An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah, Gaza. Photo by Ashraf Amra/UNWRA.

Back in February, Canadian-American novelist and journalist Omar Al Akkad published a book titled One Day, Everyone WIll Have Always Been Against This. “This” was Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. That day seems to be getting closer by the minute.

While most have carefully avoided using the word genocide, the list of politicians who have been staunch defenders of Israel’s “right to defend itself” but are now condemning its actions in the strongest of words—but not doing very much more—is growing fast.

They include British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas; Canadian PM Mark Carney and Foreign Minister Anita Anand; and Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong.

Following the Israeli war cabinet’s decision on August 8 to launch a new offensive to recapture Gaza City—an action likely to cause thousands more deaths and certain to displace a million more starving Palestinians to the overcrowded “evacuation zones” in southern Gaza—Carney and Starmer condemned this “escalation.” But there is no sign of the “concrete actions” the UK, France, and Canada threatened on May 19 if Israel did not “cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.”

The foreign ministers of Australia, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (later joined by Austria, Canada, France, Norway, and the EU commission) got together to rush out a statement on August 9 “strongly rejecting” the Israeli decision to expand the war and urging “the parties and the international community to make all efforts to finally bring this terrible conflict to an end now.”

This was followed on August 12 with a statement signed by no less than 25 foreign ministers and two high representatives of the EU, lamenting that “humanitarian suffering in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels.”

The ministers complained that:

Neither of these statements threatened any sanctions if Israel chose not to comply.

Surprisingly, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came closest to actually doing anything to restrain Israel when he announced that “Under these circumstances, the German government will not authorise any exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice.” Because of its past role in the Holocaust, Germany regards the security of Israel as a raison d’être of the German state (Staatsräson) and is Israel’s second-largest supplier of arms after the US.

Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, too, says it is contemplating sanctions on Israel “as a way to save its citizens from a government that has lost its reason and humanity.” “We are not facing a military operation with collateral damage,” Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said in an interview with La Stampa published on August 11, “but the pure denial of the law and the founding values of our civilization.”

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has spearheaded a move to get Western powers to join the 147 countries (out of 193 UN member states) that already recognize the state of Palestine. Britain, Canada, and Australia have undertaken to do so in September at the UN, albeit with conditions. Whether or not such recognition happens, in the absence of stronger measures this too will remain little more than an empty symbolic gesture.

The Trump administration in the US has meantime doubled down on its support for Israel. But fractures are appearing in the Democratic Party, which provided the Israeli government with “ironclad” backing throughout the Biden-Harris administration.

Thirty Democratic members of Congress have signed onto Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs Act to block offensive weapons sales to Israel, while on July 31, in the words of Senator Bernie Sanders:

Even Trump’s MAGA ally Marjorie Taylor Greene has gone on record saying “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that October 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

This is all way too little and way too late for the people of Gaza. Whether it is better than nothing at all remains to be seen. As of now, this performative Western outrage is little more than a sideshow that leaves the IDF free, as Donald Trump put it, to “finish the job.”

Politicians are not the only ones claiming to have had their eyes recently opened to the full horror of Israel’s crimes. Many credit photos of famine victims for their conversion. We can now add the no less horrifying photographs and powerful video footage of the “wasteland of rubble, dust and graves” to which two years of Israeli bombardment have reduced Gaza, shot by journalists from Jordanian planes dropping aid packages.

It was with “immense pain and a broken heart,” Israel’s most celebrated living writer David Grossman told the Italian daily La Repubblica on August 1, that “For many years, I refused to use that term, ‘genocide.’ But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there, I can’t help but use it…” Quoting Grossman’s words later got left-wing lawmaker Ofer Cassif expelled from Israel’s Knesset chamber.

Grossman was one of over 2,300 cultural figures to sign two recent Israeli

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