Erasing Gaza: Genocide, Denial and “the Very Bedrock of Imperial Attitudes”

by Media Lens / June 9th, 2025

Noam Chomsky offered a rule of thumb for predicting the ‘mainstream’ response to crimes against humanity:

‘There is a way to calibrate reaction. If it’s a crime of somebody else, particularly an enemy, then we’re utterly outraged. If it’s our own crime, either comparable or worse, either it’s suppressed or denied. That works with almost 100 percent precision.’ (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.27)

Now is an excellent time to put Chomsky’s claim to the test.

A BBC headline over a photograph of an emaciated Palestinian baby read: ‘“Situation is dire” – BBC returns to Gaza baby left hungry by Israeli blockade’

‘Left hungry’? Was she peckish? Was her stomach rumbling? The headline led readers far from the reality of the cataclysm described by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on 12 May:

‘The entire 2.1 million population of Gaza is facing prolonged food shortages, with nearly half a million people in a catastrophic situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death.’

Another BBC headline read: ‘Red Cross says at least 21 killed and dozens shot in Gaza aid incident’

Given everything we have seen over the last 20 months, it was obvious that the mysterious ‘incident’ had been yet another Israeli massacre. Blame had indeed been pinned on ‘Israeli gunfire’ by Palestinian sources, the BBC noted, cautioning:

‘But the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said findings from an initial inquiry showed its forces had not fired at people while they were near or within the aid centre.’

Again, after 20 months, we know such Israeli denials are automatic, reflexive, signifying nothing. More deflection and denial followed from the BBC. We had to keep reading to the end of the article to find a comment that rang true:

‘Mohammed Ghareeb, a journalist in Rafah, told the BBC that Palestinians had gathered near the aid centre run by the GHF when Israeli tanks approached and opened fire on the crowd.

‘Mr Ghareeb said the crowd of Palestinians were near Al-Alam roundabout around 04:30 local time (02:30 BST), close to the aid centre run by GHF, shortly before Israeli tanks appeared and opened fire.’

A surreal piece in the Guardian by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett clearly meant well:

‘I have seen images on my phone screen these past months that will haunt me as long as I live. Dead, injured, starving children and babies. Children crying in pain and in fear for their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. A small boy shaking in terror from the trauma of an airstrike. Scenes of unspeakable horror and violence that have left me feeling sick.’

Such honest expressions of personal anguish are welcome, of course, but the fact is that the word ‘Israel’ appeared nowhere in Cosslett’s article. How is that possible? Of the mass slaughter, Cosslett asked: ‘What is it doing to us as a society?’ Her own failure to shame the Israeli genocidaires, or even to name them, gives an idea.

The bias is part of a consistent trend. The Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. BBC insiders have described how the corporation’s reporting is being ‘silently shaped by even the possibility of anger from certain groups, foreign governments’.

The bias is not, of course, limited to Gaza. The BBC’s Diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams reported a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian bomber base, noting the ‘sheer audacity’ and ‘ingenuity’ of an attack that was ‘at the very least, a spectacular propaganda coup’.

Imagine the grisly fate that would await a BBC journalist who described an attack on the West in similar terms.

The exalted BBC Verify, no less, began a report on the same ‘daring’ attack: ‘It was an attack of astonishing ingenuity – unprecedented, broad, and 18 months in the making.’

Now imagine a BBC report lauding the ‘astonishing ingenuity’ of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US.

In similar vein, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s veteran International Editor, described Israel’s pager attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria in September 2024 as ‘a tactical victory to Israel’ and ‘the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller’. Again, imagine Bowen describing a Russian attack on Ukraine as a ‘spectacular coup’ worthy of a thriller.

On X, the former Labour Party, now independent, MP Zarah Sultana commented over a harrowing image taken from viral footage showing a Palestinian toddler trying to escape from a fiercely burning building:

‘This photo should be on the front page of every major British newspaper.

‘But it won’t be — because, like the political class, they’re complicit.

‘It’s their genocide too.’

‘Very Modest Opposition’ From ‘The Morally Enlightened’

People utterly aghast at the political and media apologetics for, indifference to and complicity in the Gaza genocide – that is, people who missed the merciless devastation, for example, of Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – might like to focus on an idea as unthinkable as it is undeniable. In their classic book, The Politics of Genocide, the late Edward S. Herman and David Peterson commented:

‘The conquest of the Western Hemisphere and the wiping-out of its indigenous peoples were carried out over many decades, with very modest opposition from within the morally enlightened Christian world. The African slave trade resulted in millions of deaths in the initial capture and transatlantic crossing, with a cruel degradation for the survivors.’ (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p.22, our emphasis)

If the ‘very modest opposition’ was ugly, consider the underlying worldview:

‘The steady massacres and subjugation of black Africans within Africa itself rested on “an unquestioning belief in the innate superiority of the white race, … the very bedrock of imperial attitudes,” essential to making the business of mass slaughter “morally acceptable,” John Ellis writes. “At best, the Europeans regarded those they slaughtered with little more than amused contempt.”’ (p.22)

Has anything changed? You may be different, we may be different, the journalists cited above may be different, but as a society, as a collective, ‘amused contempt’ is an entrenched part of ‘our’ response to the fate of ‘our’ victims.

The brutality is locked in by an additional layer of self-deception. A key requirement of the human ego’s need to feel ‘superior’ is the need to feel morally superior. Thus, ‘our’ military ‘superiority’ is typically viewed as a function of ‘our’ moral ‘superiority’ – ‘we’ are more ‘organised’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘civilised’, and therefore more powerful. But a problem arises: how, as morally ‘superior’ beings, are ‘we’ to justify ‘our’ mass killing of other human beings for power, profit and land? How to reconcile such an obvious contradiction? Herman and Peterson explained:

‘This dynamic has always been accompanied by a process of projection, whereby the victims of slaughter and dispossession are depicted as “merciless Indian savages” (the Declaration of Independence) by the racist savages whose superior weapons, greed, and ruthlessness gave them the ability to conquer, destroy, and exterminate.’ (p.22)

‘They’ are ‘merciless’, ‘they’ are savages’; we are ‘God-fearing’, ‘good’ people. The projection is so extreme, that, with zero self-awareness, ‘we’ can damn ‘them’ for committing exactly the crimes ‘we’ are committing on a far greater scale.

Thus, on 9 October 2023, Yoav Gallant, then Israeli Defence Minister, announced that he had ‘ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.’

Barbaric inhumanity, one might think. And yet, this was the rationale:

‘We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.’

In his book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, published in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, wrote:

‘In 1944 the RAF set out to bomb Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. The bombers, however, missed and instead hit a hospital, killing scores of children. This was a tragic accident of war. But in no sense can it be called terrorism. What distinguishes terrorism is the willful and calculated choice of innocents as targets. When terrorists machine-gun a passenger waiting area or set off bombs in a crowded shopping center, their victims are not accidents of war but the very objects of the terrorists’ assault.’ (Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, p.9, our emphasis)

Perhaps a plaque bearing these sage words can be sited atop one of the piles of rubble where Gaza’s hospitals once stood. Last month, WHO reported 697 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since October 2023. As a result, at least 94% of all hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. In March 2025, a United Nations investigation concluded that Israel had committed ‘genocidal acts’ in Gaza by systematically destroying its reproductive healthcare facilities.

Netanyahu has himself denounced the Palestinians as ‘Amalek’ – a reference to a well-known biblical story in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people from the face of the earth: men, women, children – everyone.

Denying Genocide Denial

Another useful way to test Chomsky’s assertion that ‘our’ crimes will be ‘suppressed or denied’ is to check the willingness of ‘mainstream’ media to mention the problem of ‘genocide denial’ in relation to Gaza.

As veteran Media Lens readers will know, the term is routinely deployed with great relish by critics of dissidents challenging the West’s enthusiasm for Perpetual War. In 2011, the Guardian’s George Monbiot devoted an entire column to naming and shaming a ‘malign intellectual subculture that seeks to excuse savagery by denying the facts’. ‘The facts’ being ‘the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda.’ Monbiot accused Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger, and Media Lens of being political commentators who ‘take the unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of the western powers’.

One can easily imagine a parallel universe in which journalists are having a field day denouncing the endless examples of ‘mainstream’ reporters and commentators belittling, denying or apologising for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Last month, the Telegraph published a remarkable piece by Colonel Richard Kemp asserting that the Israeli army ‘has been waging this hugely complex war for 19 months with a combination of fighting prowess and humanitarian restraint that no other army could match’.

Israel, it seems, has ‘been so determined to avoid killing the hostages and where possible to avoid harm to civilians in line with their scrupulously observed obligations under International Humanitarian Law’.

We can assess the evidence for this ‘scrupulously observed’ restraint in recently updated Google ‘before and after’ images of Gaza, revealing Israel’s erasure, not just of Gazan towns, but of its agriculture. Last month, the UN reported that fully 95 per cent of Gaza’s agricultural land has been rendered unusable by Israeli attacks, with 80 per cent of crop land damaged. According to the report, only 4.6 per cent of it can be cultivated, while 71.2 per cent of Gaza’s greenhouses and 82.8 per cent of its agricultural wells have been destroyed by Israeli attacks.

Using the ProQuest media database, we searched UK national newspapers for mentions of the term ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide denial’ over the last twelve months. We found not a single mention.

No surprise, given that, as Chomsky noted, ‘our’ crimes are systematically ‘suppressed or denied’. Why would the press expose their own genocide denials?

There is another possibility, of course. Could the lack of usage instead be explained by the fact that what is happening in Gaza is not, in fact, a genocide? After all, doesn’t genocide mean killing, or trying to kill, all the people in a given group?

Answers were supplied in a report published by Amnesty International last December, ‘Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’. The report concluded:

‘Amnesty International has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel committed, between 7 October 2023 and July 2024, prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. Amnesty International has also concluded that these acts were committed with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, who form a substantial part of the Palestinian population, which constitutes a group protected under the Genocide Convention.

‘Accordingly, Amnesty International concludes that following 7 October 2023, Israel committed and is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.’

Amnesty explained the reasoning:

‘Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, five specific acts constitute the underlying criminal conduct of the crime of genocide, including: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Each of these acts must be committed with a general intent to commit the underlying act. However, to constitute the crime of genocide, these acts must also be committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such…” This specific intent is what distinguishes genocide from other crimes under international law.’ (Our emphasis)

The report added a key clarification:

‘Importantly, the perpetrator does not need to succeed in destroying the targeted group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to be established. International jurisprudence recognizes that “the term ‘in whole or in part’ refers to the intent, as opposed to the actual destruction”. Equally important, finding or inferring specific intent does not require finding a single or sole intent. A state’s actions can serve the dual goal of achieving a military result and destroying a group as such. Genocide can also be the means for achieving a military result. In other words, a finding of genocide may be drawn when the state intends to pursue the destruction of a protected group in order to achieve a certain military result, as a means to an end, or until it has achieved it.’ (Our emphasis)

As Amnesty noted, other organisations have arrived at similar conclusions:

‘In the context of the proceedings it initiated against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)… South Africa also provided its own legal analysis of Israel’s actions in Gaza, determining that they constitute genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Other states have since made public their own legal determination of genocide as part of their applications to the ICJ to intervene in the case. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967 reached similar conclusions in her reports in 2024. Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food concluded that Israel “has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people which evidences genocide and extermination”.’

Israel’s crimes clearly do qualify as a genocide. The refusal of the press to even discuss the possibility of genocide denial in relation to this assault points to their own complicity and culpability.

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website

Unlocking the timecode of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Using artificial intelligence and radiocarbon dating to date ancient manuscripts

News Release 4-Jun-2025

University of Groningen

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For this study, writing styles in digitized manuscripts were analyzed using BiNet, a previously developed deep neural network for detection of handwritten ink-trace patterns. By combining writing styles with carbon-14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the date-prediction model Enoch is able to produce an accurate date for the manuscript.

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Credit: Maruf Dhali, University of Groningen

Since their discovery, the historically and biblically hugely important Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of Jewish and Christian origins. However, while the general date of the scrolls is from the third century BCE until the second century CE, individual manuscripts thus far could not be securely dated. Now, by combining radiocarbon dating, palaeography, and artificial intelligence, an international team of researchers led by the University of Groningen has developed a date-prediction model, called Enoch, that provides much more accurate date estimates for individual manuscripts on empirical grounds. Using this model, the researchers demonstrate that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought. And for the first time, they establish that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed biblical authors. They presented their results in the journal PLOS One on 4 June.

Until now, the dating of individual manuscripts was mostly based on palaeography–the study of ancient handwriting–alone. However, the traditional palaeographic model has no solid empirical foundation. For most Dead Sea Scrolls, a calendar date is not known, and there are no other date-bearing manuscripts from the time period available for palaeographic comparison. Between the few date-bearing manuscripts in Aramaic/Hebrew from the fifth–fourth centuries BCE and the late first and early second century CE a gap is present that prevents accurate dating of the more than one thousand scrolls and fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls collection.

Digitized manuscripts

This gap is now closed by researchers in the ERC project The Hands That Wrote the Bible by combining radiocarbon dates from 24 scrolls samples, in combination with palaeographic analysis using a machine-learning-based model applying a Bayesian ridge regression method. The new radiocarbon dates are reliable, empirical time markers that bridge the palaeographic gap between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE. They provide an objective date for the writing styles in the tested manuscripts.

Based on this information, the researchers trained the date-prediction model named Enoch. They used a previously in-house developed deep neural network for detection of handwritten ink-trace patterns, BiNet, in digitized manuscripts. This allows for a subsequent geometric shape analysis at the microlevel of the ink trace, such as curvature (called textural), as well as at the level of character shapes (called allographic). It provides a quantitative and empirical basis for the style analysis of handwriting which traditional palaeography cannot deliver. Cross-validation then showed that Enoch can predict radiocarbon-based dates from style with an uncertainty of some 30 years (plus and minus). This is even more precise than direct radiocarbon dating results in the period range of 300–50 BCE.

The first machine-learning-based model

Now that Enoch is ready for use, it becomes possible to date the roughly one thousand Dead Sea manuscripts from this time period. The researchers took a first step in this by feeding Enoch the binarized images of 135 scrolls and having the date predictions evaluated by palaeographers. With Enoch, researchers have a powerful new tool that they can use to support, refine, or modify their own subjective estimates for specific manuscripts, often to an accuracy of only 50 years for manuscripts over 2,000 years old.

Enoch is the first complete machine-learning-based model that employs raw image inputs to deliver probabilistic date predictions for handwritten manuscripts, while ensuring transparency and interpretability through its explainable design. The combination of empirical evidence (radiocarbon from physics and character-shape-based analyses from geometry) brings a degree of quantified objectivity to palaeography never before achieved in the field. And the methods underpinning Enoch can be used for date prediction in other partially-dated manuscript collections.

New chronology

First results from Enoch’s date predictions, presented in the PLOS One paper, demonstrate that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought. This also changes how researchers should interpret the development of two ancient Jewish script styles which are called ‘Hasmonaean’ and ‘Herodian’. Specifically, manuscripts in Hasmonaean-type script can be older than the current estimate of ca. 150–50 BCE. And the Herodian-type script emerged earlier than previously thought, suggesting that these scripts existed next to each other since the late second century BCE instead of the mid-first century BCE which is the prevailing view.

This new chronology of the scrolls significantly impacts our understanding of political and intellectual developments in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods (late fourth century BCE until second century CE). It allows for new insights to be developed about literacy in ancient Judaea in relation to historical, political, and cultural developments such as urbanization, the rise of the Hasmonaean dynasty, and the rise and development of religious groups such as those behind the Dead Sea Scrolls and the early Christians.

Anonymous authors

Furthermore, this study establishes 4QDanielc (4Q114) and 4QQoheleta (4Q109) to be the first known fragments of a biblical book from the time of their presumed authors. We do not know who exactly finished the Book of Daniel but the common assumption is that this author did that during the early 160s BCE. Likewise, for Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) scholars assume that an anonymous author from the Hellenistic period (third century BCE) was behind this biblical book, instead of the view of tradition that it was King Solomon from the tenth century BCE. Our novel radiocarbon dating for 4Q114 and the Enoch date prediction for 4Q109 place these manuscripts in the same time as these anonymous authors from respectively the second and third centuries BCE. Thus, these results have now created the opportunity to study tangible evidence of hands that wrote the Bible.

Reference: Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, Lambert Schomaker, Johannes van der Plicht, Kaare Lund Rasmussen, Jacopo La Nasa, Ilaria Degano, Maria Perla Colombini, Eibert Tigchelaar, Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis. PLOS One, 4 June 2025.

This photo shows prof. Mladen Popovic, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism and Director of the Qumran Institute (front) and his colleauge Dr. Maruf Dhali, Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence, working with Enoch to date a manuscript from the Dead Sea scrolls.

This is a still from a short video on the project, which is linked from the PLOS One paper.

Credit

University of Groningen

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Journal

PLOS One

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0323185 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis

Article Publication Date

4-Jun-2025

AI analysis of ancient handwriting provides new age estimates for Dead Sea Scrolls

Program trained on radiocarbon dating suggests some Dead Sea Scrolls might be older than previously thought

PLOS

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Enoch’s date prediction estimate for 4Q319. (a) from full spectrum color image to binarized image to 14C plot for 4Q259 that went into the training of Enoch. (b), from full spectrum color image to binarized image to Enoch’s date prediction plot for 4Q319 (see also illustration 9 in S5 Appendix). Red bars represent the probability of each date bin. The blue curve shows the smoothed distribution. Grey spikes indicate the local uncertainty of the estimate.

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Credit: Popović et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

An AI program trained to study the handwriting styles of centuries-old manuscripts from the Middle East suggests that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls might be older than previously thought, according to a study published June 4, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Mladen Popović from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and colleagues. This method could give researchers a new way to place undated manuscripts into the timeline of ancient history.

While some ancient manuscripts have dates written on them, giving archaeologists a precise understanding of when they were created, many manuscripts have no date information. By studying the evolution of handwriting styles over time, researchers can sometimes determine the approximate age of some undated manuscripts by evaluating their handwriting. But to use this method, researchers need enough manuscripts with accurate dates from that period of history to create a reliable timeline of handwriting styles.

For this new paper, researchers evaluated the age of historic manuscripts from various sites in modern-day Israel and the West Bank through radiocarbon dating, and then used machine learning to study the handwriting styles of each document. By pairing those two datasets together, the team could create an AI program — named Enoch, after the biblical figure — that could use the handwriting style of other manuscripts from the region to objectively determine an approximate age range.

To test the program, ancient handwriting experts evaluated Enoch’s age estimates for 135 of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The experts determined that approximately 79% of the AI’s estimates were “realistic,” with the remaining 21% determined to be either too old, too young, or indecisive.

Enoch has already helped the research team discover new things about these ancient manuscripts. For example, both Enoch and radiocarbon dating methods estimated older ages for many of the Dead Sea Scrolls than did traditional handwriting analysis. Although the authors note that more data and further research could help understand the timeline, their work provides new insights into when these documents might have been created.

The authors add: “With the Enoch tool we have opened a new door into the ancient world, like a time machine, that allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible, especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors.”

“It is very exciting to set a significant step into solving the dating problem of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also creating a new tool that could be used to study other partially dated manuscript collections from history. This would not have been possible without the collaboration between so many different scientific disciplines, a real team effort!"

 

 

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/44KpPfy

Citation: Popović M, Dhali MA, Schomaker L, van der Plicht J, Lund Rasmussen K, La Nasa J, et al. (2025) Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis. PLoS One 20(6): e0323185. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0323185

Author countries: The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Belgium

Funding: This project has received funding by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 640497 (HandsandBible). The funding was received by M. Popović. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Journal

PLOS One

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0323185 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis

Article Publication Date

4-Jun-2025

When Will Western Support for Israeli Genocide Finally Crack?


The U.S., U.K., Canadian, and other governments remain deeply complicit in Israel's atrocities and violations of international law. But the rhetoric is shifting and protest movement is growing louder.


The United States again vetoes a U.N. Security Council resolution calling an 'immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire' between Israel and Hamas on June 04, 2025, in New York City, United States.
(Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Medea Benjamin

Nicolas J.S. Davies

Jun 05, 2025

Common Dreams


After 20 months of horror in Gaza, political rhetoric in Western countries is finally starting to shift—but will words translate into action? And what exactly can other countries do when the United States still shields Israel from efforts to enforce international law, as it did at the UN Security Council on June 5th?

On May 30th, Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of committing a war crime by using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. In a searing interview with the BBC, Fletcher explained how Israel’s policy of forced starvation fits into its larger strategy of ethnic cleansing.

“We’re seeing food set on the borders and not being allowed in, when there is a population on the other side of the border that is starving,” Fletcher said. “And we’re hearing Israeli ministers say that is to put pressure on the population of Gaza.”

If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.

He was referring to statements like the one from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who openly admitted that the starvation policy is meant to leave Palestinians “totally despairing, understanding that there’s no hope and nothing to look for," so that they will submit to ethnic cleansing from Gaza and a “new life in other places.”

Fletcher called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop this campaign of forced displacement, and insisted, “we would expect governments all over the world to stand for international humanitarian law. The international community is very, very clear on that.”

Palestinians might wish that were true. If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.

Some Western governments have finally started using stronger language to condemn Israel’s actions. But the question is: Will they act? Or is this just more political theater to appease public outrage while the machinery of destruction grinds on?

This moment should force a reckoning: How is it possible that the U.S. and Israel can perpetrate such crimes with impunity? What would it take for U.S. allies to ignore pressure from Washington and enforce international law?

If impoverished, war-ravaged Yemen can single-handedly deny Israel access to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and drive the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy, more powerful countries can surely isolate Israel diplomatically and economically, protect the Palestinians and end the genocide. But they haven’t even tried.

Some are now making tentative moves. On May 19th, the U.K., France, and Canada jointly condemned Israel’s actions as “intolerable,” “unacceptable,” “abhorrent,” “wholly disproportionate,” and “egregious.” The U.K. suspended trade talks with Israel, and they promised “further concrete actions,” including targeted sanctions, if Israel does not end its offensive in Gaza and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.

The three countries publicly committed to the Arab Plan for the reconstruction of Gaza, and to building an international consensus for it at the UN’s High-Level Two-State Solution Conference in New York on June 17th-20th, which is to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.

They also committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 147 already recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation, including ten more since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza. President Emmanuel Macron, under pressure from the leftist La France Insoumise party, says France may officially recognize Palestine at the UN conference in June.

Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, claimed during his election campaign that Canada already had an arms embargo against Israel, but was swiftly challenged on that. Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses, but it’s still supplying parts for Israel’s 39 F-35s, and for 36 more that Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin.

A General Dynamics factory in Quebec is the sole supplier of artillery propellant for deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza, and it took an emergency campaign by human rights groups in August 2024 to force Canada to scrap a new contract for that same factory to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.

The U.K. is just as compromised. The new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has. In September, it suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, mostly for parts used in warplanes, helicopters, drones, and targeting. But, like Canada, the U.K. still supplies many other parts that end up in Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza.

Declassified UK published a report on the F-35 program that revealed how it compromises the sovereignty of partner countries. While the U.K. produces 15% of the parts that go into every F-35, the U.S. military takes immediate ownership of the British-made parts, stores them on British air force bases, and then orders the U.K. to ship them to Texas for use in new planes or to Israel and other countries as spare parts for planes already in use.

Shipping these planes and parts to Israel is in clear violation of U.S., U.K. and other countries’ arms export laws. British campaigners argue that if the U.K. is serious about halting genocide, it must stop all shipments of F-35 parts sent to Israel–directly or indirectly. With huge marches in London drawing hundreds of thousands of people, and protests on June 17th at three factories that make F-35 parts, activists will keep applying more pressure until they result in the “concrete actions” the British government has promised.

Denmark is facing a similar conflict. Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Aid, and Al-Haq are in court suing the Danish government and the nation's largest weapons company, Terma, to stop them from sending Israel critical bomb release mechanisms and other F-35 parts.

These disputes over Canadian artillery propellant, Danish bomb-release mechanisms, and the multinational nature of the F-35 program highlight how any country that provides even small but critical parts or materials for deadly weapons systems must ensure they are not used to commit war crimes.

In turn, all steps to cut off Israel’s weapons supplies can help to save Palestinian lives, and the full arms embargo that the UN General Assembly voted for in September 2024 can be instrumental in ending the genocide if more countries will join it. As Sam Perlo-Freeman of Campaign Against the Arms Trade said of the U.K.’s legal obligation to stop shipping F-35 parts,
“These spare parts are essential to keep Israel’s F-35s flying, and therefore stopping them will reduce the number of bombings and killings of civilians Israel can commit. It is as simple as that.”

Germany was responsible for 30% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, largely through two large warship deals. Four German-built Saar 6 corvettes, Israel’s largest warships, are already bombarding Gaza, while ThyssenKrupp is building three new submarines for Israel in Kiel.

But no country has provided a greater share of the tools of genocide in Gaza than the United States, including nearly all the warplanes, helicopters, bombs, and air-to-ground missiles that are destroying Gaza and killing Palestinians. The U.S. government has a legal responsibility to stop sending all these weapons, which Israel uses mainly to commit industrial-scale war crimes, up to and including genocide, against the people of Palestine, as well as to attack its other neighbors.

Trump’s military and political support for Israel’s genocide stands in stark contradiction to the image he promotes of himself as a peacemaker—and which his most loyal followers believe in.

Yet there are signs that Trump is beginning to assert some independence from Netanyahu and from the war hawks in his own party and inner circle. He refused to visit Israel on his recent Middle East tour, he’s negotiating with Iran despite Israeli opposition, and he removed Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor for engaging in unauthorized warmongering against Iran with Netanyahu. His decisions to end the Yemen bombing campaign and lift sanctions on Syria suggest an unpredictable but real departure from the neocon playbook, as do his negotiations with Russia and Iran.

Has Netanyahu finally overplayed his hand? His campaign of ethnic cleansing, territorial expansion in pursuit of a biblical “Greater Israel,” the deliberate starvation of Gaza, and his efforts to entangle the U.S. in a war with Iran have pushed Israel’s longtime allies to the edge. The emerging rift between Trump and Netanyahu could mark the beginning of the end of the decades-long blanket of impunity the U.S. has wrapped around Israel. It could also give other governments the political space to respond to Israeli war crimes without fear of U.S. retaliation.

The huge and consistent protests throughout Europe are putting pressure on Western governments to take action. A new survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that very few Europeans—between 6% and 16% in each country—find Israel’s assault on Gaza proportionate or justified.

For now, however, the Western governments remain deeply complicit in Israel’s atrocities and violations of international law. The rhetoric is shifting—but history will judge this moment not by what governments say, but by what they do.


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Medea Benjamin
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas J.S. Davies, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022. Other books include, "Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran" (2018); "Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection" (2016); "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control" (2013); "Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart" (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) "Stop the Next War Now" (2005).
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Nicolas J.S. Davies
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist and a researcher with CODEPINK. He is the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
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