Deep and entrenched prejudice provides cover for Israeli genocide, argues Lubnah Shomali.
Despite the so-called ceasefire agreement, the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip is ongoing. This is predominately due to the United States’ ongoing participation and the complicity and inaction of other western colonial states. States’ complicity and inaction is described as a double standard. However, the actions of states – or more accurately, their inaction and outright complicity – constitutes racism.
The Israeli regime adherence to the “ceasefire” is at its discretion: bombardment, willful killing, forced displacement and starvation continue in the Gaza Strip. In the two weeks after the ceasefire began an average of twenty Palestinians were killed per day. Instead of implementing military, economic and political sanctions, states continue to supply the Israeli regime with the weapons, funds and political cover to continue the genocide.
Even though the United States called on the Israeli regime to curtail its actions in the Gaza Strip, it has no intentions of curbing its military support to the Israeli regime. The role of the United States in the Israeli genocide constitutes not just complicity but participation through the provision of weapons, ensuring Israeli impunity with its numerous vetoes, and its ongoing defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
The European Union, despite having concluded in June that the Israeli regime is in breach of its human rights obligations, paused the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. By following its regular pattern of inaction, the EU continues to ignore its own laws, the 2024 and 2025 International Court of Justice’s advisory opinions, and its obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law. Concurrently, states scrabbled to provide excavation equipment to help search for the bodies of Israeli prisoners, while continuing to ignore that for the last two years, thousands of Palestinian bodies remain buried under the rubble or forcibly disappeared.
The Israeli regime continues to restrict the aid and assistance entering the Strip, and to enforce the ban of UNRWA. Humanitarian aid must be provided without prejudice, in accordance with the principle of neutrality, and at scale. UNRWA is the agency most capable of addressing the dire needs of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Ignoring the Agency’s capacity, experience and mandate, states have taken no measures to ensure its access and operations, which would at the very least stem the flow of Palestinian blood in the Gaza Strip.
As international mainstream media coverage diverges and dwindles, with a focus on blaming the resistance and the delay in retrieving the Israeli bodies, Palestinians remain starved, displaced, killed and imprisoned. States are more concerned with ensuring the elimination of the Palestinian resistance movement and coordinating and dispatching an “international stabilization force.” Rather than ending the genocide and holding the Israeli regime accountable, states’ complicity and inaction demonstrates their blatant racism against the Palestinian people. To sustain and increase its pressure, the solidarity movement must continue direct action and disruption of the status quo. Without reinforcing this pressure, states will continue to sideline their obligations and entrench their complicity, enabling the Israeli regime to perpetuate the genocide and its ongoing international crimes.
Lubnah Shomali is Advocacy Unit Manager at the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights.