On June 5, Dorothy Shea, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, vetoed a resolution by the U.N. Security Council to enact an “unconditional and permanent” ceasefire in Gaza, along with the release of all remaining fifty-six hostages and the reversal of current humanitarian aid restrictions by Israel. Shea devoted most of her statement on the matter to blaming Hamas for the ongoing crisis in the region, saying that “The United States has been clear: We would not support any measure that fails to condemn Hamas and does not call for Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza.”
But this standard is inconsistent with that of the United Nations, whose Secretary General, António Guterres, told the Security Council back in December 2023 that “international law cannot be applied selectively. It is binding on all parties equally at all times, and the obligation to observe it does not depend on reciprocity.”
Twenty months into Israel’s horrific siege of Gaza, the United States has continued to aid and enable the state in its crimes while shielding it from efforts by the United Nations and other bodies to enforce international law. Meanwhile, nearly every other country is united in calling for Israel to end its genocide in Gaza and to restore access to food, medicine, water, and the necessities of life for its two million starving people. But their efforts to combat the United States’s and Israel’s defiance of the law have so far been insufficient.
It is no secret within the international community that Israel is continually committing war crimes in Gaza. Last month, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich admitted while speaking at a conference that Israel’s policy of refusing food and other aid into Gaza is intended to leave Palestinians “totally despairing, understanding that there’s no hope and nothing to look for,” so that they will submit to ethnic cleansing and forcible removal from Gaza.
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher has told the BBC that the international community was “very, very clear” in its expectation that all countries stand united against these violations of international humanitarian law, and several Western countries have begun using stronger language in their condemnations of Israel’s actions. But there has not yet been a shift in the United States’s unconditional support for Israel.
If the de facto Ansar Allah (or “Houthi”) government of impoverished, war-ravaged Yemen can single-handedly deny Israel access to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, driving the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy as a result, more powerful countries surely have some collective capacity to isolate Israel diplomatically and economically. And now, with the fallout from Israel’s surprise military strike on Iran last week prompting rare and unusually direct criticism from across the U.S. political spectrum, the response to the U.S.’s and Israel’s actions from other key nations may be poised to shift.
Several countries, it seems, have begun making tentative moves toward this end. On May 19, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada jointly condemned Israel’s actions as “intolerable,” “unacceptable,” “abhorrent,” “wholly disproportionate” and “egregious.” In this joint statement, they publicly committed to the Arab Plan for the reconstruction of Gaza as well as to recognizing Palestinian statehood. The United Kingdom also suspended trade talks with Israel, promising “further concrete actions,” including targeted sanctions, should Israel not end its offensive in Gaza and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.
On June 10th, the U.K. and Canada joined Australia, New Zealand and Norway in imposing joint travel and financial sanctions against Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
But the United Kingdom and Canada are both compromised as defenders of Palestinian rights, as they are each still taking actions to enable Israel’s siege. While Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses to Israel, it continues to supply parts for its forty-five F-35 fighter jets, as well as for the thirty additional F-35s Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin. In August 2024, following an emergency campaign from human rights groups, Canada scrapped a new contract for its Quebec-based General Dynamics factory—already the sole supplier of artillery propellant for the deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza—to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.
The United Kingdom is also compromised in its efforts to support Palestinians. Though the new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has, and suspended thirty out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel in September, the country still supplies Israel with parts for its F-35s.
As Declassified UK has reported, the F-35 program systematically compromises the sovereignty of its partner countries in delivering materials to Israel and other end-users. The United Kingdom currently produces 15 percent of the parts that make up every F-35. Once the materials have been produced, the U.S. military takes immediate ownership of the British-made parts, stores them on British air force bases, and orders the United Kingdom to ship them to Texas for use in new planes, or to Israel and other countries as spare parts for planes already in use. Shipping these planes and parts to Israel is in clear violation of arms export laws held by the United States, United Kingdom, and other partner countries.
British campaigners argue that if the United Kingdom is serious about halting genocide, it must stop all shipments of F-35 parts sent to Israel, whether direct or indirect. In pursuit of the promised “concrete actions,” activists have applied pressure on the government, holding marches in London that have drawn hundreds of thousands of people, as well as a planned series of protests on June 17 at three factories that make F-35 parts.
Other Western countries are similarly implicated by their involvement in weapons production. Germany was responsible for 30 percent of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, largely through two large warship deals. In March 2024, humanitarian groups Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Aid, and Al-Haq sued the Danish government and its largest weapons company, Terma, to stop them from sending Israel critical bomb release mechanisms and other F-35 parts.
The backlash against these countries’ involvement in the F-35 program illustrates that many states play small but critical roles in the maintenance of deadly weapons systems, and must therefore act to ensure these systems are not used to commit war crimes. The United Nations’s resolution for a full arms embargo against Israel, which passed with an overwhelming majority in its General Assembly in September 2024, could potentially play an instrumental role in the campaign to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza should more countries join it.
In December 2024, Sam Perlo-Freeman of Campaign Against the Arms Trade told Declassified UK that the United Kingdom has a legal obligation to stop shipping F-35 parts. “These spare parts are essential to keep Israel’s F-35s flying,” Perlo-Freeman said, “and therefore stopping them will reduce the number of bombings and killings of civilians Israel can commit. It is as simple as that.”
Trump’s military and political support for Israel’s genocide stands in stark contradiction to his self-promoted image as a peacemaker—a label which his most loyal followers still believe him to embody. His decisions to end the United States’s bombing campaign in Yemen and lift sanctions on Syria in May suggested an attempt to break from the neocon playbook of endless war and sanctions, as did his negotiations with Russia and Iran.
Trump’s approval of Israel’s plan to attack Iran on June 12th, even as Iran was negotiating with the United States on a diplomatic solution, seems to confirm the worst fears of all who do not trust Trump to negotiate in good faith or to be a real peacemaker.
Though the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate and the International Atomic Energy Agency have maintained for nearly two decades that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, Republicans and hawkish Democrats have long eyed Iran as a target for their warmongering. But in Congress, Israel’s recent attack has received negative responses from both sides of the aisle, with some Republicans and corporate Democrats joining progressives to condemn actions that could escalate into another full-scale U.S. war.
The huge and consistent pro-Palestine protests throughout Europe are putting pressure on Western governments to take action on Gaza. A new survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that very few Europeans–between 6% and 16% in each country--find Israel’s assault on Gaza proportionate or justified. European public support for war on Iran may be just as low.
For now, however, the Western governments remain deeply complicit in Israel’s atrocities and violations of international law. The rhetoric is shifting—but history will judge this moment not by what leaders and governments say, but by what they do.