Fire engulfs a classroom at the Fahmi Al-Jargawi School in Gaza City following an Israeli strike, May 26, 2025.

One of the most remarkable—not to say shameful—features of the last 20 months of carnage in Gaza has been the near-unanimity of support for Israel’s assault from Western governments and political parties of otherwise sharply opposed persuasions, regardless of how criminally Israel has conducted its “war.”

Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poiliévre, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, not to mention Viktor Orban, Antony Albanese, Donald Tusk, Geert Wilders, Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas are unlikely bedfellows, but all have come together on Israel’s “right to defend itself” against Hamas “terrorism.”

In the name of this principle—whose legality is dubious, given that Gaza is not a foreign power but (according to the world’s highest court) a territory that Israel has de facto occupied since 1967, whose civilian population it therefore has a legal duty to protect—even the mildest Western expressions of “concern” over this or that IDF “excess” have invariably been prefaced (“balanced”) by obligatory ritualistic condemnations of Hamas.

With the partial exception of the Guardian, which has allowed its columnists like Arwa Mahdawi and Nesrine Malik to pen op-eds that were critical of Israel, the mainstream Western media from the BBC to the New York Times, CNN to the Washington Post, have all generally been content to toe this official line. While Israel’s justifications—and lies—have been amplified, its atrocities have been sidelined, minimized, or not reported at all.

Such partiality was perhaps comprehensible in the immediate aftermath of October 7, when images of the horror were fresh in people’s minds. But little changed either with revelations that what happened on October 7 was less clearcut than Israeli propaganda had presented it or with the mounting deaths, destruction, and undeniable evidence over the ensuing weeks and months that Israel was routinely committing war crimes in Gaza.

It mattered not that the final figure for deaths in Israel on October 7 was 1,139, not the 1,400 at first reported; nor that one-third of these were soldiers, police, or security guards—in other words, combatants—rather than “mostly civilians”; nor that most of the atrocity stories that did so much to mobilize Western opinion behind Israel in the ensuing weeks were either totally discredited, like the fairy tales of 40 beheaded babies, babies baked in ovens, and babies ripped from their mothers’ wombs, or, like the “mass rape” allegations, lacked any convincing supporting evidence. Politicians like Biden, Blinken, and Trudeau continued to repeat these myths long after they had been debunked in the Israeli press.

It mattered not that many of the Israelis who perished on October 7 were later shown to have died from IDF “friendly fire,” resulting either from the fog of war or implementation of Israel’s Hannibal Directive, which authorizes killing one’s own rather than letting them be taken prisoner. Many of the young people killed at the Nova music festival were likely casualties of fire from IDF helicopter gunships; the burned-out hulks of their cars, which could not have been produced by Hamas’s light weaponry, strongly suggest as much.

Nor did it matter that 18 months ago, on January 24, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was “a real and imminent risk” of genocide occurring in Gaza and mandated six provisional measures aimed at “preserving … the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide.” The court imposed further measures on March 28 and May 24. All were simply ignored by Israel, with the open or tacit support of the United States and Israel’s other Western allies, including Canada.

It is difficult to think of a more blatant snub to the international rule of law—unless it be the howls of Western outrage that greeted the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) last November 21 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” The US has now instituted sanctions against the judges who authorized the arrest warrants.

Only one thing mattered. For 20 months it sufficed to invoke “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the........

© Canadian Dimension