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?

Justifying complicity

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 not throw us under the bus entirely. 

For long, Gaza resurfaced as headlines were when Hamas fired rockets. Israel’s continued occupation and abuse of Palestinians – within Gaza or in the occupied West Bank – did not even make footnotes in the Western media.

For months after October 7, Western leaders brushed off Israel’s declared genocidal intent as “emotional” or “hyperbolic” speech. “Israeli society is in a state of trauma and shock” was one of the first sentences we kept hearing over and over in those meetings.

But “what about our trauma?” Palestinians would ask. 

Even before October 7, over 90 percent of Gaza’s children had PTSD, while the majority of the population suffered from depression. Most Palestinians have also lived through three wars, ten military assaults, and two ground invasions, yet you don’t see us making genocidal statements.

Even before October 7, the years 2022 and 2023 were the bloodiest in the occupied West Bank on record, but in the eyes of the “international community”, Palestinians have no right to retaliate, seek revenge, or even resent Israel.

Another excuse the West maintained was that if they criticise Israel publicly, it would sabotage the ceasefire and prisoner swap negotiations because Hamas would “harden its positions” and become “uncompromising”. 

No matter how many Israeli reports exposed how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the one scuttling ceasefire efforts for months, and how flexible Hamas was, this same talking point is still being repeated even today.

Why the sudden awakening?

In late May, Palestinians in Gaza felt hopeful by a sudden slew of strong-worded European statements calling out Israel’s starvation policy. Even Germany – one of Tel Aviv’s strongest allies – broke its silence and said Israel’s war “can no longer be justified”. 

Then Israel attacked Iran, and the world’s focus shifted to the missile and drone barrage between the two countries. European leaders rushed to praise Tel Aviv’s assault on Tehran, hailing it as a step towards stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

Beneath this cheerleading of Israel’s war on Iran lurked a desire to distract the world from Israel’s genocidal war and to invisibilise Gaza. 

As soon as Israel started dropping bombs and missiles on Iran, the genocide was immediately taken off the agenda. My inbox was flooded with cancellation notices for anything related to Palestine – meetings, workshops, seminars, etc. 

There was a clear, desperate eagerness to take the spotlight away from Gaza.

In late July, the strongly worded statements against Israel returned. So did some real action, like Germany stopping military supplies to Tel Aviv.

In both instances of Europe’s concern for Gaza, there was no sudden moral awakening or late realisation of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. 

This momentum shift was obviously the result of three things.

First, Western leaders expected coverage of and solidarity with Gaza to fade out eventually. But Israel’s overreach and escalation of atrocities did the opposite; it kept shifting public opinion across the world exponentially.

Demonstrations in countries like the Netherlands, Australia, and the UK attracted more and more protesters. 

The word genocide made it into the mainstream media despite an unprecedented, concerted campaign in those outlets of manufacturing consent for genocide while covering it up. 

The Financial Times shamed “the West’s shameful silence on Gaza”; Piers Morgan changed his mind and said “I resist no more” that Israel is committing genocide; and The New York Times published an Israeli scholar making the case why Israel’s war on Gaza constituted genocide.

Second was Israeli leaders becoming unhinged by an emboldened sense of invincibility and impunity following Trump’s victory and the Western world’s complicity and silence. 

Western leaders have long brushed off and trivialised Israeli genocidal incitement, such as “human animals” or “Amalek,” and dismissed those statements as mere “rage in reaction to October 7”. 

But after 22 months of those statements on repeat and after the genocidal incitement became more specific – like blocking humanitarian aid or “destroying everything that remains of Gaza” – it became more difficult to disregard those admissions of clear war crimes as mere “inflammatory rhetoric”.

Third, Western leaders habitually dismissed pictures of murdered children as “collateral damage” or “tragic accidents”. 

But gut-wrenching photos of emaciated children starved to death could no longer be blamed on Hamas, especially when Israel kept taking pride in starving Gaza’s population. 

Or when every UN agency and hundreds of organisations concluded that the forced famine was pushing hundreds of thousands of people towards certain death.

Meaningless PR manoeuvres

Even in the face of indisputable crimes against humanity like starvation or mass extermination, most Western leaders prefer to use the passive voice “Gazans are starving/dying” instead of “Israel is starving/killing Gazans.” 

This was a deliberate choice of words because naming Israel as the perpetrator carries a legal responsibility on those governments to impose sanctions, suspend arms sales, and pressure Israel to stop those atrocities. 

Similarly, actions taken by those states are carefully choreographed, limited in scope and hollow in consequence. In May, when the EU announced a review of the human rights clause of its association agreement with Israel, it made headlines and sparked some optimism. 

But this review was entirely needless. It was the third review in 12 months, after two earlier ones incriminated Israel. 

Germany’s recent announcement of suspending some arms to Israel that could be used in Gaza was equally hollow. Canada made a similar declaration in 2024, only to learn last July that weapons are still flowing from Ottawa to Tel-Aviv despite the embargo.

The pattern here is that Western governments are still trying to buy time through rhetorical statements and PR stunts to save face and register formal opposition to Israel’s genocide, while doing nothing serious to stop it and even continuing to enable it. 

Those gestures are not bold ruptures with the status quo but deft manoeuvres to preserve it. Western governments continue to treat Palestinian suffering as a crisis to manage, not a moral emergency to end.