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.

By positioning October 7 as Israel’s Ground Zero, Hamas’s assault becomes the self-evident point of origin of the current conflict in Gaza and the obligatory reference point for all critical analysis and moral judgment regarding subsequent events. No matter what Israel does, any criticism of Operation Swords of Iron is forestalled by this eternal return of the ever-same.

On January 26, the International Court of Justice delivered an interim ruling in response to South Africa’s charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This is a clarifying moment in modern history—the day the “rules-based international order” was given the coup de grâce, not by its enemies but by its authors. The gloves were off and so were the masks.