Genocide or WWIII

Cannot Be the Ultimatum

The U.S. genocide against Indigenous peoples and through slavery—remains the moral and political rationale that demands repair, reparation, and dismantling.

Are we living through an ultimatum: either stop the genocide or ignite a third world war?

This is not rhetorical question. It is the logical outcome of a world order held hostage by nuclear powers, where international law is cited like scripture and repeatedly broken, and where unipolar global institutions have become mechanisms for managing atrocity rather than preventing them.

The United Nations was born from the ashes of global war and genocide with a singular promise: never again. But in Gaza, again is already here. And again, the world watches on, paralyzed by veto power, silenced by strategic alliances, disarmed by the very architecture meant to safeguard peace. The world understands that the United States provokes conflict and perpetuates crisis, and governments understand that the United States holds a special place in the bleak house of global governance as the only country to drop atomic bombs on civilian populations. We possess a particular kind of evil, one that exists in the shadow of genocide, slavery, and dispossession. It is under this shadow that today’s horrors emerge, codified within our national DNA as a mutation of exceptionalism.

There is no credible dispute over the nature of this genocide. The International Court of Justice has affirmed the case for genocide against Israel under the Genocide Convention. The pattern is visible to everyone: targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure, denial of food and medicine, mass displacement, and a governing rhetoric that dehumanizes an entire people. This is not the collateral damage of war. This is the machinery of erasure.

Yet no state has intervened. No sanctions. No arms embargo. No peacekeeping force. Not because the facts are unclear, but because the perpetrators are shielded by nuclear deterrence and embedded within the global hierarchy of power. As the world understands as clearly as any one of us, Israel is backed by the United States, the most militarized and politically dominant country in the world. That fact alone explains why every international legal mechanism has so far failed to function.

The Genocide Convention, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the Rome Statute—each of these instruments becomes theater in the face of nuclear impunity. And the UN Security Council, which should act as a guarantor of peace, stands not as a gatekeeper, but as its gravekeeper, locked by the veto of the very states whose weapons fuel the horror.

If international institutions cannot act to stop a genocide they themselves recognize, then they are not institutions of justice—they are instruments of paralysis.

It is in this context that the question must be asked: if the genocide in Palestine is allowed to proceed unchallenged, what prevents others from following? What precedent is set when a state can openly destroy a people, and the world responds not with action but with carefully worded statements and declarations? What remains of global order when the worst crime imaginable is livestreamed, litigated, and still permitted?

The answer, increasingly, is nothing. The order is broken. It is not that the international community has failed to respond. It is that the concept of an “international community,” as currently constructed, is no longer viable.

The Long Arc of Genocide: Settler Colonialism

Since 1948, Israeli policy has followed a pattern familiar to all settler colonial states: dispossession, fragmentation, militarization, and demographic manipulation. The Nakba was not an isolated catastrophe. It was the beginning of a regime that continues to erase Palestinian presence through laws, walls, permits, and bombs, guided by much of the same logic and conceit that guided the erasure of our First Nations brothers and sisters in what is now the United States.

Genocide, in this frame, is not merely the acceleration of violence. It is the culmination of a long strategy that unfolded with colonialism and continues in the open, with a level of impunity only possible when backed by the world’s dominant military power.

This is not about “both sides.” This has never been a war between equals. It is the strategic elimination of a stateless, colonized people by a nuclear-armed settler state. And it is being carried out with the full knowledge and material support of the very same governments that claim to uphold international norms.

What has been done to end the genocide?

South Africa’s case before the ICJ marked a watershed moment. The Court issued provisional measures instructing Israel to prevent genocidal acts and ensure humanitarian access. But without enforcement, these orders remain in suspended animation, legally binding but politically impotent.

The ICC’s move to seek arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, alongside Hamas officials, may appear to restore balance. But parity, in this instance, obscures asymmetry. Equating the colonizer and the colonized, the occupier and the occupied, is not legal neutrality—it is moral flattening. And again, no state with the power to enforce those warrants appeared willing to act.

A few governments—Bolivia, Colombia, Chile—have taken limited diplomatic steps. A handful of European nations have begun legal reviews of arms exports. China’s Beijing Declaration established the legal recognition of a governing administration in the PLO. Municipal governments, unions, and cultural institutions have condemned Israel’s actions. But these responses, while politically significant, remain fragmented and insufficient in the face of mass atrocity.

The decisive actors are those with the capacity to impose sanctions, enforce embargoes, or suspend military aid. The very same states that remain complicit.

The clarity and courage of Civil Society

Where governments have failed, global civil society has responded with clarity and courage.

From student encampments to port blockades, from boycotts to labor union resolutions, a wide network of dissent refuses the silence, rejects normalization, and shouts “Genocide!” for the world to hear.

This movement, however decentralized, constitutes the most coherent moral opposition to genocide today. It channels the legacy of anti-apartheid resistance, though the geopolitical terrain is now far more treacherous and the blowback for repercussion is tangible. Israel is not isolated. It is deeply embedded in military-industrial networks, intelligence-sharing alliances, and financial systems that protect it from sanction.

Still, these movements matter. They shift public discourse, exert pressure from below, and reveal a growing rift between governed populations and governing elites. They are not yet sufficient. But they are essential.

The refusal of institutions to stop the genocide is not simply a failure. It is a rupture that signals the end of a particular era of global governance.

The post-WWII liberal order, with its courts, councils, and conventions, no longer holds moral authority. Its most powerful members are its most consistent violators. And its procedures have become obstacles rather than pathways to justice.

In response, an alternative alignment is taking shape. The Global South, through BRICS+, the Non-Aligned Movement, and emerging regional blocs is repositioning itself against Western dominance. Palestine is the prism through which this shift is refracted: not just a humanitarian issue, but a geopolitical fault line. Whether this realignment can produce a new legal and political architecture remains uncertain. But what is clear is that the old order has collapsed in everything but name and that new mechanisms of enforcement must emerge and hold the most powerful perpetrators of crimes against humanity accountable.

These mechanisms may not come from governments. They may emerge from civil society, shaped by popular movements rather than state institutions. However they take form, the hope remains that the Global South will choose to support people over industries, and communities over corporations.

The Consequences of Watching

To permit genocide in the open is to destroy the possibility of law. It is to announce, to the world, that some lives are expendable and some crimes unpunishable.

And it is not just Palestine that suffers for this. If genocide can be carried out without consequence, then no one safe. No treaty holds. No institution governs. Only power. And we see that today with the unwarranted arrests of citizens and immigrants in the United States by federal agents. These are not just illegal arrests, these are motivations of those guided by hatred, bigotry, and small-minded bully tactics.

This is the true danger—not only the horror of what is happening in Gaza, but the precedent it sets for a world already teetering on ecological and social collapse, economic fragmentation, and geopolitical volatility.

The genocide in Palestine is not an aberration. It is a mirror. And in that mirror, we, the collective international community must now see ourselves stripped of pretense, exposed in our complicity, and confronted with acts of choice.

To act, or to accept that we live in a world where genocide is not only possible, but also permissible is to live in a world where atrocity becomes governance, and survival like the fiction of a zombie apocalypse becomes the exception rather than the norm.

Genocide or World War Three cannot be the ultimatum.