The Slow But Significant Erosion of Israel’s Genocidal Impunity in the West

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As the second anniversary looms — in just nine days’ time — of the attacks on southern Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023 and the start of Israel’s sickeningly disproportionate and still ongoing genocidal response, it seems increasingly unlikely that the occasion will be marked by even the tiniest fraction of the outpouring of collective support that was on display two years ago, when world leaders queued up to declare that Israel had an open-ended and irresponsibly undefined “right to defend itself.”

By now, the outright lies that fuelled approval for Israel’s genocide — lies about 40 beheaded babies and mass rapes — have been thoroughly debunked, and the scale of Israel’s revenge has been so horrific that none of its supporters can credibly ignore the blunt truth that, in response to the 1,195 people killed on October 7, 2023 (including an untold number killed by Israel itself under the Hannibal Directive), Israel has routinely been killing the same number of Palestinians every few weeks for the last 100 weeks (at least 60,000, officially, but almost certainly many times more), and that, despite their protestations to the contrary, the vast majority of those killed have been blameless civilians, amongst them at least 20,000 children, as I discussed in my recent article, Gaza Horror: IDF Admits 83% of Those Killed Were Civilians, But the True Total May Be 95%.

Israel has so carefully cultivated support in western governments and in the mainstream media — and has so flagrantly ignored UN resolutions without punishment for decades — that it thought it could exterminate the Palestinians, in response to October 7, and get away with it, seeking to hide the extent of its dehumanizing genocidal intent through its usual combination of lies, threats, distortions and self-pity, and also seeking to hide the appalling truth that its true purpose was to destroy the whole of Gaza to make it unliveable, while killing as many people as possible in the vain hope that those who somehow managed to survive would subject themselves to what was euphemistically described as “voluntary migration.”

In reality, “voluntary migration” involves mass ethnic cleansing or forced displacement, colossal humanitarian crimes that are made even more unforgivable as a notion because they are so clearly spectral, conjured up, in the clear absence of any country willing to accept a mass exodus of Palestinians, as a smokescreen for nothing less than relentless extermination.

For months, Israel got away with it, even as its military rained down death and destruction on Gaza with greater intensity than in any previous military assault anywhere on a densely populated urban environment packed with civilians, and crossing repeated red lines in international humanitarian law by deliberately targeting hospitals, whilst also systematically destroying every other aspect of the infrastructure required for civil society to function.

In those early months, western leaders and the western media largely went silent regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine, aware of the hypocrisy that would be exposed after they had portrayed Vladimir Putin as pure evil, and had made Russia into an international pariah, as they proceeded to ignore the evil of Israel’s genocide, continued to supply it with weapons, and refused to even contemplate imposing any measures that would inconvenience Israel in any way.

By December 2023, as I recall, Ukraine started to sneak back into news reporting, evidently as the media’s gatekeepers thought that enough time had elapsed for their massive hypocrisy to go unnoticed, but then, in January 2024, the first high-profile criticism of Israel occurred when the International Court of Justice (one of the six principal organs of the United Nations, also known as the World Court), ruling on a genocide case brought by South Africa, warned that a claim of genocide was “plausible.”

The ICJ issued provisional measures to prevent a definitive conclusion that Israel was engaged in a genocide, ordering Israel to “take all measures within its power” to stop acts of genocide, to “prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide” made repeatedly and overtly by senior Israeli officials, and to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

In response, Israel immediately launched a cynical attack on UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the largest aid organization operating in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which has been supporting Palestinians’ needs for 75 years via humanitarian aid, education and healthcare. Alleging that 12 UNWRA employees (out of 40,000 in total) had taken part in the October 7 attacks, Israel completely gutted the impact of the ICJ ruling as western countries, led by the US, queued up to suspend funding to UNRWA, despite no evidence ever being provided to justify Israel’s claims.

Most of this funding was later restored, but Israel had succeeded in casting doubts on the integrity of UNWRA, and, by association, the UN itself and all international aid agencies, fulfilling a long-cherished aim of discrediting UNWRA not only for keeping Palestinians alive, but also for keeping alive their “right to return” as displaced refugees of the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”), when the State of Israel was founded, and 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 750,000 exiled from their land.

Recognizing the existence of the State of Palestine

As 2024 wore on, and nothing more than hand-wringing was extended towards Israel as criticism by most of the countries of the west, Israel’s presumed imperviousness was undermined by a revolt by three prominent European countries — Ireland, Norway and Spain — who recognized the State of Palestine on May 28, 2024, with Slovenia and Armenia following in June. Earlier, in April and May, four Caribbean nations — Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas — had also recognized Palestinian statehood.

The existence of the State of Palestine was first declared by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on November 15, 1988, encompassing the territories seized by Israel in 1967 — the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. By the end of 1988, it had been recognized by 78 countries, and another 56 countries recognized it between 1989 and 2019.

Most western countries, however, refused to recognize its existence, with only Iceland (in 2011) and Sweden (in 2014) breaking with an apparent consensus throughout the EU and in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, that Israel was part of the west — hence its contentious admission into EUFA (the Union of European Football Associations) in 1994 and the Eurovision Song Contest in 1973.

While entry to both UEFA and Eurovision was also extended to Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, and also to other countries outside of Europe, it seemed to be lost on most of the founding nations of both organizations that the inclusion of Israel could be seen as a recognition, by Europe’s colonial powers, of its role as the last European colonial settler project.

Reinforcing the exceptionalism granted to Israel, Russia was almost immediately suspended from UEFA and Eurovision after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, although Israel, shamefully, has continued to be allowed to compete in European football and in Eurovision, despite its football fans frequently engaging in vile behaviour abroad, and despite its inclusion in Eurovision casting a pall of misery over a competition that prides itself on its sense of transnational unity.

In July 2024, Israel — and its supporters in the west — suffered another blow when the International Court of Justice, responding to a 2022 request from the UN General Assembly to assess the “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”, found that the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory — the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip — was “unlawful”, and that it was “under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence … as rapidly as possible.”

The ICJ also pointed out, crucially, that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by [Israel’s] continued presence.”

In November, Israel’s impunity was further undermined when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant for the war crimes of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population and of starvation as a method of warfare, and for the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

Throughout this period, however, Israel’s atrocities shamefully continued unabated, as, led by the US, and with prominent roles played by Germany and the UK in particular, any meaningful action — stopping arms sales or imposing sanctions, for example — remained resolutely off-limits, even as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN experts also concluded that Israel was committing genocide.

As the Biden administration, which had led the west’s failure to meaningfully challenge Israel, gave way to the return of Donald Trump, a ceasefire negotiated by both administrations came into effect, which, for six weeks, offered the hope of an end to hostilities. Shamefully, however, all along Israel had been itching to break the ceasefire, which it did unilaterally in March, imposing the deadliest siege yet on all supplies into Gaza — of food, water, medical supplies and equipment, and fuel — resuming its deadly military attacks, and establishing, with the US, a supposed humanitarian aid organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been little more than a front for killing desperate, starving civilians in search of food.

With catastrophic famine declared in August, with Israel currently engaged in a defiant and deranged effort to destroy the whole of Gaza City and to drive the remaining population into a concentration camp in the south, and with a UN Commission of Inquiry — the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel — issuing a devastating report last week establishing, definitively, that Israel is engaged in a genocide and has been for the last 23 months, the pressure on western countries to take action has become so pronounced that, just four days ago, on September 21, the UK, Canada, Australia and Portugal all recognized the existence of the State of Palestine, with France, Luxembourg, Malta, Andorra, Monaco following on September 22, and San Marino on September 23. 157 of the 193 member states of the United Nations have now recognized Palestine as a state.

Israel’s hysterical response, and what recognition means

As the respected Middle East commentator Mouin Rabbani explained in an article for Jacobin, published on September 24, the combination of all these developments “has driven Israel and its allies into a fit of hysteria.” Last week, Netanyahu caused serious unrest within Israel when he proposed that the response to its growing unpopularity was that it should “become a ‘super Sparta’ of the Middle East.”

As Julian Borger explained for the Guardian, “The future the prime minister laid out for Israel, of a more militarised society, a partial autarky — or economically self-sufficient country — with limited trade options and relying increasingly on homemade production, has stirred up a backlash among Israelis who are ever more uneasy at the prospect of following him down the path to a pariah state.”

The veteran Israeli columnist Ben Caspit responded to Netanyahu by writing, in the centre-right Maariv newspaper, “How romantic to fantasise about the heroic and ascetic Spartans, a mere few hundred of whom successfully fought a powerful Persian army”, adding, “The problem is that Sparta was annihilated. It lost and disappeared.”

Meanwhile, Arnon Bar-David, the head of Israel’s biggest trade union federation, Histadrut, told a union meeting, “I don’t want to be Sparta. We deserve peace. Israeli society is exhausted, and our status in the world is very bad.”

After cynically playing to the far-right in Europe, suggesting that “Western Europe has large Islamist minorities”, who are “vocal” and “politically motivated”, and who undertake “campaigns of violent protest and constant intimidation” against Israel, Netanyahu then responded to the recognition of the State of Palestine by the UK, Canada, Australia and Portugal by claiming that Israel would now have to “fight both in the UN and in all the other fronts against the slanderous propaganda aimed at us, and against the calls to create a Palestinian state that will endanger our existence and constitute an absurd prize for terrorism”, while Israel’s foreign ministry wrote on X that the UK recognizing Palestine was “nothing but a reward for jihadist Hamas.”

Regarding the significance, or otherwise, of the recent spate of high-level western recognitions of the State of Palestine, Mouin Rabbani was undoubtedly correct to state that the actions these governments chose to take “were the least consequential available” adding, “They do not entail any concrete policy changes toward Israel or require them to implement significant measures such as an arms embargo, economic sanctions, judicial prosecutions, or travel restrictions. Most important, they do absolutely nothing to bring an end to the Gaza genocide.”

He also stated that “these acts of recognition need to be understood first and foremost as a response by governments aligned with Israel to growing public pressure to change course as a result of the Gaza genocide and the unprecedented shift toward support for Palestinian rights”, adding that, as Israel understands to its alarm, “Western governments are for the first time since the emergence of the Zionist movement during the late nineteenth century taking measures in support of the Palestinians in response to popular pressure.”

I do believe, however, that it should not be underestimated, given the deeply embedded nature of Israeli influence in these countries, how even the “least consequential” actions will have led to a tsunami of criticism behind closed doors, as they break with what, to date, has been a rigorous insistence by Israel’s supporters that its actions must never be meaningfully criticized or challenged.

As Rabbani also explained, “At the formal level, recognition means that Israel is no longer occupying Palestinian territory but rather the state of Palestine, a situation akin to the 1990 Iraqi occupation of Kuwait”, and it has been revelatory, in the last few days, to see western media quoting “Palestinian authorities” rather than referring to the as being “Hamas-run”, and to see references, in official government documents, to Palestine rather than to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Of course, unless these gestures are followed up with concrete measures — especially a ban on all arms sales, and the imposition of sweeping sanctions — all of the above will do nothing to end the still-ongoing genocide.

Increasing calls for sporting and cultural bans, and increasing diplomatic isolation

Action from the rest of the world is particularly important as the US is now lost, its political establishment almost entirely supportive of Israel, its Congress full of elected representatives vying with the vilest commentators within Israel itself in their enthusiasm for genocidal hysteria, while Donald Trump himself is, at best inconstant, and at worst contemptuous of everyone and everything, as his recent embarrassing speech at the UN demonstrated.

Apparently, the US in currently engaged in discussing a permanent ceasefire with Arab leaders, but it is probably unwise to think that Trump will somehow force it through and be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he so desperately craves, when Netanyahu remains a wrecking ball for all hopes of an easy end to the seemingly ceaseless horrors of his genocide.

While we wait to see if the recent western converts to Palestinian statehood take any significant action as Israel continues with its latest atrocities — destroying the whole of Gaza City in an attempt to force the entire remaining population into a concentration camp in the south — we can at least take heart that Israel’s status as a reviled pariah state, to be shunned by everyone, seems finally to be moving in the right direction.

In the world of football, UEFA and its parent body FIFA are facing increasing pressure to ban Israel from all international games and competitions, with four UN Special Rapporteurs calling for a ban on September 23, and with nearly a million people having signed a petition calling for Israel to be banned from the World Cup. Prior to meetings next week, recent reports indicate that a large majority of the executive committee and the federations are “understood to be in favour of a ban”, and, in addition, Spain has once more exerted its influence by stating that it will withdraw from next year’s World Cup if Israel are not banned.

On Eurovision, too, countries are flexing their muscles, with Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Iceland and Slovenia all having pledged to withdraw from the competition if Israel are allowed to take part next year, and with over 540,000 people to date having signed a petition calling for Israel to be banned. Spain’s inclusion is particularly significant, as it is one of the “big five” competitors, along with the UK, Germany, France and Italy, who make the largest financial contributions to the contest, and whose opinions therefore have additional weight.

Noticeably, after Donald Trump’s dismal performance at the UN, Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Friday provided the clearest evidence to date that most of the world is now so thoroughly sickened by his bestial insistence that nothing must be allowed to stop Israel’s extermination policy in Gaza that he has now succeeded in isolating himself as a reviled pariah.

As he launched into a hysterical speech in which he condemned the recent spate of recognitions of the State of Palestine as “sheer madness” and “insane”, and claimed that “giving the Palestinians a state one mile from Jerusalem after October 7 is like giving al-Qaeda a state one mile from New York City after September 11,” most of his deranged invective rang out in a empty hall, as a majority of the delegates — over a hundred, from over 50 countries — staged a walkout that was so sweeping that Netanyahu was left as a forlorn ranting figure, akin to how Hitler would have appeared had the UN existed in 1943, and had he somehow been invited to visit to try to justify his actions.

As noted above, none of this international condemnation of Israel, and the moves to isolate it, will bring to an end Israel’s ongoing and ever more deranged genocidal actions in Gaza, but every blow delivered may bring Israel’s collapse closer, and in the meantime, of course, as we recognize that it is people power that has been pushing western leaders to act, and to move, however slowly, away from their previously unbreakable support for Israel, it must only reinforce our determination to keep pushing for an end to the genocide, for meaningful accountability, and for Israel to be shunned until some just resolution is delivered for the Palestinian people.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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