Copyright brecorder
EDITORIAL: The United Nations’ latest findings have stripped away the last pretence of moral ambiguity. 63 states, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, are now formally named as complicit in what the UN rapporteur has called Israel’s two-year genocide in Gaza. The report by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, makes one thing clear: this atrocity was not committed in isolation; it was enabled, financed, armed, and politically protected by the very nations that claim to defend a rules-based world order. The UN’s words carry weight precisely because they document what the world has witnessed in real time. Since October 2023, hundreds of weapons’ consignments have flowed from Washington to Tel Aviv under the third US-Israel memorandum of understanding — guaranteeing US$3.3 billion annually in foreign military financing, plus US$500 million for missile defence. Germany and Italy have continued to supply arms despite mounting civilian casualties. The United Kingdom, while not directly providing weapons, permitted the use of its bases in Cyprus for US supply routes and conducted surveillance flights over Gaza. The infrastructure of complicity is no longer hidden; it is mapped and measured. Diplomatic protection has completed the shield. At the UN, vetoes by Washington Capitals have neutralised resolutions calling for accountability. Western governments have sustained Israel’s participation in global cultural and sporting platforms, avoiding the isolation once imposed on apartheid South Africa. The message to the developing world has been unmistakable: international law applies only to the weak. Yet despite the indifference of power, the UN’s work stands as a record — and as an indictment. It confirms that international complicity is not an abstract moral failure but a practical enabler of violence. The weapons, funding, and political cover provided by third states have prolonged Gaza’s agony and deepened the world’s disillusionment with its own institutions. For weak countries, the report only validates what has long been evident: that global governance is fractured between rhetoric and reality. When court orders are ignored, when humanitarian agencies are starved of access, and when those who supply the bombs also write the ceasefire language, the very idea of a rules-based system collapses. The UN may have been ignored in practice, but its findings ensure that the record of these crimes — and the names of those who abetted them — will survive history’s distortions. The report’s language — calling Israel’s campaign a “settler-colonial apartheid” backed by “colonial and racial-capitalist practices” — will no doubt invite political backlash. But the fact is its documents are unassailable: systematic bombardment, mass displacement, and the calculated obstruction of relief. The world’s most advanced democracies continued business as usual, sustaining the very state machinery carrying out the destruction. History’s judgement, however slow, is certain. The architects of this complicity cannot claim ignorance. The data is public, the supply chains traceable, the vetoes recorded. What remains to be seen is whether the global South, often lectured on human rights and governance, can now assert a collective moral independence strong enough to challenge the hierarchy that has made such impunity possible. The UN report may not halt the carnage or move the powerful, but it ensures that the genocide in Gaza will not fade into silence. It documents that the killing was enabled by allies who called themselves defenders of civilisation. And it confirms that when the reckoning comes, history will neither forget nor forgive. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
