The Long Shadow of Complicity
Western Silence in a Theatre of Atrocities
I have often written about the exodus of moral authority from the West to the East which I have observed over my lifetime. For me the starting point was the British in India. Others refer to US involvement in the Vietnam War. Now, almost as an unholy act of completion, it's the entire Western empire, guided by the state of Israel, intruding compulsively to generate insanity in the Middle East.
The toxic legacy of Western interventionism reads like a catalogue of hubris and devastation. From the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Mossadegh in 1953 to the catastrophic Iraq invasion justified by phantom weapons of mass destruction, the pattern reveals itself with mathematical precision. The deliberate destabilisation of Libya transformed a functioning state into a failed one, creating humanitarian crises that persist to this day. In Syria, the West's obsession with removing Assad led to arming "moderate rebels" who predictably morphed into extremist factions, prolonging civilian suffering while achieving no strategic objectives. Yemen continues to endure apocalyptic conditions under Saudi bombardment assisted by Western military technology and diplomatic cover.
This compulsive meddling represents not strategic necessity but imperial habit—a pathological inability to allow regional self-determination outside Western supervision. The moral authority that once emanated from Western institutions has indeed migrated eastward, as nations witness the chasm between Western rhetorical commitments and operational realities. What began with colonial extraction in the British Raj and accelerated through the napalm-scorched fields of Vietnam now culminates in unconditional support for actions the West would condemn instantly if perpetrated by any other power.
In the unfolding tragedy we witness at this precipitous moment of history, we are confronted not merely with distant violence but with the collapse of an entire moral architecture. The West's response to Palestine represents not simply diplomatic failure but existential hypocrisy—a mirror reflecting back the darkest contradictions of the human project.
In international forums, the verdict on Israel's actions in Palestine has been unequivocal. The International Court of Justice invoked the Genocide Convention in its preliminary ruling. The International Criminal Court initiated investigations into war crimes, issuing arrest warrants on November 21st, 2024, for several officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif - now deceased. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has explicitly condemned the collective punishment of Gazans. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem have all documented systematic violations of international humanitarian law.
Yet the United States continues to deliver weapons shipments. Britain abstains from crucial UN votes. Germany silences pro-Palestinian voices while increasing military support to Israel. Australia refuses to join calls for a ceasefire. Canada maintains its unwavering diplomatic backing. This calculated selective blindness from the very nations that lecture others on human rights reveals their principles to be situational conveniences rather than moral imperatives.
This reticence is no accident of history. Although in a recent piece I pointed to various key reasons why Western nations and their compliant media remain mute, the principal reason has never been in doubt: it's the logical culmination of settler-colonial psychology—a phenomenon replicated across geographies from North America to Oceania, where nations built upon dispossession recognise in Israel's actions the shadow of their own founding myths. The geometric patterns of history repeat themselves with ruthless precision. Those nations most vociferous in their defense of Israel are precisely those whose foundations rest upon similar historical erasures, creating a psychological investment in denying the Palestinian narrative.
The situation of Australian Aboriginals serves as a poignant example of this settler-colonial psychology. The historical context of Australia is marked by the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples, whose lands were taken by European settlers beginning in the late 18th century. This process involved not only the physical removal of Aboriginal peoples from their ancestral lands but also the systematic erasure of their cultures, languages, and identities. The parallels with the Palestinian experience are striking. Just as Palestinians have faced displacement and cultural erasure, Aboriginal Australians have endured similar fates. The British colonisation led to the establishment of a narrative that justified the seizure of land under the guise of terra nullius, which falsely claimed that the land was uninhabited and thus available for settlement. This narrative is akin to the justifications used by Israeli settlers regarding the land in Palestine, where historical claims are often prioritised over the lived realities of Indigenous populations.
Aboriginal Australians continue to experience systemic marginalisation and discrimination, much like Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The legacy of colonisation has resulted in significant socio-economic disadvantages for Aboriginal communities, including poorer health outcomes, lower educational attainment, and higher rates of incarceration. This ongoing marginalisation reflects a broader pattern seen in settler-colonial contexts, where Indigenous peoples are often relegated to the periphery of national narratives.
The psychological investment in rebutting the narratives of Aboriginal Australians mirrors the denial of Palestinian experiences by nations that have similar colonial histories. My own government has often been reluctant to fully acknowledge the historical injustices faced by Aboriginal peoples, paralleling how Western nations defend Israel while ignoring the plight of Palestinians. This denial serves to protect national identities built on colonial foundations, making it extremely uncomfortable for these nations to confront their own histories of dispossession.
This reluctance to engage with uncomfortable truths is further reinforced by the machinery of narrative management, which operates with devastating efficiency in the West. Mainstream media institutions, ostensibly dedicated to truth, have succumbed to a pathological both-sides-ism that equates documented atrocities with unverified claims. This false equivalence serves not to balance but to obfuscate, creating a cognitive dissonance that paralyzes principled action. The contemporary journalist becomes not a witness but an accomplice, filtering reality through frames designed to normalise the unconscionable.
This awkwardness is mirrored in the Israeli narrative that pivots on a selective temporality—an historical frame beginning precisely at the moment of their choosing. But history refuses such convenient starting points. The compression of decades of structural violence into the Palestinian consciousness created precisely the conditions that made conflict inevitable. It was this powder keg that erupted on 7th October 2023. When people are systematically dehumanised, displacement becomes not an aberration but an anticipated outcome of the system's internal logic.
Behind the rhetorical smokescreens lies the fundamental mission: demographic engineering through forced displacement. The targeting of journalists, care workers, physicians, and innocent women and children, including entire families, along with the destruction of infrastructure—hospitals, schools, and water systems—reveals intent beyond military necessity. It's the systematic rendering of space uninhabitable. The choreographed pressure on neighbouring states to absorb displaced populations completes this calculated demographic transformation, disguised as humanitarian concern.
Perhaps most insidious is the weaponisation of historical trauma. The cynical conflation of state criticism with antisemitism represents the ultimate corruption of memory. It transforms the moral imperative of "never again" from a universal principle to a selective shield, betraying both the memory of Holocaust victims and the ethical foundation their remembrance was meant to establish. Many Jewish voices of conscience recognize this perversion of their history yet find themselves marginalized by institutional forces vested in maintaining this conflation.
Our institutions of moral authority—religious bodies, academic centres, and cultural landmarks—stand in petrified shock, more disturbed with donor relations and political expediency than their foundational values. The university, once a sanctuary for unthinkable truths, now polices discourse to avoid controversy. Religious leaders who speak eloquently of distant injustices find themselves suddenly inarticulate when confronting this specific suffering.
We must face the truth: resistance against structural oppression is not terrorism but the natural immune response of societies fighting for their survival. The same Western nations that mythologise their own resistance movements deny Palestinians the dignity of their contextualised struggle. This contradiction reveals a deliberate double standard that preserves existing power relations.
Today's civilisational crisis being streamed in real-time is not merely political but existential. It reveals the hollow core of Western moral pretensions—the selective application of universal principles that renders them meaningless. The brutal mathematics of whose lives matter exposes the algorithmic cruelty at the heart of our global order.
As we witness this unfolding tragedy, we are being called to confront not just distant tragedy but our own complicity. Carnage flows from our silence, our acquiescence, our willingness to accept comforting fictions rather than uncomfortable truths. The future will condemn not just the perpetrators of violence but also those who, with full knowledge, chose to look away.