The West’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes

How the West sponsored the destruction of Palestine

by Fintan Drury, Irish News

ONE of the questions I am most often asked about the cause of Palestine, when the world is witnessing humanitarian horrors in so many places, is why I’ve chosen to write about Israel’s genocide.

That interest is likely to grow with the publication of a second book on the subject.

The reasons are the decades-long oppression of Palestine by a state that refuses to recognise international law; the abandonment of Palestinians over that time; the brutality of Israel, which claims to be a democratic nation; and most especially, how the West, knowing its intent, has chosen to sponsor its genocidal endeavour. There is no other event like this in our time. None.

What we’ve learned over the last year is not just how the decades-long oppression of Palestinians by Israel continues to have the blessing of the West, but that many monied Arab states will side with the oppressor in its determination to wipe Palestine off the map.

The impunity that Israel enjoys is the single greatest obstacle to peace and has been for decades.

What he could not have foreseen was how the United States would become the foundation on which Israel would build its colonial ambition to destroy Palestine.

Einstein was correct to finger the British. The 1917 decision of the Lloyd George government to grant the land of Palestine to the Jewish people was catastrophic.

Warnings against that fateful decision, including those of many eminent Jewish groups and individuals, were ignored. Most dissenters argued that the establishment of a Jewish state would disenfranchise the Arab people and would fuel antisemitism.

Within two decades, the die was cast; the growing number of Zionist immigrants was increasingly disruptive for the native Palestinians. Settler expansion caused widespread displacement, with violence by both sides contributing to a hostile environment.

The cause was the age-old issue of colonialism and the resistance of the indigenous people.

In 1938, a decade before the foundation of Israel, Henryk Ehrlich, a leading figure in the Jewish Labour movement in Europe, wrote: “The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second-class citizens.”

Today, Ehrlich’s observation seems prophetic. Even those Palestinians who became citizens of Israel and now represent 20 per cent of its population have a second-class experience in the apartheid state.

They are discriminated against across every area of life, though their troubles are nothing to those of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

The West is most liable for this, Britain and the United States especially so.

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has shown itself well-equipped for the colonial task. It always wanted more land than its original borders offered. For decades, it has pursued that goal.

When it set out on its campaign after the Hamas attack on October 7 2023, it knew the West would support it. Impunity is a byword for how Western powers have always treated Israel.

Israel took the latitude it was granted in October 2023 and conducted a genocide; as its intentions became clear, no effort was made to restrain it.

As its slaughter ran into many tens of thousands, not one of its primary sponsors stepped in to shout stop.

The ‘ceasefire’ and faux peace plan launched by Donald Trump last October was no more than the public alignment of pro-Israel nations, including some Arab states, around an economic programme that would reshape the region to the exclusion of Palestine.

It was Trump and his cabal of family and friends who control America at their most mendacious. There was no attempt made to camouflage the intention: Palestine offered riches which should fall to Israel and its backers, not to Palestine.

In Catastrophe Nakba II (Merrion Press), I covered extensively how the Democratic administration of Joe Biden had completely abandoned all accepted norms in its determination to support Israel.

Biden, a self-proclaimed Zionist, and his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, knowingly provided crucial support to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, without which it could not have pursued its genocidal ambition. Both men and others in the administration should face prosecution.

In the new book, Genocide: Sponsoring the Destruction of Palestine, I examine in more detail how and why the United States, rarely an honest broker on international affairs, has always supported Israel.

Under President Trump, the motivation changed, but not the outcome: America First meant Israel First, irrespective of how egregious its conduct. I examine this through the lens of one day in the first year of Trump’s second term in office.

Donald Trump’s speech in Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) on October 13 2025 was a new low, even by his standards. Its vanity and inappropriateness were at the higher end of even his scale; the absence of political substance was as normal.

The intention was clear. There could be a peaceful outcome, but only if the Palestinians reformed. They had to deradicalise.

Their security would be protected by an international force (not UNIFIL), but they must submit to this so the redevelopment of the Gaza Strip could begin. This was the deal.

It was this that could lead to what Trump described as ‘numerous countries of great wealth’ investing the tens of billions needed to unlock Gaza’s economic potential. There was a prize for the Gazans: “for the people of Gaza, the focus must now be on restoring the basics of a good life”.

The Palestinians expect little of the Zionist-compromised West. Still, that October day showed how money, the currency that has prevented the West from acting morally on Palestine for over a century, had turned some sovereign Arab heads too.

The leaders of powerful Arab and Islamic countries were in Sharm el-Sheikh as the American president painted his picture of a thriving Middle East that would allow the Palestinian people to enjoy the basics of a good life again.

This was how it would be. Their homeland, the territory they’d been denied the right to call their own, would be exploited by a coalition of Western and Gulf wealth and political power.

Their ‘prize’ would be to live free from bombardment and imposed starvation, and to be able to enjoy the basics of life, free from persecution.

It wasn’t said, but it was implied in every word and in every gesture – they should be grateful.

The more brutal and sustained an assault on oppressed people, the more likely they are to accept any offer, no matter how limited and demeaning, once it ends the destruction. Israel has long worked towards humiliating the Palestinians.

In his words and in his approach on October 13 2025, Donald Trump told the Palestinians that now was the moment to ‘settle’.

Where do you begin to make sense of it being Palestine that must deradicalise? How do you credit the viciously oppressed being told that it is they who must commit to offering no threat to Israel, their oppressor?

Were they to sign up to that, then, but only then, could Palestinians expect hope for a ‘return’ to the basics of life and opportunities for work.

These were not my words or my interpretation of his. The President of the United States said it was a day for ‘celebration’, a day when the world loved Israel again. Israel wanted peace. Everybody did. And what a victory it’s been, right?

Of course, impunity breeds impunity. Israel has never had any incentive to engage morally.

The Netanyahu government is the most corrupt and bloodthirsty manifestation of what has gone before, and none of the brutal behaviour has ever been challenged, but since autumn 2023, Western governments have failed the Palestinians as never before.

Global institutions, there to help the oppressed, have failed so spectacularly that it is hard to see how some can recover any sense of credibility.

Well into year three of a genocide, Israel’s impunity is intact. As long as it is, Palestine’s cause is hopeless.

The focus of the West’s current peace plan is de-radicalising the Palestinians. We are somehow expected to believe that it’s the impoverished, homeless and frightened Arab people who need to be detoxified, not the sovereign state that has vowed to eradicate them.

Palestine’s situation has never been as precarious as it is now.

‘Genocide: Sponsoring the Destruction of Gaza’ (Merrion Press) was published on June 18, priced €18.99