World's Refusal To Sanction Israel Endangers Us All

When justice is selective, when genocide is excused as self-defense, when laws bend to accommodate power, the world grows more dangerous for us all.

The number of Palestinian souls murdered by Israel is higher than 50,000.

But it is a number that no longer functions as a number. It is a concept, an abstraction. It is a mass grave so deep that even the statistics have decomposed. In Gaza, the dead are counted and recounted, but for those who keep the siege in place, the number is irrelevant. The sky rains bombs, the earth shakes, and the people, most of them women and children, are buried beneath the rubble. But the number does not move the world to do something to stop the monstrosity of the rogue Israeli regime, punch-drunk on the blood of tens of thousands of murdered children.

At least 41 people have been confirmed killed and 61 wounded by Israeli attacks in the last 24 hours taking the death toll past 50,000, Al Jazeera reports. Their names will not be known beyond the strip of land that buried them. Among them was a child, Layan Jihad Abu Daqqa, killed in an airstrike on a home in Khan Younis. Another was killed when a bomb fell on a family home in Rafah. At the European Hospital, just east of Khan Younis, the wounded arrived in waves, each new victim a testament to the last. In Rafah, Israeli soldiers opened fire on people fleeing, their escape routes carved by warplanes. The streets of Gaza are crowded with the homeless, and the lucky ones, the ones still alive, do not know where to go.

And in Washington, the most senior elected Democrat in Congress suggests the real problem is that Palestinians don’t believe in the Torah. You cannot make this up. But you do not have to. The absurdity of empire is not a malfunction. It is the design.

Schumer may not have meant to, but he’s made it clear: the Palestinian case is rooted in reason, while Israel’s case relies on a theology only they accept. If that is, as he claims, “the reason there is no peace,” then the fault does not lie with the Palestinians.

Every single Senate Democrat voted for a bill that would give Israel more funding after the ICJ ruled Israel is plausibly committing a genocide. Congress fighting harder for war than for the American people is why they only have a 13% approval rating. For months now, the Israeli government has rejected these numbers, arguing they are exaggerated, invented, impossible. The victims are documented—names, birth certificates, ages, families who once loved them—but the argument is not about accuracy. It never was. Israel’s government does not need to disprove the numbers, only to make them meaningless. And for the most part, it has succeeded. The debate is no longer about the dead but about the validity of their death. The number could be 50,000 or 500,000. The response would be the same.

And the number of murdered Palestinian civilians keeps rising.

Some die under falling buildings. Some are shot while running away. Some waste away in hospitals without medicine, in homes without food, in makeshift shelters where the walls are too thin to keep out the cold. The babies do not even have names before they are gone. The elderly die with no one left to mourn them.

But in Israel, none of this matters.

This war does not belong to the people it is killing. It belongs to those who wage it, those who finance it, those who explain it away. The Israeli public, we are told, is unmoved by the 50,000. It was unmoved at 40,000. It will be unmoved at 100,000 or even a 1,000,000. Every death in Gaza, we are told, is not Israel’s responsibility as the near senile Alan Dershowitz said to me a few days ago in a televised debate recorded for Al Arabiya.

The argument is old, worn out, but still effective. Israel is not responsible for those it bombs. It is not responsible for those it starves. It is not responsible for those it denies medical aid. The occupation is not an occupation. The genocide is not a genocide. The numbers are just numbers. Somehow Hamas and the Palestinians are responsible for Israel and the US’s ethnic-cleansing of them through genocide.

Israel’s government now openly speaks of “voluntary migration”, and Trumps’ government echoes these calls. The forced displacement of Palestinians, once whispered, once denied, now has its own bureaucracy. Plans are drawn. Policies are approved. Entire neighborhoods are emptied, as if by accident, as if by war, as if by fate. The Israeli public, we are told, supports this too. If they could press a button and make Gaza disappear, they would. But reality is more complicated. Ethnic cleansing is, after all, a logistical challenge.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu pounds the table in rage. “Why not 5,000?” he yells at his military chiefs, furious that the bombing has not been enough. “Take down houses, bomb with everything you have.” The quote, reported in Israeli media, is as clear as it is damning. A war crime, in his own words. Evidence of intent. Proof of genocide. But evidence does not matter, proof does not matter. The dead do not matter.

Screenshot of Ynet article.

The world’s refusal to sanction Israel is not an act of neutrality—it is an endorsement. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every child buried beneath the rubble, every deliberate act of starvation, siege, and ethnic cleansing is carried out with the certainty that there will be no consequences. The impunity granted to this rogue regime does not just deepen the suffering of Palestinians; it unravels the very fabric of international law, rendering meaningless the principles meant to protect all people from atrocity. And in that unraveling, the world grows more dangerous.

Meanwhile, in Israel, tens of thousands take to the streets—not against the war, not against the genocide, but against Netanyahu, against their government, against the collapse of their own democracy. They carry signs that say he is killing the hostages. That he is destroying Israel. That he is the problem. And maybe he is. But the bombs still fall. The famine still deepens. The number is still climbing, given that thousands are still trapped under the rubble presumably, unaccounted for.

And still, the world asks if it is enough to matter.

In the halls of the UK Parliament, a slow but unmistakable shift is taking place. More than 50 MPs, cutting across party lines, have put their names to an Early Day Motion demanding a total arms embargo on Israel. The call is clear: economic sanctions must follow. Among them is Jeremy Corbyn, long a lightning rod for controversy, now standing alongside politicians who, not long ago, might have hesitated to take such a stance. The motion does not waver in its language—Israel, it argues, has violated international law, and the UK must no longer be complicit.

Across the Atlantic, the picture is more complicated. In the United States, Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced resolutions aimed at halting over $20 billion in offensive U.S. weaponry bound for Israel. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, too, has spoken against the flow of arms. But here, in Washington’s corridors of power, opposition to Israel’s military machine is an act of careful calibration. While both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been vocal in their calls for economic sanctions against Russia, they stop short of the same measures for Israel. The calculus is different, the political risks greater.

The divide is stark—between a Britain where voices once hesitant now call for consequences, and an America where even the most outspoken progressives measure their words. But beneath it all lies the same question: how many lines must be crossed before accountability is no longer a matter of debate?

When justice is selective, when laws are bent to accommodate power, when genocide is excused with the language of self-defense, what remains to stop the next massacre, the next unchecked brutality? This is not just about Gaza. It is about the message sent to every nation, every despot, every future war criminal: that the powerful may do as they please, and the world will look away.

Will the world sanction Israel when the graves outnumber the living? When the last echoes of laughter are buried beneath the rubble? When the streets of Gaza hold more bones than footsteps?

Will it act when famine is no longer a forecast but a sentence? When children’s ribcages speak louder than the bombs? When the silence of their deaths grows too heavy to ignore?

Or will the graves keep filling, the streets keep emptying, while the world turns away, wringing its hands and rehearsing its helplessness?

Is it a question of when? Or was it never a question at all?