WESTERN GOVERNMENTS have failed catastrophically to intervene meaningfully in Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza. Their silence isn't passive. It’s deliberate and driven more by the strategic interests of western imperialism than any genuine commitment to human rights. While Gaza’s infrastructure crumbles and its population is pushed to the brink of annihilation, western governments wring their hands in supposed anguish while arming the very state they claim to urge restraint. It is little wonder that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes he can launch an all-out assault on Gaza with impunity.
The failure of western governments lies first and foremost in refusing to act preemptively. The Genocide Convention doesn't require hindsight; it mandates intervention at the moment the risk becomes serious. That threshold was crossed long ago, yet even then, the West reached for ambiguity and delay. The United States, in particular, has wielded its veto at the UN Security Council like a weapon—not against violence, but against accountability. Calls for a binding ceasefire were drowned out by euphemisms like 'humanitarian pause,' a term that allows governments to sound concerned while enabling continued bloodshed.
And then there’s the arms trade. Western nations have persisted in supplying weapons to Israel even as civilian casualties have surged. This isn't a policy oversight—its complicity dressed up in bureaucratic language. International law demands risk assessments and due diligence before arms are exported. Instead, countries like the United States and Britain have normalised the idea that some laws don’t apply when their allies are the violators. While targeted sanctions have been readily imposed in other conflicts, the Israeli regime remains protected. Western governments claim legal clarity only when it's politically convenient.
Even their humanitarian gestures—the aid drops, the pledges—feel like a performance. You can't bomb hospitals and then donate bandages and expect moral credit. Humanitarianism without pressure just sanitises the brutality, making it palatable to domestic audiences while avoiding the root of the crisis: a military campaign unleashed on a captive population with nowhere to run.
New Zealand, despite its geographic distance and limited power, isn’t exempt. For a country that promotes itself as a champion of the rules-based order, its response has been appalling. The Government has issued statements of concern but stopped far short of exercising real leverage. No sanctions have been imposed on Israel. The Israeli ambassador has been allowed to remain in the country. Nor has New Zealand joined The Hague Group, the coalition of countries that is pursuing accountability for Israeli war crimes in Gaza. And there still has been no formal recognition of Palestinian statehood. Inaction isn’t the absence of power. It's the refusal to use it. The New Zealand Government's default setting is to allow the United States to lead it by the nose. New Zealand has become an obedient vassal state of a declining American Empire.
What makes this failure particularly galling is that it wasn’t inevitable. Western governments had options. They could have demanded a permanent ceasefire and tied diplomatic relations and military cooperation to meaningful de-escalation. They could have stopped supplying Israel with arms. Furthermore, they could have offered international courts their full support, backed investigations, and imposed real-world costs for obstruction of aid and destruction of civilian infrastructure. Instead, they opted to allow Israel to continue its genocidal assault. And in doing so, they forfeited moral credibility.
The refusal to prevent genocide, when the warning signs were everywhere, is not just a policy misstep. It is a generational betrayal—of law, of conscience, and of the very idea that human life should matter more than geopolitics. History won’t be kind to those who issued statements while doing nothing, nor should it be. And history will certainly not be kind to those who, even now, continue to defend Israel and deny its many atrocities and war crimes.
Western governments, and that includes the New Zealand government, have enabled the destruction of an entire society. And that, more than anything else, must be remembered — and the perpetrators of genocide held accountable.
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