After two years of Gaza genocide, the West's moral pretence is shattered
If Gaza has taught us anything, it is not that the so-called rules-based international order has collapsed; it is that it never truly existed.
This concept has always been a construct devised to preserve the privileges of the powerful, lending their actions a veneer of legitimacy. For decades, the West invoked international law as an emblem of civilisation, as though morality could be codified by those who violate it with impunity.
Gaza makes this abundantly clear. The law of nations is the law of empire, applied rigorously against the weak, and selectively - if at all - against the strong.
The destruction of Gaza is not an aberration, but the logical expression of hierarchy. The same principles that once rationalised colonial conquest now sanctify Israel’s impunity.
Gaza has exposed that the colonial and racial political DNA of western leaders remains intact. The rhetoric of equality and universal rights dissolves when the victims are Palestinian.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West roared with moral outrage, imposed sanctions, and expelled Russia from cultural life. When Israel flattened Gaza, slaughtered thousands, and starved an entire people, those same governments equivocated and defended the indefensible.
Russia was punished for far less; Israel is rewarded for far more. The genocide documented by jurists and human rights bodies is treated as a matter of conflicting interpretations. Moral clarity, it seems, depends on the identity of the perpetrator.
Trading silence for protection
Gaza has also laid bare the true character of Arab regimes that posture as guardians of the faith. Many of these rulers were born of treachery, their thrones secured not by the will of their people, but by the designs of empire.
Installed and sustained by western patronage, they are relics of imperial architecture - animated not by justice, but by survival and wealth accumulation. Their complicity in Gaza’s destruction is not helplessness, but calculation.
They trade silence for protection, oil for indulgence, and their people’s dignity for the comfort of foreign approval. In their hands, sovereignty is an inheritance, not a responsibility.
Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war
Gaza reveals that the West’s alleged concern for democracy and human rights is a geopolitical stratagem, not a moral conviction. These ideals target foes like Iran and Afghanistan, but spare client autocracies such as Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan and Morocco, which are rewarded with aid and arms.
The West’s advocacy of democracy is thus a masquerade, invoked when it serves power and abandoned when it threatens it. Gaza has stripped away the pretence, exposing moral discourse as convenience, not creed.
Gaza has forced an unflinching question upon Muslim-majority nations: whether the colonial borders drawn for dynastic convenience and western profit should still command obedience.
The young, digitally native and morally restless, now see through the artifice. They no longer need permission from elites to discern right from wrong
The map of the Middle East was designed to divide and control. Many rulers were chosen to preserve that order, ensuring that subservience to Washington or London remains the price of survival. Independence, hollowed of moral conviction, is another form of servitude.
The silence of Muslim theologians has been equally revealing. Gaza has shown how moral cowardice can wear the robes of piety.
Far too many religious leaders who thunder against Western decadence fall mute when tyranny wears Arab robes. They dare not condemn the despots who consort with Israel, fearful of losing pilgrimage visas or offending Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Quick to denounce distant enemies, they are silent before the potentates who jail dissenters, stifle conscience, and align with Israel’s war machinery. In that selective morality lies not piety but complicity.
Religion, stripped of prophetic courage, becomes ceremony without conscience. The gleaming mosques and grand conferences of the Gulf are monuments to that corruption.
Even more disturbing is the spectacle of Muslims flocking to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to revel in the illusions of opulence. They marvel at towers of glass and fountains of excess, blind to the cruelty that funds them and fortifies the Zionist entity. Their devotion is not to faith or principle, but to a hollow modernity that mistakes spectacle for civilisation.
Gaza, in its suffering, has exposed this moral bankruptcy with pitiless clarity.
Grotesque inversion
At the same time, the guardians of free expression in the US, Britain, France and Germany have revealed how conditional that freedom truly is, as peaceful protests for Palestine have been met with batons, arrests and censorship.
Students in American and British universities are disciplined for moral dissent; British police disperse demonstrators under laws meant for public order, but applied to silence conscience; German authorities ban marches under the pretext of “security”. The latter’s suppression of speech against Israeli crimes is unprecedented, as though the German state believes Palestinians must pay the moral debt for Germany’s extermination of Jews during the Second World War.
The grotesque inversion is that, in seeking to atone for its past, Germany legitimises Israeli brutality, the same dehumanisation Germany once perpetrated. Gaza reveals how, when conscience collides with power, the fragility of democracy is laid bare.
Western elites insulated from their citizens speak almost unanimously for Israel, but not all share this blindness. Leaders in Spain, Ireland, Belgium and Norway act with moral clarity where others equivocate.
Across Europe and beyond, crowds defy official complicity, while in Britain and the US, younger generations reject the manufactured narrative. Gaza has shattered the silence and revived the moral instinct dulled by decades of propaganda.
The western media, the stenographer of power, has found its credibility in ruins. Its euphemisms for massacre, its deference to official talking points, and its reflex to humanise one side while anonymising the other have all been exposed.
Unfiltered and undeniable
At the same time, Gaza has revealed the liberation of truth through unmediated witness. Social media and independent reporting have undone the monopoly of narrative.
The images from Gaza, unfiltered and undeniable, have bypassed editorial gatekeepers tethered to economic and political interests. The young, digitally native and morally restless, now see through the artifice. They no longer need permission from elites to discern right from wrong.
Equally damning, Gaza shows that the foundational rules of international order have been suspended for Israel. Principles demanding equality for all citizens, and prohibiting apartheid, ethnic cleansing and demographic engineering, are set aside.
The right of refugees to return, a cornerstone of international law, is dismissed as inconvenient. States that proclaim allegiance to the International Criminal Court, having ratified its statute and pledged to enforce universal jurisdiction, fall silent when the accused are Israeli leaders - yet they are ever eager to support warrants against Africans or Russians when the opportunity arises.
For the powerful and their clients, law is not restraint, but privilege selectively bestowed.
From the ruins of Gaza emerges not only grief, but revelation. We have learned that the international order is largely an instrument of hierarchy, not justice. We have learned that the language of law is too often the dialect of domination, and that the Arab world remains hostage to its tyrants and their foreign patrons.
We have learned that Islamic authority without moral courage is an accomplice to oppression, and that the liberal democracies of the West are liberal only within the limits of their own interests.
Gaza has not created these truths; it has illuminated them. It has forced the world to confront what it preferred not to see: that beneath the banners of civilisation, the same ancient cruelties endure, cloaked in the diplomacy of the powerful.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
