This article continues from Part I, which traced Israel’s impunity to a convergence of imperialist strategy, racial hierarchies, and theological ideology, specifically, the fusion of Christian Zionism with white supremacist imperial frameworks. It argued that Israel functions as a strategic outpost of Western dominance, economically and militarily embedded in the maintenance of unequal global power structures. Part II shifts focus to how this systemic impunity is reproduced through contemporary manifestations: the blatant double standards in the application of international law, and the structural media bias that dehumanizes Palestinians while legitimizing Israeli violence. Together, these mechanisms reveal both ideological hypocrisy and the material underpinnings of a global order designed to protect colonial dominance, racial hierarchies, and the class interests of empire.
International Law and War Crimes: Double Standards for “Us” and “Them”
A glaring manifestation of white supremacy in geopolitics is the double standard in responses to war crimes and human rights violations. Western leaders and their allies, often white-majority, settler-colonial states themselves, are treated with leniency and impunity. In contrast, leaders from the Global South are condemned and punished for similar or lesser offenses, if those offenses even occurred at all (*cough* Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction). This bias is evident in the yin & yang global reactions to Israel’s actions in Palestine versus actions by Russia in Ukraine.
In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western governments acted swiftly. They imposed sanctions on Moscow, invoked international law, issued arrest warrants for Putin, divested from Russian energy, restricted global payment systems, and supported war crimes investigations — even in sports and cultural arenas. Yet when Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza killed tens of thousands of civilians in just weeks, with over 50,000 confirmed dead, a number The Lancetstate is a massive under-estimate, the same Western powers blocked any meaningful response. Instead, they continued to provide Israel with material and diplomatic support.
The United States has repeatedly wielded its UN Security Council veto to shield Israel. In late 2023 and 2024, as global calls for a Gaza ceasefire mounted, the US, with a woman of colour to do it, cast the lone “no” vote on multiple resolutions urging a halt to the bombardment. In one case, 13 of 15 Security Council members voted in favour of a humanitarian ceasefire – yet the US vetoed it outright, despite Israel slaughtering over 29,000 Palestinians by that point. This stands in stark contrast to the unanimity and urgency Western nations showed in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Oliver Stuenkel notes, many in the Global South have long observed a glaring double standard: the West condemns Russia’s occupation of Ukraine while staunchly supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza have continued for decades. The UN has repeatedly deemed its settlements and military actions illegal. Yet, Israel faces no equivalent sanctions, and even now, as its officials are investigated by the UN, ICC, and ICJ, these legal efforts are routinely ignored. Meanwhile, leaders from Sudan, Congo, or Serbia have been overthrown and/or indicted by international courts for crimes that, in raw numbers, are on par or less severe.
This Western double standard toward Israel undermines all credibility of international law. When US or NATO forces kill, torture and rape civilians in Afghanistan, Vietnam, or Iraq, Western media rarely call for war crimes trials. These acts are dismissed as unfortunate mistakes or necessary actions. Yet, when similar violence is committed by non-Western leaders like Assad or Gaddafi, they are swiftly branded as monsters and dragged before courts, or worse.
In Gaza, Western officials bent over backwards to avoid condemning Israel. Rights groups documented war crimes, including hospital bombings and the use of high-powered explosives in civilian neighborhoods. Yet former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted, “We don’t have double standards… we treat Israel… just as we would any other country”. The evidence, however, clearly shows otherwise. In truth, all available evidence indicates that US officials hold Israel not only to a low standard, but in recent times, to no standard at all, even when they trounce across their espoused red-lines.
This pattern extends beyond Israel. Historically, leaders like George Bush and Tony Blair, who led the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, faced no prosecution. This is despite clear evidence that the invasion lacked any legitimate justification. Instead, they are treated as elder statesmen, and are rehabilitated through the media through figures like Ellen DeGeneres as friendly old white-men who may have made a few honest mistakes. Yet figures like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, both vilified Global South dictators, who, indeed committed major crimes, the most severe of which in the eyes of the West was to threaten US and French monetary dominance as Saddam did with the Euro or Gaddafi with the proposed pan-African gold dinar. This currency was intended to liberate African economies from dependency on the US dollar and CFA franc. This idea gained significant support among African leaders and coincided with increased Western hostility toward Libya. After NATO killed him, Libya went from being Africa’s most prosperous nation under Gaddafi, ranking highest on the UN’s Human Development Index in 2010, to a fragmented state marked by open-air slave marketsand systemic abuse of migrants. NATO’s intervention, justified on humanitarian grounds, led to the collapse of central authority and the transformation of Libya into a militarised buffer zone, actually funded by the EU to block African migration into Europe through violent coast guard interceptions and indefinite detention in camps that human rights organisations have labelled sites of torture, making it clear this wasn’t about liberation or even imperial punishment, it was system maintenance: de-developing Libya from sovereign nation into a militarised choke point to preserve Europe’s racialised border economy, currency privileges, and the status quo of unequal exchange and elite accumulation.
Gaddafi’s killing puts him on a long list of African leaders executed for threatening African economic sovereignty. The ICC indicted Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir for Darfur and Kenya’s leaders for post-election violence, but has never charged any American or European leader for wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. The racial element is evident: a pattern in which crimes committed by leaders of predominantly white countries are met with impunity, while crimes by leaders of non-white countries are met with accountability (except when it’s convenient), and the West knows this. After the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, the ICC Prosecutor said he received threats while conducting investigations against top Israeli officials, with a senior figure telling him the Court was “built for Africa and for thugs like Putin”, and not for the West and its allies.
Even media rhetoric reflects this double standard, with the war in Ukraine providing the perfect juxtaposition as Ukrainian resistance fighters are lionised as heroes defending their homeland, even when on occasion their resistance fighters, particularly the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion have been pictured with swastikas, while Palestinian fighters, who like Ukrainians, are legally allowed to resist occupation under International law, are almost reflexively branded “terrorists” or “antisemites” by Western media and officials.
In sum, Israel’s impunity is a prime example of this double standard. Western governments not only fail to hold Israel accountable; they actively block others from doing so. Blinken’s denial of a “double standard” rings hollow when the US provides legal cover and unfettered support to an ally killing civilians by the tens of thousands. The global outcry over these biases is growing. Non-Western countries increasingly speak out about Western hypocrisy – noting that calls for a “rules-based international order” are undermined when rules apply only to adversaries, never to friends This racial and imperial asymmetry in enforcing human rights ensures that victims of Western-aligned violence (such as Palestinians) are left with no justice, while Western nations claim moral high ground against others. It is a system that effectively says: “Only our enemies commit war crimes”. Understanding this context is key to explaining why Israel can act with such brazenness – it is shielded by the world’s most powerful states, due not only to strategic interests but also a deep-seated worldview that places Israel (and those deemed part of Western/white identity) above the law.
Structural Bias in Western Media: Manufacturing Consent for Genocide
One of the pillars upholding Israel’s favourable image and excusing its abuses is the structural bias in Western media, especially in the US and U.K. Mainstream outlets, often billionaire owned and therefore materially dependent on the continuation of imperialism and unequal exchange (outlined in part one), often frame conflicts in a manner that dehumanises Arabs and Muslims while humanizing Israelis (or more broadly, white, Western lives). This media bias is not simply anecdotal; it’s well-documented by content studies, journalist testimonies, and the stark difference in coverage between comparable events.
A 2024 media analysis highlighted “the racist and dehumanizing double standards of war reporting” in US news coverage. The study, which compared CNN and MSNBC’s treatment of Israel’s war in Gaza vs. Russia’s war in Ukraine, found that Palestinians killed in Gaza received far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israeli victims or Ukrainian victims. This disparity has been explored in depth by Mondoweiss, which conducted a comparative analysis of The New York Times’ coverage of Ukraine and Gaza. The study found that the Times used humanizing, emotive language, such as “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “innocents”, extensively in reference to Ukrainian victims, but avoided those same terms when describing Palestinian deaths, even when casualty figures were far higher. This linguistic double standard reveals how editorial choices serve to construct Palestinians as less grievable, less human, and therefore less worthy of outrage or solidarity.
In the first 100 days of the Gaza war (post-October 7, 2023), the tone and empathy extended to Palestinian civilians was markedly lower – their deaths were often reported as statistics or with caveats, whereas Israeli deaths or hostage releases were individualised and mourned, and Ukrainian suffering was given wall-to-wall emotional coverage with cries of injustice due to “Ukrainian refugees blond hair and blue eyes”. This double standard suggests that Western media inherently values some lives over others. Critics have pointed out that American media’s “consistent dehumanization and erasure” of Palestinian suffering has enabled the prolonged killing to continue with little public outrage. In contrast, Ukrainians or Israelis are routinely portrayed with stories of their lives, families, and the injustice of their deaths. The imbalance is so severe that over 1,500 journalists (many from major US outlets) signed open letters in late 2023 protesting their own employers’ biased coverage of Israel-Palestine, arguing that newsrooms were whitewashing Israeli atrocities and devaluing Palestinian lives, this trend is mirrored in Britain, as eight UK-based journalists at the BBC wrote a detailed letter accusing the broadcaster of “failing to tell the story of Israel-Palestine accurately”, while every critic of Israel on British TV is first met with the infamous litmus-test question to determine if their opinions should be considered valid “But do you condemn Hamas?”
Western media bias operates through several mechanisms. One is terminology: for example, Israeli actions are described with sanitizing language (“airstrikes” or “precision security operations”) whereas similar actions by Palestinians or other Muslims are labeled with loaded terms (“terrorist attacks”, “massacres”), while Israel´s captured are hostages and Palestinians are ´prisoners or detainees´, or debunked claims of beheaded babies and sexual violence on October 7th continue to be parroted across Western media, while actual videos of beheaded babies in Gaza and systematic rape of Palestinian abuductees are completely ignored. Meanwhile even with death tolls, Palestinian claims and death reports are usually contextualised with “claim Hamas” to sow doubt in readers minds.
The Al Jazeera Media Institute notes that CNN, BBC, NY Times, and others have been “repeatedly criticised for one-sided coverage, selective terminology, and lack of balanced representation”. Palestinian voices are underrepresented, as reports often feature Israeli officials or Western analysts, but seldom Palestinians on the ground, and when they are included, they are often attacked and forced to defend or condemn armed resistance, rather than given the chance to give their side of the story, as most Israelis are.
Another mechanism is contextual framing: Israeli violence is routinely contextualised as “response” or “defence,” implying justification, while Palestinian violence is framed as aggression sprung from Islamic fanaticism or antisemitism, ignoring their reality of living under occupation. Even when casualty figures show an unimaginable Palestinian death toll, headlines might use the passive voice (“Clashes erupt” or “Violence flares”) rather than assigning clear responsibility to Israel, and when forced to report on the crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as Dr. Abusalama outlines in her book “Between Reality and Documentary”, frame the issue as a “humanitarian catastrophe” with no oppressor, rather than a political struggle based on colonialism and occupation.
The end result is a subtle dehumanization and obfuscation of blame for the plight of Palestinians, as the audience does not see Palestinians (or Arabs/Muslims in conflict with the West) as fully realised people with equal moral weight. As media watchdogs like “Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting” and “Media Matters for America” put it, US networks show a “pointed lack of sympathy” for Palestinians, echoing popular Israeli sentiment that “there are no innocents in Gaza”, even children, and therefore deserve to be placed within what has been converted from the world’s largest open air prison to the world’s largest torture chamber, helping to manufacture public consent in the US to their country’s role in an 18-month death campaign.
Assal Rad, of DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now), explains that because US policy and rhetoric have long been pro-Israel, it “shapes public perception and influences media narratives that often go unchallenged”. The political alliance, and the same vested interests present in the media-political establishment, translates into media adopting the framing of US officials. For instance, media widely parroted the phrase “Israel has the right to defend itself” (which UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese has pointed out on many occasions, simply isn´t true due to Israel´s status as an occupier) as a virtual mantra, even as that “defence” entailed bombing dense civilian areas in Gaza, water desalination plants, hospitals, schools or ambulances. Meanwhile, phrasing like “occupied,” “siege,” or even mentioning the root causes (occupation, dispossession) of this “conflict” were downplayed or omitted, because they shift the narrative of Israel to being an oppressor. This bias is so deeply embedded that even basic empathy can become controversial: when Haaretz, one of Israel’s oldest newspapers, dared to describe Palestinians as “freedom fighters” in an international human rights forum, the backlash was swift. The Israeli government condemned the language as “incendiary” and initiated a soft boycott, restricting access and pressuring advertisers. This chilling response underscores how even Israeli media outlets are coerced into aligning with the nationalist-security paradigm, showing that dissent is stifled not only through occupation, but through economic and institutional discipline.
Activists and observers have tried to highlight this bias. In Britain, the BBC has been the focus of direct action by groups such as Palestine Action, a grassroots network known for disrupting institutions linked to Israeli arms companies and media complicity. The group splashed red paint across BBC headquarters in London, symbolising Palestinian blood, to protest what they describe as the broadcaster’s “whitewashing of Israeli war crimes.” The campaign highlights how corporate media, deeply tied to Britain’s military-industrial and imperial legacy, continues to serve elite geopolitical interests while criminalising resistance narratives.
Such accusations are backed up by internal emails and staff leaks, which have indicated there is huge pressure within Western outlets to avoid language too sympathetic to Palestinians. For instance, terms like “occupied Palestine” or showing graphic scenes of Palestinian casualties often face editorial caution or are sanitised, whereas Israeli trauma is prominently featured. Importantly, this narrative control does not operate in isolation, it reinforces the material impunity granted by trade, finance, and geopolitical alignment.
This structural and systemic bias in media doesn’t just reflect public sentiment – it shapes it. When a population is consistently shown one side’s humanity and the other side’s facelessness, combined with general anti-Islam reporting across the media at large, it cultivates indifference or even contempt for the other side. As Al Jazeera commentator Faras Ghani summarised, Western media frequently “downplay Palestinian suffering and justify Israeli actions”, which has become “the norm” in coverage.
The human impact of this bias is profound. It enables Western politicians to support harsh Israeli military actions without fearing significant public backlash, because the media has sufficiently dehumanised the Palestinian people. It also feeds into Islamophobic and anti-Arab tropes, by often associating Arabs/Muslims primarily with violence or extremism. Meanwhile, Israeli Jews (or Westerners in similar situations) are given full nuance – as doctors, teachers, children, with hopes and fears. Correcting this bias is not merely an ethical journalism issue; it’s literally a matter of life and death, as, as history shows us, misinformed publics allow wars and injustices to continue for as long as they are profitable.
Conclusion
Israel’s extraordinary impunity on the international stage is the product of a toxic combination of imperial interests and racial-cultural bias. As we have shown, the US and its allies indulge Israel not merely because of lobbying or vague notions of friendship, but because Israel serves as a strategic linchpin of Western empire, fragmenting regional unity, securing vital resources and trade routes, and acting as a loyal outpost of military power. These imperial calculations have, since the signing of the Balfour declaration, long trumped any concern for Palestinian rights or international law. Layered atop that is the powerful influence of white supremacy in global politics: elite-driven media bias ensures people across the west implicitly identify with Israel and its European-descended people as part of an “us,” while Arab/Muslim lives are cast as a distant, lesser “other”. This manifests in fawning treatment of figures like Netanyahu, welcomed to Hungary with a red carpet today, and hailed as a partner in defending “civilization” by western elites, and in the dizzying double standards in who gets labelled a terrorist or a war criminal. A Western leader can destroy a country and be forgiven and rehabilitated while an Arab leader resisting Western domination is demonised and executed. Western media narratives systematically valorise Israeli (and by extension Western) perspectives while erasing or delegitimising the voices of the oppressed. Meanwhile, ideological currents like Christian Zionism inject vehement a theological support for Israel in the US, making it politically suicidal for American leaders to hold Israel accountable, no matter how extreme Israel’s actions become.
Western leaders often justify their support for Israel through appeals to “shared democratic values” or “Israel’s right to self-defense.” Yet these narratives collapse under scrutiny: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and UN experts have repeatedly classified Israel as an apartheid regime, while legal scholars like Francesca Albanese have made clear that Israel, as an occupying power, has no legal claim to self-defense against a population it controls. The rhetoric of democracy masks a structural alliance of settler-colonial capital and racial militarism.These myths persist because they obscure the economic underpinnings of the alliance: weapons sales, arms tech co-development, intelligence-sharing, and joint fossil-fuel investments, all binding Israel into the machinery of imperial capitalism.
Understanding Israel’s impunity requires seeing all these forces, and many others, working together in tandem as part of a wider system of domination. It is not just a matter of domestic Israeli politics or clever lobbying, it is a deeper system of inequality which will always require an “other” to externalise costs on, in which Israel’s role as a pillar of Western empire coincides with racialised perceptions that place Israel within the “West”, as exhibited by Israel’s participation in the Eurovision or European football tournaments, and receipt of EU horizon funding, while fatefully, as Edward Said outlined in Orientalism, Palestinians fall outside this sphere as the scary ‘other’. In this system, Israel can violate what few rules exist without fear of sanction. Whether it’s illegally expanding settlements on stolen land, committing genocide in Gaza, or defying dozens of UN resolutions, Israel is shielded by the world’s most powerful states diplomatically, economically, and militarily. The human cost is unimaginable, borne predominantly by Palestinians, but also by other peoples of the Global South from Lebanon to Yemen, both currently under bombardment by Israel and the US, who get caught in the fallout of Israel’s unchecked militarism.
If the world is serious about principles like human rights, sustainability and equality, contingent on dismantling genocidal, apartheid regimes wherever they are, we must confront the tripartite engine that sustains it: imperial domination, racialised hierarchy, and the capitalist interests that bind them. The machinery of global finance, arms trade, and fossil fuel extraction depends on repressing the same populations whose voices are erased in the media and criminalised in law. The occupation of Palestine is not just a racialised project, it is a capitalist one, embedded in the very DNA of the neoliberal world order.
Tackling imperialism or racism without the other won’t be enough, they are two sides of the same coin, meaning racism will only be dismantled materially, that being when the ‘other’, the exploited, can have sovereignty over their own lives, resources and economic priorities. Efforts to shift the geopolitical balance are already underway – for example, the growing trade and diplomatic ties among Global South countries aim to lessen Western dominance in trade, disrupting the mechanisms for unequal exchange and create alternative centres of power. If successful, these could reduce Washington’s ability to unilaterally shield allies like Israel. Similarly, movements to diversify global currency reserves chip away at petrodollar supremacy, thus weakening the leverage that lets the US print endless money and reward or punish others at will.
On the other hand, challenging the racism and bias in Western culture means confronting Orientalist narratives and white supremacist ideologies head on, and while this is happening at the grassroots level, as more people in the West, especially younger and more diverse generations, are calling out the double standards and refusing to buy the old propaganda, the media is moving in the opposite direction to encourage the people disenfranchised by the system to punch down instead of up.
While state power remains entrenched, a counter-hegemonic movement is emerging from below. Simultaneously, tectonic shifts in the global order are challenging Western dominance from above.The unprecedented protests for Palestine in Western cities and universities over the past 18 months, often led by young Jewish activists and people of colour, suggest a potential shift in public consciousness. They are rejecting the notion that some lives inherently matter less and challenging the nature of hierarchy itself. This is crucial, because only a public awakened to the reality will be able to create a strong enough movement to challenge unprecedented power. This change, rooted in the student and trade union movements and supported by direct-action groups, is fighting to be strong enough to reclaim democracy and make the unconditional support of Israel an untenable position, with those in power reacting accordingly, through increased repression and increasingly drastic punishments once unimaginable in our supposed democracies founded in “free-speech and human rights”.
Ultimately, Palestine is a litmus test for the world’s commitment to justice in the 21st century. It sits at the intersection of colonialism, racial inequality, and militarist capitalism. If the world can muster the moral courage and organisation to end the ongoing genocide, which just today April 4th has killed at least 33 more children across three attacks on schools, and hold Israel to account, it would mark a civilizational step forward toward a single standard of law for all, and mark a significant step towards the global collaboration necessary to dismantle the colonial systems of domination and ultimately, preserve life on Earth.
This is our only chance of surviving in the long run, yet this is exactly the threat for Business-as-Usual and the imperial mode of living, with those in power using Israel as a battering ram for precedent and international law, to shift the baseline of what’s acceptable and maintain their relative privilege and status-quo social norms where white supremacism, imperial relativism and unchecked hierarchy dictate whose injustices are punished and whose are ignored. If unchecked it will only perpetuate conflict, competition and cynicism and embolden other aggressors, as it likely has already, from Washington to Europe, as we watch the imperial boomerang return home with a clatter.
The path ahead looks incredibly challenging, but it’s not without hope. Entrenched interests from Wall Street to Riyadh will resist any change tooth and nail, but change often comes from the margins, where contradictions in the system are most antagonistic. As the US isolates itself globally, and global power balances slowly shift eastward and southward, civil society movements continue to push conversations on racism, democracy, sovereignty and decolonisation. Within this rupture, cracks in the edifice of Israeli impunity are appearing.
We see these cracks in the unprecedented, yet so far, ineffective, arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, huge student victories in universities, major wins for the BDS movement and irreversible cultural shifts. The task for activists, academics, sustainability professionals, principled policymakers and the public at large, is to widen those cracks into systemic ruptures. This means boycotts, divestments and sanctions for Israel to isolate it economically, diplomatically and militarily from the rest of the World, as worked with dismantling apartheid in South Africa. It means uniting struggles, as many social and environmental justice groups are doing already, as are trade-unions, student groups and other activist groups, people like Great Thunberg and Jason Hickel who recognise that the fight for Palestinian liberation is ultimately the fight for human liberation, for justice, for democracy, for sustainability, sovereignty and through this, the future of life on our planet.
Only by attacking root causes, such as capitalist-imperialism and white supremacy, both materially and culturally, can we hope to achieve worthwhile systems change and end the disastrous exceptionalism granted to Israel and the United States. Justice in Palestine would not only liberate Palestinians, it would also strike a blow against the broader system of oppression and domination that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction.
A future in which no person, nation or religion is above the law, collaboration between and wellbeing among all life is prioritised, and people are given control of their own resources with collective wellbeing prioritised instead of private profit, is our only chance at collective survival in the long run. The alternative is parasitic billionaires in bunkers siphoning whatever source of life remains on a burning planet, as billions are left to die. Getting to a decolonial future requires naming and dismantling the forces that have shielded Israel and its imperialist sponsors for so long. The first step is acknowledging the truth: Israel’s impunity is not an accident of history, but a reflection of who holds power and whose lives they value. Changing that equation through fighting for true democracy, accountability, sovereignty and global equity is the moral imperative for our times.
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