The aid provided by Western governments to Israel and its genocidal policies is a fact that is out in the open. Some are ashamed, others openly display their association and complicity. Geopolitical calculations (for the domination of the Near East), capitulation to financial and emotional blackmail, Islamophobia (Israel trained as an attack dog against “Muslims”) and eschatological delusions among Zionist evangelicals are all part of Western Israelophilia. The United States has given Israel $33 billion since October 7, 2023, in the form of thousands of tons of bombs that have devastated Gaza, weapons systems and cash donations.
Governments and mainstream media have used gimmicks, tricks and lies to distort reality, to exonerate Israel, to justify and cover up Israeli crimes, to ensure impunity for the perpetrators and to divert attention from a blatant genocide. Western governments and mainstream media have been complicit in the murderous madness that has befallen Gazans. But that is not all. They have also undertaken a systematic campaign of repression against individuals and groups who have spoken out against the abominations committed in Gaza and who have reminded them of the rights of the Palestinian people. To this end, they have not hesitated to trample on the laws and norms that their own society considers fundamental. This is where the current situation is sadly new.
The past and the present
Governments and mainstream media have always produced propaganda for Western interests in international affairs and marginalized or ignored critical voices. Public space was monopolized by the official narrative, which passed for “the truth.” Serious analyses were dismissed a priori as “conspiratorial” or in the pay of demonized leaders or organizations (Saddam, Putin). Banning speeches, refusing to publish (on the grounds of “lack of space” or other pretexts) and cancelling meetings are well-known practices.
The current novelty is the shift from rendering invisible to active repression of the opposition. It is no longer a matter of blotting out the opposition but of silencing it and punishing it with aggressive political, legal, and police measures. Arrests, detentions, dismissals, extraditions, reputational lynchings and accusations of deviation from the official line are becoming normal. Slander takes on a threatening tone as it is transformed into accusations, obviously gratuitous, but with legal implications. Slanderous insults such as “hate speech,” “apology for terrorism,” and “anti-Semitism” are being bandied about recklessly. The instrumentalization of ” anti-Semitism” and the criminalization of support for the bombed, martyred, and genocided Palestinian people have become official policy.
Preventive repression
The repressive action began on October 7, 2023. Even before a pro-Palestinian demonstration took place, the French government banned it on the grounds that it would be “anti-Semitic.” With Israeli leaders clearly declaring their genocidal intentions early in October 2023, Western governments understood that horrible things were going to happen in Gaza, that Western populations would be outraged, and that they therefore had to be muzzled and preemptively threatened. The conflict in Gaza gave rise to the classic case of official repression in support of the side with which the West is associated. But it is only a more extreme form of a model that emerged in February 2022 to support NATO and the Kiev regime against Russia. In an atmosphere of collective hysteria fomented at the highest levels, repression had cast a shadow over public debate and encouraged the harassment of independent thought and the persecution of those who disseminated it.
Democratic rights in danger
The Gaza crisis has exacerbated all the violations. Rights and freedoms have been thrown out the window. The new development is the combination of the actions of Zionist lobbies and official repression by Western public authorities, openly in the service of Israel. Even presidents of American universities have been dragged through the mud in the House of Representatives for not having done enough against the Palestinians, and forced to resign in 2023. In Quebec, in 2024, a minister of higher education, recently a member of the board of directors of a Zionist lobby group, interfered in course content to prevent the study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The collaboration between pressure groups and government circles in the destruction of the edifice of rights and freedoms is of unprecedented gravity. Motivated by support for Israel, the assault on democratic gains, the result of decades of struggle, benefits Israel, but it goes beyond Israel. This support and its repressive corollary are becoming a mortal threat to the foundations of Western society and a lever of reaction on all levels. Israel has become the spearhead of a trend toward contempt for the law, far right politics and authoritarianism in the Western world.
International bodies in danger
Despite the 2024 International Court of Justice ruling that the occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory, as well as the blockade of Gaza, were illegal, Israel has redoubled its efforts and acted with impunity. Torture, rape, bullets in the heads of children, men paraded in their underwear, people burned alive, planned famine, tents blown up, mass graves piled with blue bags, mutilated bodies, children amputated, thousands of people dying under the rubble, journalists and medical staff targeted, hospitals bombed, human beings humiliated, buildings razed, burial sites desecrated, schools, universities and cultural sites destroyed, supply trucks blocked, people killed at supply sites, and, as an aggravating and shocking circumstance, the demonstrations of joy and self- congratulation on the Israeli side in the face of these crimes. Such is the list of facts, each more damning than the last. To determine which of the two armies, that of Israel or that of Nazi Germany, is the more sadistic, one would have to resort to psychopathology.
Israel and the United States have acted in flagrant violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. They have sought to discredit UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine), as well as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court.
As the genocide continued, the US government even went so far as to impose utterly inhumane “sanctions” on the judges of the International Criminal Court, but also on the only Western person worthy of a peace prize, Nobel or other, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories. On July 9, 2025, her freedom of movement was restricted, she was blamed of collaboration with the International Criminal Court (!), she was accused of “terrorizing the global economy,” her US visa was revoked and all her assets were frozen. People who do business with her are liable to a billion dollar fine and 20 years in prison. She is the mother of a US citizen, and her husband works for an American organization. To illustrate the point, Albanese says that her daughter faces a $1 billion penalty if she makes her coffee or breakfast. (See her testimony at 8 minutes here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grDvcHv5mWQ). Albanese cannot open a bank account. No one can collaborate with her now. The US « sanctions » have had a chilling effect on all her university and NGO collaborators. This is the impasse she finds herself in. Albanese’s fate illustrates the negation of fundamental rights and freedoms that official support of the Israeli genocidaires entails and the by-product of this support, namely the persecution of those who defend what are considered “Western values”.
An important report from the FIDH
When dissenting voices are repressed even at the highest international levels, there is reason for alarm. The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH https://www.fidh.org/en) has published a report on the violations of fundamental freedoms committed in the context of the repression of the solidarity movement with Palestine. The document can be consulted by visiting the following link (https://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/fidh_report_on_palestinian_solidarity_under_fire.pdf ). It is a well-researched, enlightening, and disturbing study.
Samir Saul – Michel Seymour
Samir Saul holds a doctorate in history from the University of Paris and is a professor of history at the Université de Montréal. His latest book is L’Impérialisme, passé et présent. Un essai (2023). He is also the author of Intérêts économiques français et décolonisation de l’Afrique du Nord (1945-1962) (2016), and La France et l’Égypte de 1882 à 1914. Intérêts économiques et implications politiques (1997). He is also co-editor of Méditerranée, Moyen-Orient : deux siècles de relations internationales (2003). Email : samir.saul@umontreal.ca _______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Michel Seymour is a retired professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal, where he taught from 1990 to 2019. He is the author of a dozen monographs, including A Liberal Theory of Collective Rights, 2017; La nation pluraliste, co-authored with Jérôme Gosselin-Tapp, for which the authors won the Canadian Philosophical Association Prize; De la tolérance à la reconnaissance, 2008, for which he won the Jean-Charles Falardeau Prize of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. He also won the Richard Arès prize from Action nationale magazine for Le pari de la démesure, published in 2001. Email : seymour@videotron.ca web site: michelseymour.org
