No going back: How the Gaza genocide shattered the myth of Western morality
Destruction in Rafah following Israeli forces’ invasion, photographed on 21 January 2025
Daniel Lindley writes in The New Arabon 15 October 2025:
In the same week that we marked two year years since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, a ceasefire was also announced, though it is difficult to imagine that the period will be remembered as a time of celebration. Our world was changed by the months of horrific killing, and the dividing lines were drawn. While the initial events have mostly been memory-holed, this was in fact clear almost from the start.
Already at the start of Israel’s war, in October 2023, concern in Brussels over their endorsement of actions “that will swiftly be labelled as war crimes,” was being reported. With one EU diplomat being quoted as saying: “We may be about to see massive ethnic cleansing.”
Another event that’s been memory-holed is how Western officials were pushing for Egypt to allow Israel to implement its plan to force the Palestinians of Gaza into the Sinai; only to be refused as “they shared widespread concerns that once Israel has forced the Palestinians out of Gaza, it will never let them back.”
Genocide is always wrong?
Now I’m certainly not saying that European liberals have never supported anything immoral before this, their special treatment of Israel despite its brazen violations of international law being but one example. But one core principle they’ve always pledged to maintain consensus on after the fall of Nazi Germany is that genocide is always wrong. It’s the basic moral lesson Europeans are all taught from childhood when they learn about WWII, to the extent that it’s become a sort of secular religion replacing traditional Bible stories.
To persuade Europeans to support Israel while it openly attempts to annihilate an entire people was always going to create some serious cognitive dissonance. If Israel could get this done quickly and relatively quietly (I’m detaching myself from morality here), these events probably would have passed without provoking an internal crisis. But it’s been two years; a combination of steadfast Palestinian resistance and international outrage hindering Israel’s starvation tactics left it still unable to achieve its strategic goal of permanently removing the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
It’s been incredibly depressing to witness just how much Israel has been able to get away with and still avoid hitting outright pariah status. I honestly wouldn’t have predicted that this slaughter would have been permitted to continue anywhere near this long, and it shouldn’t be forgotten that it was only halted the day that the US government decided it must end.