racism embedded in their political advocacy. Their objections were never rooted in concerns about historical accuracy, and instead were driven by a determination to preserve a narrative in which Palestinians appear only as footnotes to a triumphant story of Jewish nation‑building in colonized Palestine.

Any attempt to centre Palestinian experiences of dispossession is treated as a threat—not because the facts are in dispute, but because acknowledging those facts destabilizes the ideological framework these organizations defend.

CIJA’s claim that the exhibit could “contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students” is a striking example of how Palestinian narratives are stigmatized. The suggestion that acknowledging Palestinian suffering is inherently dangerous to Jews reflects a supremacist worldview in which Palestinians are seen not as victims of human rights violations but as inherent threats to the rights of others by their mere existence.

Similarly, Shurat HaDin’s assertion that the exhibit “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination” reveals a belief that Palestinian history must be suppressed to protect Jewish identity. This is not political disagreement; it is supremacist logic.

Zionism, as practiced by these organizations, functions as a supremacist ideology—one that justifies the displacement, erasure, and dehumanization of Palestinians. The reaction to the Nakba exhibit demonstrates that these organizations are not defending historical accuracy but rather a political ideology that cannot tolerate the legitimacy of Palestinian narratives.

Institutional Power and Racialized Suppression

The resignation of Mark Berlin—the museum’s only Jewish trustee—became a flashpoint. Berlin accused the CMHR of “institutional anti‑Zionism” and denounced the exhibit as “curation by omission.” His departure illustrated how deeply Zionist ideology is expected to be accommodated in Canadian institutions, and where any attempt to tell stories about Palestinian suffering is swiftly recast as anti‑Jewish, biased, or dangerous.

This reflexive reframing does not arise from evidence. It arises from a political project that treats Palestinian memory as inherently dangerous to Jews and Palestinian voices as needing correction, containment, or counter‑narration.

Canada’s Human Rights Test

The Nakba exhibit is Canada’s human rights test. It asks whether Palestinians can exist in Canadian public memory without being filtered through Zionist ideology. It asks whether Palestinian suffering can be acknowledged without apology, without demands for “context” from those hostile to Palestinian existence, and without political interference.

Canada’s approach to historical memory makes the imbalance unmistakable. The country has invested enormous resources in memorializing the Holocaust but almost none in acknowledging the Zionist Jewish violence and atrocities that accompanied the creation of Israel through Palestinian dispossession. The CMHR exhibit is the first major attempt to acknowledge this history—and even that modest effort has been met with outrage, lobbying, and demands for ideological correction.

This opposition the CMHR display is purely political. The fury directed at the museum for daring to tell Palestinian stories demonstrates that the erasure of Palestinians is not a passive omission but an active project in Canada—one sustained by powerful Zionist organizations that insist Palestinian suffering must be  filtered through their ideological lens.

If Canada is ever to claim a genuine commitment to human rights, it must confront this reality directly. It must reject supremacist ideologies that seek to silence or reshape Palestinian narratives. And it must affirm, unequivocally, the right of Palestinians to narrate their own history—without permission from those who helped produce their dispossession.

Only then can Canada begin to live up to the principles it claims to uphold. 

© 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.

1000 days of genocide: A story of Western immorality and Israeli inhumanity (Part 1/3)

The Gaza genocide has exposed the end of the post‑1945 human‑rights order, showing that international law for powerful states is applied selectively. 

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

A version of this article has also been published by Rabble.ca.

On July 3, 2026 the world will cross a threshold that should never exist—a thousand days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A thousand days of mass murder, starvation, displacement, cultural destruction, and the systematic annihilation of a people and society. A thousand days during which Western governments have not merely failed to stop the genocide, but have actively enabled it. A thousand days in which the mask of Western “humanity,” “values,” and “moral leadership” has fallen away, revealing a political order that has decided that Palestinians are less than human and that their lives are disposable.

For the better part of three years, the world has watched the destruction of Gaza unfold in real time. Every major human‑rights organization—Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, the International Federation for Human Rights and others—has documented patterns of killing, destruction, and dehumanizing rhetoric. Each eventually concluded that Israel’s actions meet the legal definition of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Prominent Israeli Holocaust scholars such as Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and Raz Segal, affirmed the same. United Nations agencies have also repeatedly warned that Israel’s actions constituted genocide.

Yet despite overwhelming evidence, Canada and most of its allies refused to acknowledge the crime. Worse, they continued to supply Israel with weapons, diplomatic cover, and political legitimacy. The United States remained the primary enabler, but Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and others played indispensable supporting roles. Canada exploited a legislative loophole that allowed it to continue exporting weapons and components to Israel via the United States, even as Gaza’s hospitals, universities, refugee camps, and entire neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble.

Western governments have made the truth impossible to deny. Through both their actions and their refusals to act, they have effectively endorsed Israel’s project of erasing the Palestinian population of Gaza. Their persistent refusal to intervene anywhere in the occupied Palestinian territories—Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem—signals not neutrality or support for a two‑state compromise, but alignment with Israel’s long‑standing ambition to consolidate a “Greater Israel” cleansed of its Indigenous Palestinian population. For decades, Western leaders cloaked this alignment behind the language of a “two‑state solution,” a phrase repeated so often it became a diplomatic reflex rather than a genuine policy. In practice, it functioned as a convenient fiction—an empty slogan used to mask Western complicity in Israel’s expansionist, settler‑colonial agenda and to obscure the reality that their actions consistently advanced the very outcome they claimed to oppose.

A 78 year record of enabling Israeli impunity

If Western governments had ever truly intended to uphold international law, the UN Charter, or the Genocide Convention, they would have acted long before genocidal violence was initiated by Israel in the fall of 2023. Israel’s history since 1948 is a catalogue of violations of the very legal instruments the West claims to defend:

• Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement during the Nakba in 1948;
• Illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem;
• Systematic apartheid, as documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem;
• Repeated wars on Gaza, each involving mass civilian casualties—in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and the ongoing Gaza genocide since 2023;
• Targeting of journalists, medics, and children;
• Collective punishment, prohibited under the Geneva Conventions; and
• Annexation of occupied territory, which is illegal under the UN Charter.

For decades, Western governments responded with statements of “concern,” “regret,” or “alarm”—but never with meaningful action. No sanctions. No arms embargoes. No diplomatic isolation. No accountability.

This is not mere failure. It is deliberate policy.

The West’s unwavering support for Israel—political, military, economic, and ideological—created the conditions in which genocide could occur openly, livestreamed to the world, without consequence. In the process, the so-called “international rules‑based order” has been exposed as a selective system designed to protect Western allies and punish Western adversaries. Palestinians, like many non‑Western peoples, were never part of the moral universe that order claimed to defend.

The death of the responsibility to protect

After the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica, the UN adopted the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), committing states to intervene when mass atrocities occur. Gaza has proven that R2P is a hollow promise. If Western leaders possessed even a fraction of the humanity they claim, they would have invoked R2P the moment genocide was affirmed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, UN agencies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Israeli human‑rights groups, and leading Holocaust scholars.

Instead, Western governments did the opposite. They shielded Israel from accountability, vetoed UN ceasefire resolutions, and continued supplying weapons. The message to the world was unmistakable: Palestinian lives do not trigger Western moral obligations.

Canada’s Hypocrisy

Canada’s political class—under both the Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney governments—has perfected the art of moral posturing while enabling atrocity. Canadian leaders routinely describe Canada as a defender of human rights, a champion of the UN, and a guardian of the “rules‑based international order.” Yet Canada violated its legal obligations under the UN Charter and the Genocide Convention by refusing to take the actions required when genocide is occurring.

If Canada were truly committed to international law, it would have:

• Imposed a full arms embargo on Israel;
• Suspended the Canada–Israel Free Trade Agreement;
• Sanctioned Israeli political and military leaders responsible for genocidal acts;
• Supported South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justicde (ICJ), as NATO allies Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkiye, along with 16 other countries have done;
• Expelled the Israeli ambassador and recalled Canada’s ambassador; and
• Launched universal‑jurisdiction prosecutions against top Israeli political and military officials.

These actions are not radical. They represent the bare minimum required under the principles of basic morality when genocide is unfolding. Yet Canada undertook none of them. Instead, it continued exporting weapons—often through loopholes—and hid behind symbolic gestures that carried no material consequence for Israel. Its belated, heavily conditioned “recognition” of Palestine, while welcomed, did nothing on the ground, offered no protection to Palestinians, and imposed no cost on Israel. Such gestures function as political theatre designed to placate public outrage while allowing Canada to maintain alignment with Israeli policy.

A Study in Racialized Morality

The clearest demonstration of Western hypocrisy is the contrast between the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Canada acted with speed and moral clarity: sanctions, diplomatic isolation, asset freezes, ICC support, and a unanimous parliamentary declaration of “genocide.” Yet when Israel began its genocide in Gaza, Canada imposed no sanctions, no arms embargo, no diplomatic isolation, no accountability mechanisms, and refused to acknowledge genocide at all.

The only difference between the two cases is the identity of the victims and the political alignment of the aggressors. Ukrainians are white, European, primarily Christian, and aligned with the West. Palestinians are Indigenous, Arab, Muslim, and colonized by a Western ally.

This is not diplomacy. It is the operationalization of a racial hierarchy—a worldview in which the rights, lives, and suffering of some peoples are treated as inherently more valuable than those of others.

A Thousand Days That Changed the World

As the world marks a thousand days of genocide in Gaza, something fundamental has shifted. The world has watched Western inhumanity and Israeli brutality exposed with a clarity that cannot be undone. The illusion of Western moral superiority—already eroding for years—has now collapsed entirely. The global South sees it. Millions across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas see it. Even within Israel, a small but courageous minority sees it.

This moment forces a reckoning. What does it mean for the future of the international system when the world’s most powerful democracies enable genocide? What does it reveal about the structures of law, morality, and global governance that were supposedly built to prevent such crimes? And what does it demand of nations like Canada, which helped make this atrocity possible?

The Gaza genocide has exposed the end of the post‑1945 human‑rights order. It has shown that accountability for powerful states is optional, that international law is applied selectively, and that the principles the West claims to uphold collapse the moment they conflict with geopolitical interests. A thousand days of genocide have laid bare a truth the world can no longer ignore: the system is broken, and those who enabled this crime must one day face a reckoning worthy of its scale.

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

An allegory about Palestinian oppression, suffering and erasure

Sometimes rather than explaining global events in geopolitical terms it requires telling a story to which ordinary people can personally connect.

 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

So imagine if someone showed up at your home, a place where you and your extended family have lived for generations, and said, “I’m moving into your house.”

You would laugh at first, because who says something like that. But then the person pushes their way through the door, carrying old papers and documents, and a confidence so absolute it feels unreal. You ask why they think they can just walk in. They hold up a faded document and declare, “My great, great, great, great grandfather lived here once. That means this home is rightfully mine.”

You stare at them, confused. Your family has lived in this house for generations. You have the keys, the deed, the memories, the photographs, the stories. Every corner of the home carries the imprint of your life. But this stranger insists that a distant ancestor’s presence—centuries ago—gives them the right to reclaim everything you built, and the land on which it sits.

Before you can process what’s happening, they push past you and your family and head upstairs to claim the guest room.

At first, the intruder insists it’s only symbolic, a small space that “means a lot.” You resist, but the authorities tell you to be reasonable, to compromise, to make room for someone whose claim they view as legitimate. Refusal, you’re warned, would make you the unreasonable one. The authorities even help the intruder settle in and assist them in inviting other relatives.

Soon, more rooms are taken—one after another—to accommodate their growing family. When you push back, the authorities threaten you with charges. Each expansion is framed as necessary, as part of reclaiming what was “always theirs.” You’re assured you still have plenty of space, even as your world shrinks around you.

Your children end up sharing a single bedroom. Your parents are moved into the hallway. Your kitchen becomes a narrow strip of counter you’re allowed to use only at certain hours. The living room—once the heart of your family—now has a locked gate, and you must request permission to enter.

You protest. You show your deed, your family photos, the bills you’ve paid, the repairs you’ve made. None of it matters. The intruders dismiss it all, and the authorities echo their indifference.

“My ancestor was here first,” the intruder repeats. “That’s the only thing that matters.”

Then their friends begin arriving at the intruder’s invitation.

Not one or two—dozens. They arrive with boxes, furniture, tools, and a sense of entitlement that mirrors the first intruder’s. They spread across the house, occupying rooms you never agreed to give up. They claim they’re helping “restore the home to its rightful owners.” Your presence, they insist, is temporary—tolerated only because removing you all at once would be troublesome.

Any objection is treated as aggression. Defending your own home is framed as a threat. Your resistance becomes proof, in their eyes, that you don’t deserve the shrinking space you still occupy.

Locks appear everywhere. Doors once open now have metal bars. Windows you used to open for fresh air are sealed shut. You’re told it’s for “security,” for “order,” and that good behavior might lead to fewer restrictions.

It never does.

Instead, the intruders begin building new rooms—extensions, additions, expansions—right on top of your garden, your yard, your driveway. They pave over the soil where your grandparents planted olive trees. They tear down the shed your father built with his own hands. They erect fences that slice through your property, separating your family from one another.

When you ask why, the intruders shrug. “We need more living space. And this home was always meant for us.”

You remind them of their earlier promises to leave certain areas untouched—spaces where your family could still live with dignity. They nod politely, then quietly build over those areas too. Everything is justified as temporary, as necessary, as something you should be grateful isn’t worse.

Meanwhile, you’re squeezed into smaller and smaller corners. You’re forbidden from renovating, expanding, or even fixing a broken window without permission. The intruders, however, build freely and endlessly. They even restrict your access to the bathroom and ration your water, while using as much as they please.

One morning, you wake to find that the room you were sleeping in has been reclassified as “disputed space.” You’re allowed to stay only if you remain silent, avoid drawing attention, and never mention that this was your home long before the intruders arrived.

Your children grow up hearing the intruders tell visitors, “This house was empty when we arrived,” or “The family living here never really belonged,” or “We brought civility to this place.” Your children look to you for clarity. They know the truth, but the intruders speak with such authority—and the local authorities reinforce their claims—that the broader community begins to believe them.

Then comes the inversion of reality. The intruders begin accusing you of being the trespasser.

You’re told you don’t belong. You’re told you should be grateful for whatever scraps of space remain. Your presence is framed as the obstacle to peace. If only you stopped insisting on your rights, everything would supposedly be fine.

This is said while the intruders sit in your living room, holding your keys, lounging on your family’s furniture which they now claim as their own..

When you try to tell your story—when you try to explain what happened, when you try to show the community the truth—the authorities silence you. Your account is dismissed as “too political,” “too emotional,” or “too upsetting for the intruders.” Acknowledging your history is labeled “controversial.”

Imagine that. Being told that the theft of your home is a sensitive topic, and that the feelings of those who took it matter more than the reality of what your family endured. Imagine being told your history is optional, debatable, or inconvenient. Imagine being told your suffering must be softened or erased so the intruders can feel comfortable in the house they stole.

Now imagine living like this not for a day, nor for a year, but for generations.

Imagine raising children who have never known safety in their own home. Imagine growing old in a place where every door is controlled by someone else, and being told repeatedly that you should be grateful for whatever space you’re allowed to occupy.

And then imagine being blamed for the entire situation.

As the years pass, something even darker unfolds. The intruders begin speaking openly about your family as if you are pests. They use words meant to strip you of your humanity—cockroaches, snakes, human animals. These slurs are tossed around casually, as if describing vermin rather than the human beings whose home they invaded.

At first, you think it’s just hateful language. But the language becomes a prelude to violence.

One night, one of the intruders corners your eldest son in the hallway. Your son dares to assert that this is his home, that he has a right to walk freely in it. The intruder responds with lethal force. Your son does not survive.

When you demand justice, the intruders dismiss your grief and the authorities express “regret” but support them. Your son is branded “dangerous,” accused of provoking the attack. Had he stayed in the tiny corner allotted to your family, they insist, he would still be alive.

You’re not allowed to mourn openly. Cry too loudly and you’re accused of disturbing the peace. Speak your son’s name and you’re accused of incitement. Try to tell visitors what happened and the intruders cut you off, calling you a liar.

Their friends and the authorities nod along. They admire the polished floors and expanded wings, pretending not to see the broken rooms where your family now sleeps. They praise the intruders’ “restoration work,” ignoring the fact that the home was beautiful, whole and thriving before it was invaded and taken over.

When you show these visitors old photographs proving your family lived here long before the intruders, they dismiss the evidence as “inconclusive” or “too complicated.” Dwelling on history, they warn, might “inflame tensions.” Some even accuse you of rewriting the story.

Meanwhile, the intruders grow bolder. They patrol the hallways with weapons, claiming it’s for their safety. Your presence, they insist, is the threat. If you weren’t so “hostile,” they wouldn’t need to defend themselves.

But you know the truth. The weapons are tools of domination.

One afternoon, your daughter tries to retrieve a favorite book from the bedroom that used to be hers. An intruder blocks her path. She is small, frightened, and desperate to reclaim a piece of her childhood. When she reaches for the book, the intruder reacts with lethal force.

You bury another child.

Once again, the intruders blame you. Your daughter “shouldn’t have been there.” She “posed a risk.” Her death is described as “regrettable” but the intruder had “no choice.”

The authorities—who claim to be neutral and care about justice—look uncomfortable for a moment, then return to admiring the intruders’ new kitchen remodel. You’re urged to “move on,” to “focus on the future,” to stop talking about what happened.

You realize the authorities favour the intruders. They have chosen to ignore the truth because acknowledging it would require confronting the injustice they have supported for years through their actions and inaction.

The intruders continue expanding, building new rooms on top of your children’s graves. They celebrate their “progress.” They host parties in the home they stole, toasting their own “resilience” and “security,” never mentioning the ugliness and brutality that made it possible.

Your family, once whole, now lives in fear, grief, and suffocating confinement. You cling to memories of what the home once was, even as the intruders insist those memories are false.

And through it all, they repeat the same refrain: “This house was always ours.”

They speak with such confidence that outsiders believe them. They repeat it so often that even some in the community begin to doubt the historical truth.

But you remember.  You remember every room, every wall, every tree in the yard. You remember the laughter that once filled the halls. You remember the life your family built long before the intruders arrived with their ancestor’s distant claim.

And you know—with a clarity that cannot be erased—that what happened to your home was not fate, not destiny, not a misunderstanding.  It was theft.  It was violence.

It was the deliberate erasure of a people’s place in the world.

And no amount of denial, propaganda, or dehumanizing language can change the truth of what was taken from you.

The end of the story hasn’t been written.  Because the intruders—Zionists and their supporters—will face justice one day for taking from the homeowner—Palestinians—their rights, their dignity, their property, their possessions, and their lives.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”  And that is why Palestinians will ultimately prevail, despite the bleakness they have endured for generations.  Ultimately, Palestinians will be free from the river to the sea. Because that is their destiny.

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