Western colonialism in Gaza by Jonathan Cook, 9/24/2025

Western colonialism in Gaza
With the help of Israel and the ideology of Zionism, Western elites have revived their racist system of control and sold it as a moral cause.The fact that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip constitute genocide is now being echoed by reasonably attentive observers of international politics at every turn. But there seem to be no consequences, at least not for Western heads of state and their governments. Even declarations of recognition of Palestine as an independent state remain lip service unless accompanied by more effective measures. But the West’s relationship to the Middle East conflict is not solely characterized by failure to provide assistance. Basically, the moment colonialism became unpopular, the concept was transferred to a region that apparently stands outside any moral principles.by Jonathan Cook
[This article posted on 9/24/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/westlicher-kolonialismus-in-gaza.]

Israel’s campaign to wipe out Gaza is now entering its third year.
This is not simply a symbolic moment, but a decisive phase — both for those carrying out the destruction of the enclave and for those resisting it.

Even after two years, Western capitals still refuse to call Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation genocide. They continue to turn a blind eye to the tidal wave of crimes against humanity that Israel has committed over the past 23 months. And for most, even describing these atrocities as violations of international law is going too far.

Western leaders are unwilling to change course.
Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, they are “so deeply in blood” that they dare not turn back. This would mean admitting their complicity in Israel’s genocide — which they have enabled by supplying and providing weapons, intelligence, and diplomatic cover.

However, the difficulties they face in denying a genocide being broadcast live are growing by the day — and not only because more and more children in Gaza are dying of starvation.
Last week, the overwhelming majority of the International Association of Genocide Scholars decided that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.

The official scientific consensus has now fully aligned with the general consensus — even if Western heads of state and their compliant media prefer to ignore both.

This is undoubtedly genocide.
The only verdict still pending is that of the International Criminal Court, whose wheels turn so slowly that its final decision — which will most likely confirm the judges’ earlier assumptions about genocide — will be relevant mainly to historians.

Genocide “accomplices”
The consequences of genocide cannot, of course, be limited to Gaza. The big lie that Israel is waging a “war of self-defense” must be actively and continuously enforced by Western elites.
William Schabas, an authority on genocide and international criminal law, noted last week that the case brought against Israel in January before the Criminal Court is “probably the strongest case of genocide ever brought before the Court.”

The case was heard 20 months ago.
Western states, especially the US and Germany, have not concealed their role as “accomplices to genocide,” he adds. This means that the liberal order of the West is in deep crisis. Schabas argues that the international justice system is facing a “test”: Can it end genocide and bring these rogue states to justice?

Failure would mean not only the downfall of the people of Gaza, but also the collapse of the liberal order in their own countries.

Western leaders have so far failed to win public support for the genocide or for the West’s complicity in it. Instead, they have turned against those who publicly express their opposition, vilifying, harassing, and arresting them.

In the US, police beat up students who had set up protest camps on campus, while universities revoked the degrees of many of them. Federal immigration officials began hunting down activists against the genocide in order to deport them.

The Palestinians themselves, including even children from Gaza who urgently need medical treatment for injuries sustained from US-supplied bombs, are now being denied visas to the US.
The situation is similar in the United Kingdom. Mass protests against the genocide are labeled “hate rallies” (link no longer available). Activists who take action against arms factories that supply the Israeli genocide machine — and who thus jeopardize Britain’s arms sales to Israel — are imprisoned as terrorists.

And those who stand up for and defend these activists are prosecuted and arrested under the same draconian terrorism legislation.

This weekend, the second mass demonstration against the ban on Palestine Action took place in front of the British Parliament. Nearly 900 demonstrators were arrested for holding up posters expressing their support for the protest action group.

In the run-up to the event, the police “anti-terrorism unit” conducted a series of house searches of organizers of “Defend Our Juries,” a group behind the mass protests. (Translator’s note: “Defend Our Juries” is a group that advocates for jurors to be able to make decisions based on their conscience and beliefs).

Six of them, including Tim Crosland, a lawyer and former senior official at the Serious Organized Crime Agency and the National Crime Agency, were charged with terrorist offenses that could lead to prison sentences of up to 14 years.

Vicious circle
There is an echo of the repressive mood in the US in the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy organized witch hunts against left-wing activism, labelling it “un-American”, “communism” and a threat to national security.

He found willing support from both parties in Congress, Hollywood, the media, universities, businesses and the courts. Careers were ended and lives destroyed. Socialism in the US, branded a dangerous, subversive ideology, never recovered.

Today, long after the end of the Soviet Union, the pretext for authoritarianism and political repression is no longer “communism.”

Instead, progressive politics that reject genocide are defamed as “anti-Semitism” — which in turn is itself an insult to Jews, because it implies that the slaughter of Palestinians is inherently consistent with some kind of “Jewish” worldview.

The real purpose was to crush resistance to the political ideology of Zionism.
It was Western institutions — based on centuries-old Western Christian Zionism — that supported Israel’s founding as an apartheid state; a state that privileged newly immigrated Jews over indigenous Palestinians and sanctioned the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land.

In both its Christian and Jewish forms, Zionism is the ideology currently driving genocide. However, Zionism stands for more than this narrow-minded form of Jewish supremacy. That is why Western capitals are determined to support Israel and the ideology it stands for at any cost — even if their own societies go under in the process.

Modern Zionism is a continuation of Western colonialism — the use of force to oppress and dominate other populations with the primary goal of controlling their raw materials — but with the advantage of being able to dress it up as “moral.”

After World War II — precisely at the moment when the reincarnation of colonialism could be sold as a just cause of our time after the Holocaust — traditional colonialism fell out of favor.
Western support for a heavily armed Israeli state in the oil-rich Middle East was supposed to liberate the Jewish people — liberate them, mind you, from a genocidal Europe — but at a high price.

This required the destruction of the Palestinian people, whose homeland was needed for a so-called “Jewish state.” And it established a Western-armed outpost whose basic idea was to harass and attack its Arab neighbors — a foreign policy based on the “divide and rule” principle, which also happened to suit Western interests.

Had the West done even part of this directly — rather than through its proxy — it would have become apparent that ruthless Western colonialism had never left the Middle East. Israel and the ideology of Zionism on which it was founded provided a pretext for this.

Better still, this cover story had a wonderful circular logic that worked for decades.
The more the West armed Israel so that it could brutally torment the Palestinians under its rule and bomb its Arab neighbors, the more resistance was fueled in the region. And the more resistance Israel faced, the more the West could arm Israel — after all, it had to be protected from irrational, savage, Jew-hating Arabs.

The rise of political Islam—the most important symptom of the reaction to Zionism’s domination and colonization of the region—could now be cited as the reason for the problems in the Middle East. Israel provoked the very problems of “terrorism” that it was supposedly there to solve.
Insurance policy

However, Zionism was more than just a cover story for Western institutions. It was also an insurance policy.

The role of Zionism was to normalize atrocities against dark-skinned people — indeed, to give these crimes a moral purpose — while breathing life into colonialism’s favorite narrative: the “clash of civilizations” between Western progress and Eastern barbarism.

The success of Zionism depended on creating a politics of fear — the “war on terror” — that could be used to manipulate public opinion in favor of the interests of the Western ruling class.
For decades, Western institutions in their own countries have pushed resistance to Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian people and its continued domination of the Middle East to the political margins and defamed it as “anti-Semitism.”

The so-called mainstream—whether in official politics or the establishment media—has never expressed more than lip service to the question of justice for the Palestinian people.

Anything more, anything that would have put real pressure on Israel to make concessions, such as the popular grassroots BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement to boycott Israel, was automatically demonized as hatred of Jews.

The role of Zionism as an insurance policy came to light in the United Kingdom after Jeremy Corbyn, a social democrat, was unexpectedly elected leader of the Labor Party.
Corbyn rode a wave of support for left-wing politics — including not only a fairer, less militaristic, less colonial foreign policy that could expose Israel as an anachronism, but also an end to austerity at home, which had hollowed out public services and left voters feeling powerless and impoverished.

The British establishment, including the right wing of the Labor Party, currently led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, quickly decided to use anti-Semitism as a weapon against Corbyn and his political base.

During the Corbyn years, the left was portrayed as inherently anti-Semitic. As soon as Starmer took the helm, his top priority was to “purge” the party of leftists.
It is striking that the smears about anti-Semitism focused not only on Corbyn’s pro-Palestinian activism, but also on his redistribution policies. Critics maliciously insinuated that his criticism of the financial elites who had plundered the country’s wealth and hidden it in offshore tax havens was in fact a veiled reference to “Jewish bankers.”

The anti-Semitism witch hunt against Jeremy Corbyn, as in the days of McCarthyism, was about sabotaging the left and its ideas for a more just society. It was about maintaining militarized colonialism overseas and protecting the neoliberal elites at home (link no longer available).
Imaginary threat

But Israel’s genocide is a stress test that threatens to undo this kind of politics.
As in the days of McCarthyism, the public is being told that the liberal order can only be protected through extremely illiberal measures.

To silence opposition, the establishment in the 1950s ordered tests of ideological conformity, backed by legal enforcement and social exclusion, justifying this as a fight against the danger of a communist takeover.

Today, 70 years later, Zionism is seen as so central to the Western “liberal order” that its opponents — those who oppose the deliberate starvation of children — must be demonized and ostracized.

As with McCarthyism, the point here is that our politicians pretend to represent liberal and humanitarian values while doing the exact opposite — in this case, supporting genocidal mass murder in Gaza and banishing dissenting opinions from the streets by criminalizing them as “terrorism.”

The cover story has collapsed. That is why Western capitals — except for Trump’s Washington — are desperately trying to revive it with statements about UN recognition of a Palestinian state this month.

Belgium, which recently became a disciple of this idea, shows the contortions Western leaders are performing to prevent meaningful change.
Brussels is making its recognition conditional on Hamas releasing the last Israeli hostages and no longer playing a role in Gaza in the future. In other words, it has granted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who apparently does not want to reach a ceasefire, a veto over Palestinian statehood.

None of the other countries that want to recognize Palestine — including France, Britain, Australia, and Canada — intend to grant it material sovereignty. It is to be “demilitarized,” meaning it will have no military or air force to protect its borders and will remain completely dependent on Israel’s goodwill for trade and freedom of movement.
The symbolism of this kind of recognition serves them, not the Palestinians.

At the end of last month, France’s Emmanuel Macron hinted at the unspoken in a fawning letter to Netanyahu. He boasted of undermining anti-Zionism — opposition to Israel’s apartheid-like, genocidal rule over Palestine — by conflating it with anti-Semitism.

And he explained that the goal of recognizing a “demilitarized” Palestinian pseudo-state was to “transform Israel’s military successes at the regional level” — that is, its attacks and widespread bombing of its neighbors — “into a lasting political victory that promotes (Israel’s) security and prosperity.”

Other alleged benefits include Israel’s “normalization” after subjugating its neighbors through terror and persuading them to sign Trump’s Abraham Accords, which aim to further integrate Israel economically into the region.

For the West, recognizing Palestine is not about advancing Palestinian sovereignty or even ending genocide. It is about maintaining Western colonialism in the Middle East “under the guise of Zionism.”

UN protective power?
What blatant hypocrisy.
Former British Foreign Secretary David Lammy expressed his outrage on Twitter (link not available) about the “humanitarian crisis” caused by Israel through famine, while doing absolutely nothing to end it. His successor, Yvette Cooper, seems to be continuing this hypocritical approach.

European leaders are wracking their brains over how to respond to Israel’s double blow—invading Gaza City and either driving out or exterminating the starving population, and then annexing the West Bank. Even Israeli military leaders admit (link no longer available) that the official pretext for invading Gaza City, namely to “defeat” Hamas, is pure fiction.
Meanwhile, Israel’s annexation of the West Bank will destroy any pretense of the possibility of a “demilitarized” Palestinian state.

Last week, Lammy was at it again, saying, “The UK is doing everything it can to improve the situation.”

However, there are many effective measures that he and other Western leaders could take if they cared more about Palestinian lives than maintaining Western colonialism under the guise of Zionism.

Britain could end its arms sales to Israel’s genocidal war machine. And it could stop the spy flights originating from the RAF base at Akrotiri in Cyprus (link no longer available), which provide intelligence to the Israeli military as it bombs hospitals, murders journalists, and starves children.

There are positive steps the West could take to intervene. The British government could send naval ships loaded with food and medicine to end Israel’s siege of Gaza and help UN agencies feed the population there.

Britain could challenge Israel to end this.
Or, better still, Britain and other European states could initiate a “Uniting for Peace” mechanism in the UN General Assembly to override an inevitable US veto and send a UN protective force to Gaza.

Such a peacekeeping force could secure emergency humanitarian aid in Gaza and respond militarily to any possible attempt at interference by Israel.

If this seems laughably implausible, it is only because we implicitly assume that the West will never hold its most spoiled satellite state to account with the help of international law.
The question we don’t want to admit to ourselves is: Why?

The precedent of Great Britain
Once again, the Western public is beginning to take action in place of its failing government.
Last week, a flotilla of dozens of aid ships set sail from Spain to Gaza. Passengers include environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “Game of Thrones” actor Liam Cunningham, and Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla Mandela.

Israel has previously attacked flotillas in international waters, kidnapping their passengers and crew, taking them to Israel and deporting them. The lead ship appeared to have been hit by a drone in the port of Tunis on Monday night.

Meanwhile, Israel’s far-right security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, threatened to lock up the participants in prisons he says are reserved for “terrorists” and deny them their basic rights. These are the prisons where Palestinians — often held without charge — are systematically beaten, tortured, and sexually abused.

“After a few weeks in prison,” he said, “these supporters of terrorism will no longer feel like organizing another flotilla.”
Ben Gvir may have been inspired by the precedent set by Starmer’s government in classifying protests against genocide as a terrorist offense.

What is certain is that Britain and other European states will do nothing to protect their citizens if they are illegally intercepted in international waters or dragged into Israeli prisons as terrorists by the very state that is actively starving them for wanting to provide food to starving children.
When Starmer was asked during Prime Minister’s Question Time what protection Britain would offer its citizens aboard the flotilla, he ostentatiously refused to answer.

The moment of truth
We are under time pressure. Two years after the genocide began, as Israel prepares for a final push into Gaza City to drive starving Palestinians from their last refuge, the Western public is beginning to accept a gruesome truth: their politicians will not come to the rescue.
This is a moment of searing truth. It is not just Israel and its genocidal “war” that must be defeated. It is the ugly colonial system that has long hidden behind the “moral” facade of Zionism.

Signs of collapse are everywhere.
They can be seen in the more than 1,600 people who have been arrested in the UK to date on trumped-up terrorism charges.

They can be seen in the ashamed looks of the police officers sent to arrest them and the prosecutors who have to charge them.
They can be seen in the popular actor Hugh Bonneville — star of the Paddington films — who interrupted a live televised interview about his latest film to call on his government to take active steps to end the attack on Gaza City. (Translator’s note: He is calling on the entire international community to do so).
They can be seen in the people lining the route of the La Vuelta cycling race and holding up dummy dead babies to the cyclists, including a team from Israel.
They can be seen at a protest during a gala concert broadcast live by the BBC, where Jewish demonstrators accused the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra of having “blood on their hands.”
They can be seen at the Royal Opera House, which was forced onto the defensive by its own members after its director wrestled on stage during the curtain call with an actor who displayed a Palestinian flag.
They can be seen in the Italian dockworkers who threaten to bring all European trade to a standstill if the aid flotilla to Gaza is stopped.
They can be seen in the 23-minute standing ovation — the longest ever — that followed the press screening of a film at the Venice Film Festival — a film about Israel’s slow murder of five-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza and the ambulance crew that tried to save her.
They can be seen in two US military veterans (link no longer available) who interrupted a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing and were dragged out as they shouted, “You are complicit in genocide!”
They can be seen in last week’s independent Gaza Tribunal in London, chaired by Corbyn, which gathered shocking expert testimony about Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Britain’s complicity.

These acts of resistance, large and small, are signs that the center cannot hold much longer. They are signs that the authority of the West’s political and legal systems of rule is rapidly declining and being replaced by authoritarianism.

We are facing a moment of truth. And Gaza is the wake-up call.
Editorial note: This text first appeared under the title “In Gaza, western colonialism has been unmasked.” It was translated by Gabriele Herb on a voluntary basis and edited by the volunteer Manova proofreading team.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist who has lived in Nazareth, Israel, as a freelance reporter since 2001. He holds a degree in philosophy and politics from Southampton University and in journalism from Cardiff University. He completed a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For more information, visit jonathan-cook.net.