Those who purport to lead and speak for the Western world seem to be breaking their disgraceful silence 18 months after the onset of the Zionist state’s primitive savagery.

A couple of weeks after Israel began its campaign of terror in Gaza two Octobers ago, a journalist and novelist named Omar El Akkad published a note on X, formerly known as Twitter, that has stayed with me ever since:

Pure pith, if you ask me, a trespass onto that forbidden land where humanity’s taboos are ignored and acid truths openly articulated.

El Akkad, an Egyptian by birth who has lived, reported and written in Canada the whole of his adult life, already had some  honoured novels to his credit —  American War, 2017, and  _What Strange Paradise_, 2021 — by the time he offered the above observation.

This past winter he published his bitter reflections on Gaza and the West’s hypocrisies thereupon under the title One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The thought altogether merits the recycle, digital media message to hard covers.

I have wondered lately whether the day El Akkad anticipates with raw indignation may be hard upon us. Those who purport to lead and speak for the Western world — parliamentarians, senior foreign policy people, various corporate media — seem to be breaking their disgraceful silence 18 months after they ought to have spoken up in condemnation of the Zionist state’s primitive savagery.

There is a great, often untraversed, distance between words and action, what is said and what is done, in our post-democracies. So I cannot usefully speculate where these recent expressions of outrage, confessions of error and misplaced sympathies prominent among them, will lead. Turns in sentiment, however, nearly always precede turns in policy and conduct. Anyone who lived through the Vietnam War years knows this.

I have suspected from the earliest days of the Israeli military’s real-time barbarities that “the Jewish state” was bound to overplay its hand at some point. The rest of the world can take only so much pretending that the murder spree in Gaza is a Biblically authorised war against — how does this work? — the descendants of those phantom, Jew-hating clans known as Amalekites. The Zionist project is at bottom an attempt to make the modern world recognise invocations of ancient wars of revenge, annihilation and race-paranoia, whether or not they ever took place, as legitimising unspeakable horrors in the third decade of the 21st century. Sooner or later, I figured, the rational would prevail over the imaginary and mythological – Athens, as the scholars think of it, over Jerusalem.

Has this moment come at last? Good enough, it is worth posing the question. A highly significant emergency session of the UN Security Council on 13 May suggests that the West’s unconscionable support for Israeli terrorism now wears very thin. So does a marked turn toward plain-spoken truths about Gaza in some Western media. (And how novel is this?) We also begin to hear a few disavowals coming from political figures who have until now defended the indefensible. There is often a danger of over-interpretation in times such as these, but a shift of sentiment seems to me in the offing, if it has not already arrived.

Shifting winds

The chronology of events, easily enough read, indicates that Israel crossed its bridge too far in early March, when it was step-by-step betraying the phased ceasefire agreement it had entered upon in January. On 2 March, the Netanyahu Government announced it would block all humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. On 18 March, the Israeli military resumed its bombing campaign,........

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