In July 2024, I walked into an unusual meeting with a European Union leader to discuss the situation in Gaza. But as soon as he started speaking, his first words were, “We [the EU] are completely irrelevant.” 

Everything he said that day left me astonished because of his candour and sheer contradiction to what European leaders say in public. 

As he passed his tablet around the table to show satellite imagery that the EU had been collecting of destroyed Gaza neighbourhoods, he said: “Israel is wiping out the place systematically to make Gaza uninhabitable, so that as soon as the war is over, people there would have no option but to leave.” 

He also lambasted the EU’s hypocrisy. “We give Gaza’s people food and bandages in the morning and give Israel bombs in the evening, so if people get killed, they wouldn’t die on an empty stomach, and if they survive, they can plaster their wounds.” 

What came out of the conversation was a staggering reality: most European governments were giving Israel carte blanche to continue the war, even if some made hollow calls for a ceasefire deal. At the most, some EU leaders were asking Israel to “kill fewer people,” i.e., keep the death toll below 100, so as to keep Gaza off the headlines. 

But it took more than a year since this meeting for Western leaders to start acknowledging those basic facts about the genocide, albeit in sugarcoated words. 

But why did this outrage start only now, when those leaders knew all along what Israel’s plans were? 

From the start, Israel had made crystal clear its genocidal intention and the very strategies it would use to accomplish this goal – mass killings, starvation, destruction, and ethnic cleansing. Nothing Israel does now is new; it’s the continuation of systematic annihilation. 

Where was the world during the past 19 years of draconian siege and repeated military assaults?

This Western duplicity did not emerge on October 7, 2023. 

Even before the ongoing genocide began, Gaza and Palestine were being deliberately deplatformed and deprioritised for years. The UN had said as far back as 2018 that Israel’s blockade had rendered the enclave unlivable.

But the only talk in the halls of power was the Abraham Accords that sidestep Palestinians, if........

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