By Shaun Narine
The western world’s feeble response to Israel’s attack on Gaza has severely damaged the West’s already tenuous moral credibility in the Global South and undermined the foundations of the human rights regime and international law developed after the Second World War.
The West claims it champions a liberal rules-based international order and human rights on the global stage. This rhetoric now appears completely disingenuous to most of the Global South.
The West’s inability to rally the world against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reflects the Global South’s rejection of what it views as western hypocrisy. Few states supported Russia, but fewer accepted the West’s claim that punishing Russia was a “moral imperative” when the western commitment to morality is so selective.
This has been particularly exemplified by the illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003 and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
Russia condemned, Israel supported
The West’s position on Gaza has done even more consequential damage to the notion of western global “leadership.” Even as Russia escalates its violence against civilians and infrastructure in Ukraine, most Global South states find the American condemnation of Russia grotesquely hypocritical as the United States supports Israel’s war in Gaza and attacks on civilians that are even more devastating than Russia’s.
Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But one war crime shouldn’t justify another. What Israel has done to Gaza in response is exponentially worse in terms of the loss of human life and the widespread infliction of human suffering.
Israel is using starvation, dehydration and disease as weapons of war against a captive population of 2.3 million people, half of whom are children.
Long list of atrocities
American public health researcher Devi Sridhar projects that 500,000 Palestinians may die of preventable diseases in 2024 if the war continues. More than 400,000 Gazans are experiencing severe hunger now, with the entire population at risk of famine. Rates of diarrhea in children under four are 100 times the norm.
Israel is indiscriminately bombing civilians with an intensity not seen since the Second World War. It’s destroyed more than 70 per cent of the homes in Gaza and has bombed areas that it declared safe for refugees.
Gaza’s health-care system has collapsed. Children’s limbs are being amputated and pregnant women are enduring Caesarean sections without anesthetic. On average, Israel is killing 160 civilians a day, including journalists, and the cultural and intellectual elites of Gaza are being targeted.
This list of atrocities goes on and on. International aid workers say Israel’s attack on Gaza is the worst situation they have ever seen.
Violations of international law
The West’s failure to protect the rights of Palestinians under international law contributed directly to this disaster.
For decades, Israel has blatantly violated international law in its treatment of Palestinians. In contravention of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel settled occupied Palestine and employed progressively more violent and oppressive instruments of control to consolidate that settlement.
Israel kept Gaza under a 16-year illegal blockade that created mass poverty and left Gazan children malnourished and without access to potable water.
Today, Jewish settlers and the Israeli military are using the distraction of the Gaza war to displace Palestinians from large parts of the occupied West Bank.
If the West had held Israel to account, Oct. 7 might never have happened. Palestinians may have had their own state. Instead, the U.S. has used its veto in the United Nations 45 times since 1972 to protect Israel from the consequences of its actions.
The West’s leaders have effectively sided with the occupier against the occupied, leaving Palestinians at the mercy of an increasingly brutal apartheid state.
Valuing the rule of law
South Africa recently accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). South Africa’s turn to international law to stop the war illustrates that states in the Global South value the rule of law.
Most states understand their self-interest in maintaining the legitimacy of the international legal system. It’s the West, led by the U.S., that has most frequently abused the rules it claims to support.
Namibia has condemned Germany’s support for Israel at the ICJ, asserting that Germany has learned nothing from its genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908. The Israel-Hamas conflict is presented in the West through a European, colonial mindset that rationalizes the history of the displacement of Palestinians.
In the U.S., Germany, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the West, anti-Semitism has been weaponized to silence pro-Palestinian voices. Numerous reporters have been fired for offending pro-Israel sensibilities.
Disillusionment grows
Nonetheless, protests against the war continue unabated and Israel is losing the youth of America. Eventually, this could have serious political consequences, but that won’t save Palestinians today.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, recently said:
“What happened in Gaza has caused the West and Europeans to suddenly lose all their reputation and all the credit they had accumulated. They have spent all their credit in the eyes of humanity, and especially our generation. It won’t be easy for them to get it back.”
The West no longer has credibility when it criticizes Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar or any other state for human rights abuses or breaches of international law.
Disgust and disillusionment with the West is growing in the Global South. Western hypocrisy in Gaza is having real geopolitical implications.
Shaun Narine is Professor of International Relations and Political Science at St. Thomas University (Canada).
Pogo says
@Shaun Narine
Congratulations on living somewhere where your ideas aren’t disregarded/suppressed. I envy you.
Now this can join my other comment addressed to you.
Samuel L. Bronkowitz says
No, genocide isn’t damaging western moral credibility, it’s just a good defining point on what to expect from the west, e.g. nothing.
DaleL says
South Africa has very little credibility concerning genocide. South Africa has turned a blind eye to the Darfur genocide and those who caused the deaths of between 80,000 and 400,000 people in Sudan.
The historically Jewish land in the Middle East, formerly known as the Roman/Byzantine province of Judaea, is now part of what is known as Palestine as a result of the Arab Muslim invasion of the region in 640 C.E.
Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization. If the Southern hemisphere nations do not like what is going on in Gaza, then they need to step up and propose a solution. Perhaps a multi-national military force could replace IDF. The goal would be to bring order to Gaza, root out Hamas, and bring peace to the region.
Samuel L. Bronkowitz says
Nice use of DARVO
DaleL says
I agree that the actions of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) in Gaza are brutal and borders on criminal. One rarely gets restraint and justice from those who have been incessantly attacked at every turn. The sad irony is that Israel may be establishing the very conditions which are impossible for long term peace.
In this case, I believe that DARVO also applies quite well to those who dismiss or even excuse the absolute horror of the October 7th attack.
Assuming we can agree that to end the violence, the IDF need to be removed from Gaza, then what? In the absence of a governing power with a sufficient peacekeeping force, Hamas will fill the power vacuum. If Hamas is left in charge, this same cycle of destructive violence will repeat.
Pogo says
@For the record
This is a moral authority?
“…Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, recently said:
“What happened in Gaza has caused the West and Europeans to suddenly lose all their reputation and all the credit they had accumulated. They have spent all their credit in the eyes of humanity, and especially our generation. It won’t be easy for them to get it back.”…”
The history of Turkey’s participation in genocide, armed repression of its own minorities, and its press, are a matter of record. Enjoy your new F-16 fighters, Mr. Fidan. Your efforts to elect Trump may yield a sympathetic brother in brutality, but doom the entirety of humanity.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I hope, may still enjoy some respect — FWIW:
The Term “Global South” Is Surging. It Should Be Retired.
Stewart Patrick, Alexandra Huggins
“…The phrase has once again become a convenient shorthand for a broad swath of nations seeking to overhaul the unjust structures of the global economy, hedge their strategic bets, and promote the emergence of a more multipolar system. But analysts and policymakers would be wise to invoke the term with greater restraint, both to avoid unwarranted generalizations and to steer clear of past mistakes…”
https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/08/15/term-global-south-is-surging.-it-should-be-retired-pub-90376
Bill C says
For the record: “The word Palestine derives from Philistia, the name given by Greek writers to the land of the Philistines, who in the 12th century BCE occupied a small pocket of land on the southern coast, between modern Tel Aviv–Yafo and Gaza.” Source- Britannica.
From Wikipedia: “The term “Palestine” first appeared in the 5th century BCE when the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a “district of Syria, called Palaistinê” between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories.[7] Herodotus provides the first historical reference clearly denoting a wider region than biblical Philistia, as he applied the term to both the coastal and the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley.[8][9][10][11] Later Greek writers such as Aristotle, Polemon and Pausanias also used the word, which was followed by Roman writers such as Ovid, Tibullus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Dio Chrysostom, Statius, Plutarch as well as Roman Judean writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus.”
ROBERT JAMES DATTILIO says
A simple question. If an American citizen found a tunnel under a hospital in Dearborn, Mi. would you expect them to contact the authorities immediately? Especially if you could drive a car thru it and it was loaded with explosives? Then why all the fuss about people who wouldn’t care to notify the authorities? Should they be expected to be ignored as part of the problem, or maybe they are the entire problem!