“The Gaza Genocide and America’s Lost Moral Authority”
John J. Mearsheimer
November 7, 2026
San Jose, California
I am deeply honored to be here tonight to deliver the keynote address at the public launch of the Gaza Genocide Center. Indeed, I was delighted when I first learned of the plans to establish the Center, although I dearly wish there had never been a need for such an institution. Nevertheless, given what is happening in Gaza, I believe it is essential to create not only a memorial to the victims of the genocide, but also a permanent public record of that horrendous crime.
I was asked to speak about how the Gaza genocide fits into the changes now taking place in the Western-led international order. To address that question, I will examine how the genocide in Gaza has affected—and will continue to affect—America’s image of itself as a morally righteous nation, as well as its implications for international law, which the United States, of course, played a key role in creating.
I will argue that US complicity in the Gaza genocide has dealt a hammer blow to its image of itself as a country that commands moral authority around the world. Indeed, US support for Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza is a permanent stain on America’s moral reputation. Furthermore, that support has done significant damage to international law, further undermining the US claim to be a morally responsible stakeholder in the international system. Finally, I will argue that there is good reason to believe Israel’s horrific treatment of the Palestinians will continue for years to come.
Before turning to these themes, I would like to say a few words about the Gaza Genocide Center itself.
THE CENTER’S VIRTUES
The creation of the Center is of great importance for three reasons.
First, it will serve as a memorial to the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, many of whom remain buried beneath the estimated 70 million tons of rubble that now cover large parts of that small strip of land. They will not be forgotten. I cannot help but think of the words of the Palestinian poet and scholar Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike: “If I must die, you must live, to tell my story.” Moreover, the Center will commemorate Palestinian suffering at the hands of Zionists, Israelis, and their great-power allies, including the United States—not just since October 7th, but throughout the broader sweep of Palestinian history.
Second, the Center will document what happened in Gaza in a single, highly visible location. This is imperative because Israel and its various lobbies across the West—as well as the American policymakers who were complicit in the genocide—will go to great lengths to argue that what happened in Gaza was not genocide and that Israel was, in fact, waging a legitimate war of self-defense. Indeed, some will argue that if anyone was guilty of genocide, it was Hamas, which they portray as determined to murder every Israeli. The Center will play a central role in countering these claims. In doing so, it must also make clear to the world that the Gaza genocide ranks among the great crimes of modern history.
Third, the Center will compel people around the world—especially Americans—to confront what has happened to the Palestinians in Gaza since October 7th. As Edward Linenthal, a leading scholar of memorials, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, observes, they are “conspicuous points of moral orientation on the national landscape.” In the case of the Gaza Genocide Center, the question of “moral orientation” has special significance for the United States because it was complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians, which was clearly not the case with the Holocaust. American complicity in Gaza is something Americans must be compelled to confront and wrestle with for generations to come.
Let me now turn to the genocide itself and its broader consequences.
THE WEST’S SENSE OF MORAL SUPERIORITY
The United States has long had a powerful sense of moral superiority over other countries. It has traditionally viewed itself as a “city upon a hill,” a country dedicated to pursuing a virtuous foreign policy. In particular, the United States sees itself as committed to respecting and protecting the rights of individuals around the world. There is, in short, a powerful universalistic dimension to America’s sense of itself. For sure, it is widely acknowledged that the United States sometimes fails to live up to its ideals, but the prevailing belief is that it does so most of the time and certainly has a better track record than any other country in this regard. Unsurprisingly, American elites have a strong tendency to view the world in terms of good and evil, with the United States and its allies cast as the “good guys” and their adversaries as the “bad guys.”
This belief that the United States is committed first and foremost to pursuing a morally responsible foreign policy has been especially pronounced since the end of World War II. President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in January 1961, at the height of the Cold War, is a prime example. Americans, he emphasized, are “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” He went on to famously declare: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and more.”
When the Cold War ended, this rhetoric went into overdrive, beginning with Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 article, “The End of History?” In that piece, he emphasized that the triumphant liberal state “recognizes and protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom.” Less than a decade later, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously declared: “We are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”
In a 2013 speech, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the United States did not have “the means to right every wrong.” But when it could make a difference, he declared, “I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.”
Let me conclude my discussion of the American case with three brief quotations from President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address in January 2005. He declared, to applause, that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” He went on to say, “America’s belief in human dignity will guide our policies.” Finally, he emphasized that “In America’s ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service and mercy, and a heart for the weak.”
This commitment to liberal principles was not confined to the United States, especially in the post-Cold War years. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, for example, told the US Congress in 2003 that “Ours are not Western values, they are universal values of the human spirit.” Former Czech president Václav Havel declared in 1999 that “human rights are superior to the rights of states,” while former German chancellor Angela Merkel stated at the 2011 Munich Security Conference, “We have an obligation to pursue value-based foreign policy.” Of course, I could cite many more examples of American and European leaders emphasizing the paramount importance of pursuing a foreign policy grounded in human rights, universal values, and human dignity.
US leaders also place great emphasis on the importance of an international order built around institutions and laws that promote and protect these inalienable human rights. Indeed, a central aim is to encourage states to become “responsible stakeholders” who respect the rule of law. For example, in his address to Congress in September 1990, President George H. W. Bush spoke about the opportunity to create a new world order “where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” Similarly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear in January 2013 that she believed the United States was “the indispensable nation,” with a responsibility to “uphold a just, rules-based order,” while Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the United Nations in May 2021 that “human rights and dignity must stay at the core of the international order.”
It is especially important for our purposes here to emphasize that the United States played a key role in creating the Genocide Convention in 1948, as well as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has jurisdiction over disputes concerning genocide. The importance the United States attached to the Genocide Convention is reflected in a letter President Harry Truman sent to the Senate on August 26, 1950, urging its ratification. He emphasized “the need for the free and civilized nations of the world to cooperate in outlawing this shocking crime of deliberate extermination of entire national, ethnical, racial or religious groups. Genocide has not occurred in the United States, and I cannot believe that it would ever occur here. But in other parts of the world various national and religious groups still face this threat. These unfortunate people need whatever help can be given them by the more fortunate nations of the world.”
Similarly, when President Ronald Reagan signed legislation implementing the Genocide Convention on November 4, 1988, he emphasized that after World War II, “the nations of the world came together and drafted the genocide convention as a howl of anguish and an effort to prevent and punish future acts of genocide.”
There is ample evidence, however, that the United States has often failed to live up to its professed commitment to protecting human rights and respecting international law, including the Genocide Convention. Consider, for example, how American policymakers responded to the Cambodian genocide between April 1975 and January 1979 as well as the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
In the Cambodian case, the United States condemned the Khmer Rouge’s barbaric behavior, but its criticism was limited, and Washington did nothing to stop the genocide. A key reason was that China strongly supported the Khmer Rouge, while American policymakers were determined to transform China from an adversary into a strategic partner. They feared that taking action to stop the genocide might derail the improving relationship between Beijing and Washington.
Regarding Rwanda, the United States played a key role in weakening the UN peacekeeping force there, despite mounting evidence that Hutu extremists were preparing a murderous campaign against the Tutsis. Even after the genocide began in April 1994, the Clinton administration pressed for the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, ultimately supporting a Security Council resolution that reduced the force from more than 2,000 troops to just 270. Moreover, the administration did little to stop the genocide and initially refused to call it genocide, even as the evidence became overwhelming. As President Bill Clinton later admitted: “We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”
The US role in the Gaza genocide, however, is fundamentally different from its role in the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. American policymakers may have failed to act to stop those earlier genocides, but at least they were not complicit in carrying them out. In Gaza, however, the United States is complicit in what is often described as “the crime of crimes.”
THE US ROLE IN THE GAZA GENOCIDE
Before describing US complicity in the Gaza genocide, it is important to establish that there is abundant evidence that Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 7th, constitute genocide. For starters, the world’s two most prominent international human rights organizations—Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—have published detailed reports documenting Israel’s actions in Gaza. B’Tselem, one of Israel’s leading human rights organizations, has also published a comprehensive report concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Other important organizations that have reached a similar conclusion include: the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Moreover, prominent Israeli and Jewish scholars specializing in Holocaust and genocide studies—such as Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and Raz Segal—have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide.
These are not casual observers. They include some of the world’s leading experts on human rights, international law, and genocide. If anyone is qualified to assess whether genocide has occurred, surely, it is these organizations and individuals.
It is worth noting that a July 2026 YouGov poll done for The Economist found that 43 percent of Americans believed Israel was committing genocide against Palestinian civilians. Only 24 percent believed Israel was not committing genocide. Furthermore, a June 2026 poll conducted by the Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago found that 30 percent of American Jews believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, while another 21 percent said that they do not know enough to reach a conclusion. That same poll found that 45 percent of Jewish Democrats believed that Israel was guilty of genocide.
These are striking numbers, especially since the mainstream media in the US has gone to great lengths to shield Israel from accusations of genocide. Yet these findings are not particularly surprising, given that the devastation in Gaza has been extensively documented on social media platforms like TikTok. As Amnesty International’s secretary general put it in April 2025, “the world has been made audience to a live-stream genocide.”
Although Israel carried out virtually all the killing in Gaza, it could not have sustained its murderous campaign without extensive material and political support from the United States. This support underpins the widespread argument that the United States was complicit in the genocide.
Prominent figures in Israel’s own national security establishment have acknowledged that US support was indispensable to sustaining Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Consider three revealing statements made during the course of the genocide. Zohar Palti, a former head of Mossad’s intelligence directorate, declared, “Without the US weapons, Israel cannot fight.” Similarly, a senior Israeli Air Force official told Haaretzthat “without the Americans’ supply of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, especially the air force, Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war for more than a few months.” Finally, retired Major General Yitzhak Brik warned, “The minute they [the US] turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability.” He went on to emphasize, “Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the US. Period.”
Let me provide some data to illustrate just how profoundly dependent the Israeli military is on the United States. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, “Israel’s entire inventory of combat capable aircraft comes from the U.S., including 75 F-15s, 196 F-16s, and 39 F-35s. Israel’s attack and transport helicopters are also all of U.S. origin, including 46 Apache helicopters and 25 Sea Stallion and 49 Black Hawk transport helicopters.”
During the first nine months after October 7th, the Biden administration sent approximately 24,000 bombs to Israel, including at least 14,000 of which were 2,000-pound bombs and 6,500 of which were 500-pound bombs. According to the Israeli government, by May 2025, the United States had delivered 90,000 tons of military equipment to Israel in more than 800 flights and 140 shipments by sea. A study by the Center for International Policy estimates that between October 2023 and May 2025, the United States exported nearly $4.2 billion worth of weapons to Israel. Moreover, in January 2025—the Biden administration’s final month in office—it announced an additional $8 billion arms sale to Israel.
US political support was also critically important in enabling Israel’s campaign in Gaza. By my count, the United States vetoed six UN Security Council draft resolutions aimed at stopping the genocide. Moreover, Washington has gone to great lengths to deny that Israel is committing genocide. For example, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that the Palestinians in Gaza faced an urgent threat to rights protected under the Genocide Convention and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent genocidal acts. The Biden administration nevertheless dismissed concerns that Israel was committing genocide and took no meaningful action to compel Israel to comply with the Court’s orders. On top of all this, the United States defended Israel even as it severely restricted—and at times completely cut off—the flow of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. That strategy, of course, was designed to inflict mass death through starvation and disease.
Then there were the protests against the genocide that swept college and university campuses across the United States in the spring of 2024. How did the Biden administration and the leaders of these liberal schools respond? The administration condemned antisemitism associated with the protests, while university administrators, often working with the police, moved to shut down encampments and demonstrations. Although many of the protests were peaceful, accusations of antisemitism became a central issue in the controversy surrounding them. President Biden himself declared on April 21, 2024, as the protests at Columbia University were attracting national attention: “This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous and has absolutely no place on college campuses.”
I find this argument inconceivable, although I recognize that many Zionists regard virtually any criticism of Israel as evidence of antisemitism. I have been associated with academia for almost my entire adult life, and before the spring of 2024, I had never heard anyone suggest that antisemitism was a problem on college campuses. Indeed, I had never personally heard a student or professor make an antisemitic remark. The protests themselves, of course, were not antisemitic. In fact, many Jews participated in them, as was widely acknowledged at the time. The central aim of the protests—as all of you know—was to stop the genocide in Gaza. The Biden administration, however, responded by condemning antisemitism associated with the demonstrations, while university leaders—who invariably profess their commitment to liberal values—moved to shut them down.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF COMPLICITY
Let me now turn to the consequences of the Gaza genocide, especially for the United States, the leading champion of the liberal international order.
For starters, it is essential to consider the genocide’s implications for liberalism, by which I mean liberalism in the Lockean sense of the term. The United States is a liberal democracy at its core. As such, it places great emphasis on individual rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those rights are considered inalienable, meaning they belong to every human being on the planet, including, of course, Palestinians. Moreover, tolerance is a central liberal value, while violence is generally deplored. None of this is to deny that the United States is an imperfect liberal democracy that does not always live up to its core principles. Nevertheless, it sees itself—and takes great pride in being—a liberal democracy.
Moreover, American foreign policy has long emphasized the importance of spreading liberal democracy around the world, effectively making other countries look more like the United States. Underpinning this policy is the widespread belief that the more liberal democracies there are in the world, the more peaceful international politics will be. Relatedly, Americans have a strong tendency to divide the world into “good guys” and “bad guys,” with the United States, of course, cast as one of the good guys fighting against evil adversaries. This worldview stems directly from the liberal principles deeply embedded in American political culture.
US complicity in the Gaza genocide, therefore, strikes at the very heart of its liberal identity. After all, the Biden administration’s deep involvement in Israel’s campaign in Gaza represents a blatant violation of the Palestinians’ right to life. How can anyone argue that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is morally justified or consistent with the liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? How can anyone maintain, in light of what has happened in Gaza, that the United States pursues a righteous foreign policy and is committed to combating evil around the world? Can the United States and its key European allies, whose support for Israel has also raised serious questions of complicity, still credibly portray themselves as the good guys in world politics? A country that sees itself as a “city upon a hill” should surely not be complicit in genocide.
The United States’ close collaboration with Israel during the Gaza genocide has also dealt a severe blow to the credibility of political liberals in America, one whose consequences are likely to endure for years to come. Let me emphasize that I am referring here to the so-called liberal wing of the American political spectrum, not to liberalism as a defining feature of American political identity. My focus is primarily on the Biden administration and its political allies, although I would argue that the Trump administration is also complicit in the genocide, given its close cooperation with Israel since taking office in January 2025.
Putting the Biden administration aside for the moment, there are many liberals in academia, the media, and think tanks who profess a deep commitment to protecting human rights both at home and abroad. Many champion doctrines such as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which holds that the international community has a responsibility to protect people around the world from war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and, yes, genocide.
How have these liberal voices responded to the genocide? Far too many have either remained silent or defended Israel. There has been remarkably little protest from the many self-proclaimed champions of human rights in academia. As for political figures, former President Bill Clinton suggested in October 2024 that Hamas’s tactics were forcing Israel to kill civilians, while earlier that year, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized campus protesters for knowing little about the history of the Middle East—or, for that matter, history more generally. Liberal media outlets such as The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post – as best I can tell – never characterized Israel’s campaign as genocide in their editorials. All three eventually became more critical of Israel’s conduct, arguing that its actions were excessive and calling for an end to the conflict, although they continued to frame it in terms that obscure the nature of what is happening in Gaza. It is also worth noting that The Wall Street Journal, which is not part of the liberal camp, has strongly defended Israel’s behavior in Gaza at almost every turn.
And then there is the Biden administration, which was filled with self-professed liberals who played a central role in enabling the genocide in Gaza. This includes the president himself and two of his closest advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. These three men, along with numerous other members of the Biden administration, bear responsibility for complicity in genocide. Were there to be a modern equivalent of the Nuremberg trials, there is little doubt that Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan would be in the dock and ultimately found guilty.
Perhaps the most glaring case of liberal complicity in the genocide involves Samantha Power, who headed the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the Biden administration. Long before the Gaza genocide, she had become world-famous for her writings on genocide and her fervent criticism of the United States for “having consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress genocide.” Simply put, she was a leading advocate of American intervention to prevent future genocides. Given that commitment, one might have expected her either to resign from the Biden administration or to work tirelessly behind the scenes to end US support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. She did not resign, and there is little public evidence that she mounted such an effort behind the scenes. Instead, she remained in her position until President Biden left office in January 2025.
Incidentally, both Power and Jake Sullivan now hold chaired professorships at Harvard University—a major bastion of liberalism, to be sure. Both may well return to prominent policymaking positions in a future Democratic administration. But whether they do or not, their involvement in the Biden administration’s Gaza policy has left a moral stain on their reputations that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Indeed, the reputational damage extends far beyond Sullivan and Power to those liberals who either helped make the genocide possible or stood by while it was happening. At the very least, their ability to claim the moral high ground has been seriously compromised for the foreseeable future.
Finally, US complicity in the Gaza genocide has done significant damage to international law and the key international institutions responsible for preventing genocide and punishing its perpetrators. More specifically, the Gaza genocide makes a mockery of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The United States, which played a central role in creating that landmark treaty in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the other horrors of World War II, has provided extensive support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, whose devastating consequences people around the world could see with their own eyes. Moreover, the Trump administration as well as the Biden administration has staunchly supported Israeli policy in Gaza. In addition, both administrations have sought to undermine the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and, especially, the International Criminal Court (ICC)—the former for its efforts to uphold the Genocide Convention and the latter for seeking to hold individuals accountable for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
One wonders where all this will lead. We know that the world is, in many ways, a nasty and brutish place. Liberal values, international law, and international institutions are meant to soften the harsh edges of the human condition as much as possible. This is no easy task. Yet the United States and its European allies have seriously undermined those guardrails through their complicity in the Gaza genocide. The price we will all pay over time for this immoral behavior is difficult to gauge, but I fear it will be substantial.
CIRCLING BACK TO THE GAZA GENOCIDE CENTER
I would like to conclude with a story about the famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Large numbers of Irish Catholics immigrated to the United States during the nineteenth century, many of them fleeing the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1852. Once here, they faced intense discrimination at the hands of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment, which dominated American society at the time and harbored deep hostility toward Irish Catholics, who were among the most despised European immigrant groups.
In response to this discrimination, Irish Catholics in New York City set out to build a magnificent cathedral that would serve, in large part, as a powerful expression of defiance against an establishment that refused to treat them with respect and dignity. The Irish, however, had little wealth at the time. What made the construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral possible was that countless ordinary Irish Catholics scraped together their nickels and dimes to help finance this monumental undertaking.
I believe this story has important lessons for Palestinians in the United States and throughout the West. I see the Gaza Genocide Center not only as a memorial to the victims of the genocide and an indispensable means of documenting that horrifying crime, but also as an act of defiance against an American establishment that not only refuses to acknowledge the genocide but also played a central role in making it possible.
It is therefore essential that the Gaza Genocide Center flourish in the years ahead—that it grow in size and scope and become a prominent and enduring part of the American political landscape. Given the US role in what has been happening in Gaza since October 7th, the Center has an especially important place in American public life.
To take the analogy with St. Patrick’s Cathedral one step further, I would encourage Palestinians and their allies around the world to support the Gaza Genocide Center in whatever ways they can. They should do so not only for the reasons I have just outlined, but also because Palestinians living in Greater Israel face grave threats to their safety and well-being that are likely to persist for the foreseeable future. They will need all the help they can get.
Thank you.
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