On September 27, Israel dropped US-supplied 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on the Dahiya residential area of Beirut, flattening six apartment blocks and killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The cost of Nasrallah’s scalp was likely several hundred Lebanese civilian lives. The Palestinian journalist got it right. Their dead don’t seem to count the same way.

As a response to a terrorist attack from an occupied territory, Israel’s Gaza campaign is wholly exceptional, at least among Western democracies that claim to be governed by international law. Israel exists in a state of exception, to use the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s concept, in which the rule of law is suspended and the normal rules don’t apply.

There are many ways of measuring the evil that Israel has done to Palestinians. But the true measure of our evil lies in the West’s complicity in maintaining Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and in particular, in the support it has offered Israel in its genocidal assault on Gaza in response to October 7.

The genocide in Gaza is the moment of moral conscience for this generation, as Vietnam was in the 1960s. As Derek Sayer writes, Israel’s violence and the repression on American university campuses are intimately connected. It is time we lifted our heads from our everyday evasions and diversions, our compromises and complicities, and started to listen to the kids.

The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender suggests, on the contrary, that the real danger arises when the awesome data-crunching capacities of AI are put in the hands of human beings. Derek Sayer on Israel’s human targeting software and the banality of evil.

Even if Hamas did commit every one of the atrocities of which it has been accused, this would not justify Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza, either morally or in international law. The comparison that needs to be made by the international community is rather with the infinitely greater horrors Israel has inflicted on Gaza since October 7.

The impending famine in Gaza is the result of deliberate, conscious, informed choices, and nobody in the Israeli or American governments can be in any doubt as to where they are leading. As Derek Sayer writes, we are on the threshold of a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem. Ladies and gentlemen, this way for your ambient genocide.

If Netanyahu is facing his Rubicon, the West has finally arrived at its own moral crossroads. After months of uncritical support for Israel’s assault on Gaza and weeks of equivocation as the magnitude of its inhumanity has become undeniable, there is still time to draw back from the abyss and defend the post-war order whose highest legal authority is the ICJ.

Aaron Bushnell’s supreme sacrifice cuts like a knife through the Orwellian doublethink—mass slaughter of innocent civilians is “self-defense,” the IDF is “the most moral army in the world”—that allows us to continue to live with what the highest court in the world has described as a plausible genocide.

After four months of war, some Western leaders seem finally to be waking up to the monstrosity of the horrors Israel has unleashed upon Gaza, in which our governments and civil societies—our corporations, our news organizations, our social media, our educational and cultural institutions—are unarguably complicit.