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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.
Jun 05, 2025
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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Invading Greenland Won’t Protect Us From the Climate Crisis
It is of course possible that further melting will lead to increased tensions in which Arctic territory becomes an especially valued possession. But other threats are far more urgent, including the one causing the melting.
May 24, 2025
Greenland does not, on the face of it, seem to be the kind of place that a superpower like the United States would regard as a vital component of its security. With fewer than 60,000 inhabitants in an area roughly one-quarter the size of the contiguous United States, it is the least densely populated nation on Earth. Its only industries of note are fishing and, to some extent, tourism, and its northernmost point is as close to the North Pole as Los Angeles is to Denver.
Yet President Donald Trump insists the United States needs Greenland “very badly,” to the extent that he won’t “rule out” using force to attain it.
Such covetousness almost certainly owes at least something to the prospect of access to the mineral resources, including lithium, that Greenland is believed to harbor. But Trump himself has suggested a different motivation, musing in an interview about “Russian boats and… Chinese boats, gunships all over the place… going up and down the coast of Greenland.”
A world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.
Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland is a confounding solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist.
Moscow and Beijing undeniably have an increasing number of vessels operating year-round in Arctic waters. In Russia’s case, that’s hardly surprising: Russia accounts for 53% of the region’s coastline. But its interests, and indeed those of China’s, have little to do with Greenland and a lot to do with its own Arctic waters, specifically the seaway along its north coast that Russia refers to as the Northern Sea Route (NSR). As sea ice decreases in thickness and extent as a result of climate change, the NSR is slowly opening up. As a result, Moscow sees this passageway as a potential source of riches and national pride and even a way to reorder international trade.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that the NSR will ultimately “replace the Suez Canal” as the favored transit route between Atlantic and Pacific. It is presently a long way short of that: Just under 40 million tons of goods shipped through the NSR in 2024, almost exclusively on Russian and Chinese vessels, compared to 525 million tons that transited Suez. But it is far more than the 7 million tons that traveled the passage in 1987.
The Northwest Passage—the frequently narrow, shallow, and twisting pathway through the islands of Canada’s High Arctic—tells a similar story on a smaller scale. From the 16th through the 19th centuries, multiple expeditions perished in the ice of the Northwest Passage; after it was finally navigated for the first time in 1906, there were just 67 further transits over the course of the 20th century. Thanks to melting sea ice, there were 41 transits of the Northwest Passage in 2023 alone.
While both the Northwest Passage and NSR are more navigable than in the past, both are still challenging to sail through during all but the very warmest weeks of the year. Even as the Arctic heats up four times faster than the rest of the globe, its seas are unlikely to be consistently ice-free during summer before mid-century at the earliest. The anticipation of such an eventuality, however, has led to a jockeying for position and influence, and a rumbling discord among Arctic powers.
Canada and Russia regard the Northwest Passage and NSR respectively as their national waters, and they intend to dictate who can use them and when. Moscow requires any vessel that wants to transit the NSR to apply for permission up to four months in advance and mandates icebreaker escorts for most ships—often at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.
The United States chafes at such restrictions, arguing that both waterways are international straits, open to vessels from all nations.
“We’re concerned about Russia’s claims to the international waters of the Northern Sea Route,” said then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019, adding with a swipe at Canada that “we recognize Russia is not the only nation making illegitimate claims.”
Interestingly, China is broadly in accord with the U.S. position; but, as is its wont, the country is playing the long game. Notwithstanding Trump’s talk of Chinese gunships off Greenland, Beijing’s interest in the Arctic thus far appears to be entirely mercantilist. Particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China is the only country whose commercial vessels transit the NSR with some regularity. In 2012 the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long even explored the feasibility of crossing from Atlantic to Pacific across the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole.
It is of course possible that further melting will lead to increased tensions in which Arctic territory becomes an especially valued possession. But other threats are far more urgent. While the rest of the world is not heating up as rapidly as the Arctic, it is still warming. And a world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.
It is, to put it mildly, unfortunate that Donald Trump continues to insist that climate change is a “hoax.” Because reducing emissions rapidly is a far better way to protect Americans than idle threats to invade an ice-covered island.
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Outrage After Israeli Occupation Forces Shoot Live Rounds at Foreign Diplomats in West Bank
Among those shot at were representatives of three nations that threatened "concrete actions" if Israel doesn't end its assault and siege on Gaza and others that support a genocide case against the country.
May 21, 2025
Israeli occupation forces fired what they called "warning shots" at a large delegation of international diplomats visiting the besieged Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on Wednesday, an incident many critics said was an attempt to intimidate countries that just two days earlier issued an ultimatum to stop annihilating Gaza and others that have joined a genocide case against Israel.
Palestinian officials were briefing a group of more than 20 diplomats about the crisis in the illegally occupied West Bank—where Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians including hundreds of children since October 2023 while pushing ahead with massive land theft and colonization—when they came under fire.
According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the delegation "deviated" from the route approved by Israeli occupation authorities "and entered an area where they were not authorized to be," prompting Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers to fire "warning shots to distance them away."
"The IDF regrets the inconvenience caused," the ministry added.
Israeli soldiers intentionally fired at a delegation of about 30 Arab & EU diplomats, ambassadors and consuls, visiting Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank. Israel claims "it was an accident" and that they fired "warning shots" because they "felt in danger". Israel was trying to intimidate them.
[image or embed]
— Anonymous ( @youranoncentral.bsky.social) May 21, 2025 at 6:06 AM
Israeli media reported IDF troops fired shots in the air. However, video footage of the incident appears to show soldiers aiming their guns and firing straight ahead in the direction of the diplomats as they scrambled for cover. Israeli officials have often been caught lying about the actions of IDF troops in Palestine.
The delegation included diplomats from the European Union and countries including Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, France, India, Japan, Jordan, Lithuania, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
On Monday, three of those countries—France, the United Kingdom, and Canada—issued a rare joint statement condemning Operation Gideon's Chariots, the ongoing Israeli campaign to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population.
On Tuesday, the U.K. announced it is suspending negotiations with Israel on a free trade agreement, explaining that "it is not possible to advance discussions on a new, upgraded FTA" with a government "that is pursuing egregious policies in the West Bank and Gaza."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza including extermination and forced starvation.
The U.K. additionally sanctioned three far-right Israeli extremists, including settler leader Daniella Weiss, as well as three illegal settlement outposts and two groups "that have supported, incited, and promoted violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank."
Also on Tuesday, European Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas—who is the E.U.'s foreign policy chief—said the 27-nation bloc would review its political and economic agreement with Israel in light of the "catastrophic" situation in Gaza.
Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, and Turkey have either joined or expressed support for the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice—which last year found that Israel's 58-year occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must be ended as soon as possible.
Israel's 592-day assault and siege on Gaza has left more than 189,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and over 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned what it called Wednesday's "heinous crime" against the diplomats.
"The delegation was undertaking an official mission to observe and assess the humanitarian situation and document the ongoing violations perpetrated by the occupying forces against the Palestinian people," the ministry said. "This deliberate and unlawful act constitutes a blatant and grave breach of international law and of the fundamental principles of diplomatic relations as enshrined in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations."
Kallas said Wednesday that "any threats on diplomats' lives are unacceptable."
"Israel is also a signatory to the Vienna Convention, I mean the obligation to guarantee the security of all foreign diplomats," Kallas noted. "We definitely call on Israel to investigate this incident and also hold accountable [those] who are responsible for this."
The governments of other countries whose diplomats were targeted on Wednesday condemned the incident, with some, including France and Italy, summoning their Israeli ambassadors.
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