In the aftermath of the attacks of 7 October 2023 and for months afterwards, Western governments that have been long-standing supporters of Israel — including the Australian Government — invoked “self-defence” to justify the severity of Israel’s response.

Later, when the civilian death toll mounted and the horrors of the bombing and starvation campaigns could not be hidden or written off as defensive — and when people in the West began to express concern about the conflict with ever growing marches and protests — the same Western Governments changed their public tunes and began to reluctantly call for a ceasefire.

In some instances, they recognised the State of Palestine in order to pacify their increasingly angry domestic audiences and salvage what was left of the two-state solution: a policy under direct threat from the expansion of settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan River.

Both the calls for an end to the conflict and diplomatic recognition of Palestine were vigorously opposed by the Netanyahu Government, pro-Israel lobbies and their fellow travellers in the commercial media who portrayed both moves as a reward for the terrorism of Hamas: the right of Palestinians to self-determination, including those on the West Bank where Hamas was all but absent from, was simply forgotten.

However, the aim of the “I stand with Israel” movement went well beyond the return of hostages taken on 7 October and the elimination of Hamas as a political and military force in Gaza. As more honest members of Israel’s political and military elites were only too happy to admit, it was and remains the annihilation of Palestinians as a national group. Hamas had finally provided them with the pretext they had been looking for.

In instances where criticism by Western Governments was unavoidable, it was narrowly focused on the Netanyahu Government, not the Israeli people who enthusiastically shared their government’s ambition to ethnically cleanse Gaza. In other words, criticism of the state and its transitory government was permissible up to a point, but criticism of the nation, of the population for supporting the genocide, was beyond the pale and dismissed as antisemitism. This remains liberal orthodoxy in the West.

Neither sanctions, such as those imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, nor diplomatic expulsions, were ever on the table. And whenever the issue of the International Criminal Court indictments of Prime Minister Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant were raised, a discreet silence ensued – except in the US where officers of the Court were targeted with sanctions for having the temerity to impose international law on Washington’s closest ally.

Meanwhile, the US, the UK and Germany maintained their complicity in the genocide by covertly furnishing Israel with the weapons and intelligence needed to continue it, while simultaneously calling for an end to hostilities in public announcements.

It has been a double game from the outset. Rhetorical and symbolic criticism at the public level when domestic public outrage rises, but business as usual behind the scenes, accompanied by lies and deceit directed at the public.

One example illustrates the point. The invocation of Israel’s right to self-defence against the Palestinians of Gaza was always fallacious.

First, Israel was not facing an existential threat, nor an enemy with tanks, aircraft, naval ships or sophisticated weaponry – in fact, given the one-sided nature of the conflict it is inaccurate to call it a war at all. With such an unbalanced kill ratio, it is more accurate to describe the conflict as a genocide with the breakout used by Israel as a pretext for pursuing long-held plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza under the guise of destroying Hamas. Hamas survives, barely, but tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians do not.

International lawyers will endlessly debate the application of term genocide to this conflict. That many have determined it to be so, and that the International Court of Justice believes there is sufficient evidence to evaluate the charge, suggests the claim of genocide cannot be easily dismissed.

Secondly, self-defence swings on the legal principle of proportionality to the original attack. No one seriously argues that proportionality was a consideration in Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks.

Thirdly, there is no need to systematically shoot more than 20,000 children and toddlers in the head and chest, or rape incarcerated men, to exercise a right to self-defence. That these, and other horrors, were perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza cannot be denied, given they have been widely recorded on social media by the perpetrators, backed up with testimony from doctors treating the dead and injured, and verified by those released in prisoner exchanges.

Fourthly, simultaneous attacks launched by settlers in the West Bank, in collaboration with the IDF, prove how marginal destroying Hamas has been to Israel’s plans. Given the absence of Hamas as a significant presence in the West Bank, the spike in violence against Palestinians and the expansion of settlements cannot be laid at the feet of what Hamas did on 7 October 2023.

Fifthly, there is no right to self-defence to maintain an illegal occupation of other people’s land.

Further, Palestinians have the legal right to resist an occupation, including violently in certain cases. As Norman Finkelstein suggests, one analogy for the attacks is the slave revolts in antebellum America. These were often extremely violent and morally indefensible, but easy to explain: who condemns them today? And who would express inhibitions about the use of violence by those who resisted the Nazi occupation of Europe, including the summary justice handed out to collaborators?

It is an indictment of Western political culture that the question of whether Palestinians have a right to self-defence for 77 years of repression, displacement and purgatory, never even arises. When diplomacy (Oslo, Camp David, Taba) and non-violent resistance (the Great March of Return) consistently end in bloody failure for one side, what options are left for those who have seen their land occupied and stolen, while being slaughtered for objecting to their fate?

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, despite strenuous efforts to decontextualise and de-historicise the attack. The only unique aspect to these events is that the Palestinians initiated a breakout from what has long been called a concentration camp. Massacres from the recent past directed against them — Operations Protective Edge, Cast Lead and numerous others which Israel calls “mowing the lawn” in Gaza — have to be consigned to the memory hole before the case for ethnic cleansing and genocide can be built. The West’s double game on Gaza has made a significant contribution to achieving this goal.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.