https://www.scmp.com/opinion/article/3309917/western-world-has-already-dug-its-own-grave-gaza-war
The Western world has already dug its own grave in Gaza war
By enabling Israel to unleash its genocidal impulse, most leaders of developed nations have crossed a moral red line that cannot be undone.
Alex Lo in Toronto
11 May 2025
It’s a bleak statement issued by The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: “Escalating atrocities in Gaza present an urgent moral crossroads and states must act now to end the violence or bear witness to the annihilation of the Palestinian population in Gaza – an outcome with irreversible consequences for our shared humanity and multilateral order.”
The warning came from a team of UN experts.
“While states debate terminology – is it or is it not genocide? – Israel continues its relentless destruction of life in Gaza, through attacks by land, air and sea, displacing and massacring the surviving population with impunity,” the UN experts said.
“No one is spared – not the children, persons with disabilities, nursing mothers, journalists, health professionals, aid workers, or hostages. Since breaking the ceasefire, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians, many daily – peaking on 18 March 2025 with 600 casualties in 24 hours, 400 of whom were children.”
Calling Israel’s actions “one of the most ostentatious and merciless manifestations of the desecration of human life and dignity”, UN officials said the aggression had transformed Gaza into a landscape of desolation, where nearly half of the casualties were children.
Some 52,535 have died, 70 per cent of them women and children, and 118,490-plus injuries as of last week.
But that’s OK because “Israel has the right to defend itself”. Those seven words have been the proverbial hill Western leaders – from Washington and London to Berlin and Brussels – are ready to die on.
Except it won’t be just them, but the very humanity of the society they represent and supposedly lead.
Now we truly know the Western-dominated world order has ended. But you won’t be able to blame Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping for it. I am sure they are happy to see it gone and may even fancy themselves at having a hand in it. Well, maybe a little bit. But they can’t do it if the West hasn’t committed the most extreme moral self harm, and ignore those very things that keep it alive, that is, as they say, things like Western-inspired universal values such as human rights, international law, and the law of war when it comes to Israel.
The most extraordinary censorship is being exercised across many Western countries, but especially in the United States and Germany, to silence anyone who tries to speak out what everyone already knows is going on in Palestine. It is no accident that the two countries that make the most of the Holocaust as universal civic education are the two countries that most actively enable a real-time genocide being committed and shown live on our computer screens and social media pages.
Silencing the victims’ cries so the killers can continue with the butchery, and criticism is considered racial hate speech against the killers and their apologists. Who does that?
The West cares more about the feelings of the butchers than the lives and limbs of victims. Western “civilisation” now sounds like a contradiction in terms.
Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov asked whether you would let a single child suffer the most horrible torture and death so that the whole of humanity will be free of suffering forever more.
What a naive idealist Ivan was! The real question is how many children we will allow to die the most painful and horrific death before the people who claim to be enlightened and free will collectively speak out and say – “Enough is enough! Enough blood!”
Those were the words of the late Yitzhak Rabin at the signing of the Oslo Agreement.
Having surveyed the whole of history up to his time, Arnold Toynbee concluded that great civilisations died by suicide, rather than murder.
The West has just proved his point. It will of course always exist as a geographic reference. But it’s just places on the map now, not an inspiring idea.
As
an ideal, it has died by its own hand with the
horrifying screams and dying breaths of tens of
thousands of children in Gaza.