Israel’s war on Gaza and the West’s credibility crisis

Western support for Israel is threatening the liberal world order the West had so persistently promoted for decades.

Over the past decade and a half, I have attended many meetings and conferences, and met many people in Western governments, think tanks and academia who have been concerned about the rise of autocracies across the world. Many of them believe that authoritarian tendencies are the biggest threat to the liberal world order and rules-based system.

But I beg to differ. I believe the biggest threat to the liberal world order comes from liberal democracies and not their autocratic nemeses. That is because there is a widening chasm between the values Western governments proclaim to uphold and their actual conduct. That has triggered a credibility crisis that threatens to unravel the liberal world order.

What we say about our value system and how we project our foreign policy objectives in our statements is important, but even more important is what we do afterwards. People have eyes and ears, and when what they see is the opposite of what they hear, they lose trust.

This is what is happening now with Western rhetoric and actions in relation to Israel and Palestine. This mismatch between what is said and what is being done is, of course, nothing new.

I come from a region where we have suffered immensely as a result of the great liberal promise of the West; our neighbour Afghanistan faced disaster not once, but twice because of it. As we moved from one war to another after the 9/11 attacks in the US, the Western-made liberal order started to lose its credibility faster than the West had time to realise. It left behind a debris of chaos, bloodshed and broken promises of “democratisation” and “emancipation”. The