Never again, except for Palestinians: The moral realignment

by Ziyad Motala

Western leaders readily rediscover moral language when horror arrives on their own shoreline. After the murderous attack at Bondi Beach, Australia’s political class, rightly, denounced terrorism and mourned the dead. A nation gathered. Candles were lit. The grammar of moral clarity briefly returned to public life.

That clarity evaporates the moment the victims are Palestinian.

On any given week, despite the so-called ceasefire, Gaza and the West Bank produce images so grave that they should end political careers and place their perpetrators behind bars. Hospitals are starved of fuel. Children are killed in places the world once called “safe.” Settlers drive civilians from their homes. Unlawful attacks and the use of starvation as a method of warfare, long recognised as grave violations of international law, continue with numbing regularity.

Yet much of the Western political and media establishment responds not with scrutiny, but with ritual. The ritual has a name: antisemitism and the Holocaust.

They now seek to criminalise criticism of Israel itself, deploying antisemitism not as a shield against hatred but as a weapon against accountability. No honest person diminishes antisemitism or the singular barbarity of the Nazi project. The Holocaust must not be weaponised as a rhetorical prop. It is a moral abyss that demands remembrance, education, and vigilance. Precisely because it is so grave, its instrumentalisation is so corrosive. In too many Western capitals, the Holocaust has been converted into an exemption card, a standing absolution for a state’s present conduct, even when that conduct is documented, litigated, and condemned by the most authoritative and mainstream human rights institutions in the world.

The argument runs as follows: because Jews suffered the ultimate crime, the Jewish state cannot plausibly commit atrocity. This reverence is a moral non sequitur. It converts memory into immunity. It also debases the lesson Western leaders claim to honour. “Never again” was never meant to mean never again, except when a favourite ally does it.

The American right’s unexpected revolt

A second development now complicates this familiar script. In the United States, a noticeable segment of right-wing commentary has shifted from reflexive Zionist piety to open scepticism, even contempt, for Israel’s war in Gaza and for Washington’s habit of underwriting it. This is not the progressive left speaking. It is the populist right, the “America First” faction, increasingly hostile to foreign entanglements and suspicious of permanent alliances that appear immune from scrutiny.

Tucker Carlson has become the most visible emblem of this shift, openly challenging the premise that Israel is a strategic asset rather than a strategic liability, and in doing so igniting a civil war within conservative institutions. Carlson has gone further, criticising Israeli human rights violations in Gaza and questioning why the United States continues to finance them.

The critique is not merely geopolitical. It is domestic and distributive. Why, critics ask, is Congress capable of limitless urgency for foreign military financing, including the underwriting of actions that violate basic human rights norms, yet paralysed by the everyday emergencies of American life?

Marjorie Taylor Greene, hardly a humane standard-bearer, has voiced this argument in its crudest and most disruptive form. She has tied foreign military aid to the neglect of soaring health insurance costs at home, explicitly juxtaposing Israel funding with America’s affordability crisis. More strikingly, she has described the assault on Gaza as genocide and condemned Israeli bombing campaigns that have struck Christian churches. Whatever one thinks of Greene, she is giving voice to a sentiment that is no longer fringe: the belief that an “Israel-first” posture has become a litmus test in Washington, even as grave Israeli human rights violations are financed by the United States while Americans drown in premiums, rent, and debt.

This is the new right-wing syllogism. If the alliance is truly “strategic,” it should make Americans safer and more prosperous. If it does neither and costs them dearly, then it resembles not strategy but habit, ideology, and political capture by the Zionist lobby.

When repellent voices say the quiet part aloud

There is, of course, a darker tributary feeding this moment. Some criticism comes from repugnant antisemites and outright neo-Nazis, including Nick Fuentes, who deserves no amplification. Their purpose is not justice for Palestinians. It is hate.

Still, even this filth is revealing, not because it is morally serious, but because it exposes a contradiction the establishment has tried to suppress. The West has spent decades insisting that ethnic supremacy is inherently suspect, until it is rebranded as “security” and aligned with Washington’s donor class. The more Israel presents itself as an explicitly ethnonational state, the harder it becomes to sustain the old liberal fiction that it is merely “like any other democracy.” When that fiction collapses, bad actors rush in to exploit the wreckage.

The correct response is neither to silence all criticism by smearing it as antisemitism, nor to indulge antisemites because they share a conclusion. The correct response is to insist on a clean moral line. Antisemitism is a poison. Palestinian life is not expendable. An ethno-fascist state is fundamentally anti-democratic and must be named as such.

Public opinion has moved. Elites have not

Now consider the numbers. Pew Research Center’s spring 2025 survey across twenty-four countries records overwhelmingly unfavourable views of Israel throughout much of the West. In the United Kingdom, sixty-one per cent report an unfavourable view. France registers sixty-three per cent. Germany sixty-four. Canada sixty. Australia seventy-four. The United States fifty-three. In several European countries, the figures climb higher still: the Netherlands at seventy-eight per cent, Spain and Sweden at seventy-five, Greece at seventy-two.

These figures tell a story that political elites persistently refuse to hear. The so-called “special relationship” is increasingly special only to those who professionally benefit from it. Large majorities in mainstream democracies view the Zionist project with moral revulsion and reject the attempt to smear that judgment as antisemitic.

This is the defining disconnect of our moment. Political classes and major media institutions continue to speak as if Israel’s narrative is the default moral setting. The public, confronted daily with Gaza’s devastation and Palestinian suffering, has reached a different conclusion. What follows from this.

Three conclusions suggest themselves

First, for the majority of citizens in democratic societies, the Holocaust and antisemitism can no longer function as a trump card to excuse Israel’s violations of international norms. The understanding of the Holocaust must return to its true purpose. It is a warning against dehumanisation, collective punishment, and the bureaucratisation of cruelty. If remembrance is to mean anything, it must discipline power, not launder it.

Second, Western political elites are wagering that the old formula still works. Condemn terrorism when it strikes “us,” relativise atrocity when it strikes “them.” The Bondi Beach attack, like other attacks in the West, was properly condemned. The public is now telling its governments that moral reflexes cannot be reserved for Western victims alone. To reserve them so is grotesque racialised moral hierarchy, plain and indefensible.

Third, the emerging right-wing revolt in the United States should alarm the pro-Israel establishment, though not for the reasons it loudly proclaims. This is not merely a public relations problem. Support for the colonial Zionist project has become politically unsustainable across ideological lines. When both left and right increasingly view the alliance as immoral, expensive, and strategically incoherent, the political centre eventually loses its monopoly on the narrative.

The tragedy is that this reckoning has come only after Gaza was reduced to ruin. Politics often follows the bodies. If Western leaders wish to salvage even a residue of credibility, their publics are instructing them to stop debasing the moral capital of the Holocaust to excuse present injustice and to apply, at last, the lesson that memory demands. The value of human life is not contingent on race, religion, or passport.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

“Reprinted from….”https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251229-never-again-except-for-palestinians-the-moral-realignment/