Canada once stood apart by challenging apartheid and asserting an independent foreign policy, even against US pressure. Now, as Washington sanctions Canadian ICC judge Kimberly Prost for pursuing Israeli war crimes cases, Ottawa stays silent. Once a supporter of international justice, Canada appears to prioritize trade and diplomacy over moral leadership.

The West may now be finally waking up to the full enormity of the horrors Israel has inflicted in Gaza. It needs also to wake up to the evils it has nurtured not just for the last two years, but for over a century. It is time we started listening to Palestinian voices, while there are still Palestinians left alive to speak truth to power.

What’s unfolding in Gaza is not just a humanitarian crisis—it’s a deliberate, systematic campaign to destroy a population. Mass killings, starvation, and attacks on aid efforts are part of a broader strategy. Western governments, through their support and silence, are complicit. This is not only Israel’s genocide. It is enabled, justified, and sustained by the West.

Western support for Israel during its war with Iran and continued assault on Gaza reveals deep double standards in applying international law. Despite rising global protests and civilian casualties, leaders still back Israel while silencing dissent. The situation points to a broader crisis of legitimacy and the erosion of democratic norms across the West.

Are we so morally bankrupt that we will allow Netanyahu’s cynical maneuver, an act of naked aggression in flagrant breach of international law, to divert us from our responsibilities to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza? From the first responses of Western political leaders, it would appear that the answer to this question is unfortunately an unhesitating and emphatic yes.

One of the most remarkable—not to say shameful—features of the last 20 months of carnage in Gaza has been the near-unanimity of support for Israel’s assault from Western governments and political parties of otherwise sharply opposed persuasions, regardless of how criminally Israel has conducted its “war.”

A non-political civil service, diversity, USAID, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Scholarships, federal funding for scientific and medical research—the Washington Post, the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, Ivy League universities, “big law”—the great institutions of liberal America are falling to Trump like dominoes, one by one.

While in Gaza an intensifying series of air strikes killing hundreds of Palestinians does not constitute an act of war, the US is the victim of a “invasion” launched by Venezuela involving neither ground troops nor air power, but whose “devastating effects” nevertheless justify the suspension of normal due process rights. Truly we are living in the upside-down.

As anybody not living on a desert island without internet access cannot fail to have noticed, Trump has begun his second term in the White House with a flourish. But the speed and comprehensiveness of the rest of his MAGA revolution has left many reeling, not just in the US (or Canada) but across the globe. It is astonishing just how much has been done—and undone—in just six weeks.

For over a year now, the West has been tearing up the legal and institutional fabric on which the post-war international order and its increasingly threadbare claims to moral authority rest—in much the same way as Biden has overridden the US judicial system to grant his son a pardon and Trump promises to weaponize the same system to settle scores with his political enemies.