As the Palestinian death toll of Israel’s war on Gaza surges past 19,000, millions across the world are displaying unprecedented solidarity with the Palestinian cause by pouring onto the streets calling for an immediate ceasefire on humanitarian grounds. 

The violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinians that the entire world is witnessing in real time dwarfs even that of the Nakba of 1948, which was followed by the establishment of Israel and conflicts that continue to this day.

Despite this carnage, it is business as usual for Western governments. Their support of Israel remains unconditional. The weapons dropped on Palestinians continue to be supplied and the mantra of “Israel has a right to self-defence” is repeated ad nauseam even as it violates every core principle of the laws of war and international humanitarian law. 

These much-lauded and oft-cited principles - namely military necessity, proportionality and distinction between combatants and protected civilians - are being wilfully ignored in blatant disregard for human life.

Basic human necessities such as food, water and medicine have been cut off from Gaza as a form of collective punishment. 

Civilians - men, women, and children - are being mercilessly killed as Israeli politicians and officials make public statements of a genocidal nature, dehumanising Palestinians. The staggering death toll will undoubtedly rise much higher even after the bombs stop as the emerging health crisis ravages an already decimated people.

Western officials and mainstream media, which irresponsibly parroted false Israeli government claims about Hamas beheading Israeli babies on October 7, are now conspicuously silent on actual decomposed Palestinian babies killed by Israel.

The very same American, British, and European officials who condemned Russia for targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and declared those actions to be “war crimes” now justify Israel doing the same to Palestinians on a much larger and bloodier scale.

Over 500 Ukrainian children have been killed by Russian strikes in 2 years. Over 7,000 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli strikes in 2 months. 

This has become one of the most intensive bombing campaigns of the 21st century and has destroyed half the buildings in Gaza, which has long suffered one of the world’s highest population densities and now has to deal with entire neighbourhoods levelled to the ground.

The silence of Western governments on the daily atrocities being carried out in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank is deafening, even as hundreds of thousands are demonstrating weekly across Western capitals demanding action from their governments to end this humanitarian crisis. 

The US veto on December 9 of a draft UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire is only the latest example of callous indifference to human suffering.

Amidst all this bloodshed, one German state has recently issued an order for citizenship applicants to commit in writing to “the right of the state of Israel to exist.” Whether or not this controversial order is upheld by a German court, it in any case once again highlights the European arrogance and ignorance that has led us to the catastrophe unfolding today.

No religious or ethnic group – whether Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or atheists - has a “right to exist” as a state under international law. States either exist or they do not. When states exist, they have certain rights and responsibilities; however, no state has an inherent right to exist. States come into existence typically because of war, genocide, and conquest – Israel was neither the first nor last – but this is not a recognised right under international law.

No country on Earth can claim a “right to exist” as a nation-state at the expense of the internationally recognised right of people to self-determination and their fundamental human rights to life and liberty. It is people who have the right to exist, not states.

Europeans, and especially Germans, should come to terms with their own anti-Semitic history without forcing a non-existent right down people’s throats to virtue-signal and cleanse their own guilt by supporting Israel and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

It was neither Arabs nor Muslims who murdered millions of Jews during WWII. In the Middle East, Jews were not forced to convert, rounded up in concentration camps or burnt alive as they instead were in Europe.

The Germans seem to be saying with this proposed law that - while they apologise for killing 6 million Jews in Europe - applicants for citizenship must now recognise Israel’s “right to exist” and their right to ethnically cleanse Arabs in Palestine in order to prove they will truly be good citizens.

Coming as it does amidst of an ongoing genocide, it is a message that cannot be ignored.

The hypocrisy of Western governments - who have long preached to the rest of the world on human rights, freedom and democracy - is not being lost on the rest of the world.