“Every empire, however grandiose, is a fragile construction, not unlike a literary text, subject to interpretation, rewriting, and even dismantling.”
—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 331.
Let us begin not with politics, but with a parable.
On 13th October 2022, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s chief diplomat, stood before the students of the College of Europe in Bruges and uttered what he no doubt considered an elegant metaphor: “Europe is a garden. The rest of the world is a jungle.” The garden was his Eden—trimmed, civil, ruled by law and light. The jungle? Chaotic, dark, teeming with threats to the order so carefully cultivated by the European hand.
This metaphor, as Edwy Plenel immediately understood, was no slip of the tongue. It was an axiom. It revealed the deep structure of the Western imaginary, which still sees itself as a beacon among brutes, a lighthouse casting moral clarity across a sea of unruly others. From this imaginary flows not only foreign policy but the epistemology of power itself—who gets to name, who gets to act, and who gets to suffer in silence.
The myth of moral clarity is one of the West’s most enduring cultural products. It is exported not only through ideology but also through jets, embargoes, aid packages, white papers, and prime-time broadcasts. It enables extraordinary acts of violence to be narrated as a reluctant necessity, and it recasts resistance as pathology. But beneath this rhetorical scaffolding lies a crisis too great to ignore: the incoherence of the Western world order, now laid bare by its serial hypocrisies, moral evasions, and geopolitical retreat.
We live in an age in which the West still speaks the language of human rights but has lost the capacity to enact them without contradiction. The 2025 collapse of the UN Conference on Palestine is not merely a diplomatic failure. It is a mirror shattering. In its shards, we see not just the broken ambitions of a peace process but the fragmented self-image of a civilisation that once believed it spoke for the world. This underscores the importance of recognizing Palestinian rights, which may leave the audience feeling a sense of justice that needs to be upheld.
The Disfigured Mirror
The moral cartography by which the West once navigated the world has grown grotesque. Rockets launched from Gaza are terrorism, but cluster bombs dropped from American-subsidized jets are “defensive operations.” Netanyahu, who governs behind the smokescreen of a permanent state of emergency, is a defender of civilisation. Iran, with its long history of foreign subjugation, is cast as an ungovernable theocracy. Occupation becomes complex. Apartheid becomes an unfortunate necessity. And the ultimate sin, we are told, is not to commit injustice but to speak too harshly of it.
This distortion does not happen in silence. It is rehearsed daily in think tanks, repeated across op-ed pages, and embedded in the language of international institutions. But true clarity requires one to look not into a polished mirror but into fire. And the fire is burning—in Jenin, in Rafah, in the obliterated neighbourhoods of Gaza City, where childhood ends not in time but in shockwaves.
Here lies the grotesque irony of Western “balance”: the equal weighting of a boot and a throat. A slingshot and a drone. A stateless people and the fifth most powerful military in the world. This is not moral complexity; it is ethical farce.
The Diplomacy of Exhausted Legitimacies
There is little that is accidental in the theater of international affairs. The near-simultaneous condemnations from Ottawa, London, and Paris were not the stirrings of conscience but, as one Israeli official bluntly put it in Haaretz, an “ambush.” It was a coordinated performance, timed to precede Brussels’ deliberations—a gesture not of moral reckoning, but of optical calibration. The objective: to feign distance from Israel’s excesses just as the slaughter reaches its terminal phase. To manage perception, not policy. To appease outrage without disturbing alliance.
President Emmanuel Macron’s hyperactive engagement with the Palestine file is less a step forward than a sidestep—out of Africa and into the Middle East, out of a crumbling sphere of postcolonial tutelage and into a new theatre of managed moralism. It is a manoeuvre born not of conviction, but of historical displacement. As the embers of Françafrique cool into ash, Macron seeks to kindle a new kind of relevance—not by returning to first principles, but by rebranding France’s faded grandeur under the banner of Palestinian diplomacy.
France is not alone in this recalibration. Britain and Canada, middle powers likewise caught between imperial memory and post-imperial fatigue, joined Macron’s chorus with striking act of geopolitical synchrony. After years of euphemism and evasion, they found their tongues. Statements were sharpened; sanctions hinted. Yet this was not an awakening—it was choreography. A concerted effort not to rescue Gaza, but to salvage the dwindling moral capital of the West’s aging protagonists.
The Macron manoeuvre, now echoed in London and Ottawa, is less about the crisis in Gaza than the crisis of credibility facing the liberal international order. As the American imperium frays and as ascendant powers call out the West’s hypocrisies, the old middle powers are left exposed—not for lack of force, but for lack of faith. They find themselves in crisis—not of capability, but of credibility.
The inflexion point came on May 19, 2025,: an improbable triad—France, Britain, and Canada—shifted, near-simultaneously, from studied silence to stern reproach of Israel’s actions. They issued a joint declaration condemning the Gaza offensive and warning of “concrete actions” if the humanitarian crisis worsened. Within a day,Britain froze trade talks and sanctioned West Bank settlers. Caught in varying degrees of imperial afterlife, France and Canada followed suit. But this was no rupture—it was a pivot. A carefully scripted repositioning that revealed the performative marrow of Western diplomacy. Palestine becomes the alibi. A platform upon which these states rehearse relevance, not righteousness.
In Brussels, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced a review of the bloc’s political and economic agreement with Israel, invoking its human rights clause. Seventeen of twenty-seven member states supported the move. The proposal, led by Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp, focused on Israel’s violations of Article Two of the Association Agreement—the clause that insists relations rest on respect for human rights. Veldkamp’s letter cited Israel’s worsening of an already “dire humanitarian situation.” A legalistic overture, but no less part of the script.
In London, Keir Starmer executed his own carefully timed pivot. Having spent his early leadership disavowing Labour’s pro-Palestinian past, he now found himself cornered—by diasporic discontent, by youth uprisings, by the rhetorical assertiveness of the Global South. He shifted posture. He spoke with the gravitas of a statesman, aligning with Paris and Ottawa. This was not the awakening of principle, but the calculus of reputational risk. Inaction now costs. Even technocrats must perform conscience.
Then came Mark Carney’s Canada—a state long cast as the avatar of procedural decency—now confronting its reckoning. Carney, Central banker-turned-premier, had avoided the word “genocide” on the campaign trail, invoking the need to preserve neutrality. But as the ICJ advanced its case, as allies recognized Palestine, and as civil society closed in, he too joined the chorus. Not as leader. Not as laggard. As brand manager. Carney understood the market in moral legitimacy. Silence was too costly. He adjusted the message.
None of this was spontaneous. The groundwork had been carefully laid. Establishment media had already softened the terrain with a new lexicon—“intolerable,” “disproportionate,” “dark phase.” By the time the leaders stepped forward, the narrative was primed. They spoke in familiar cadences, with calibrated indignation. It was a rupture in tone, not in substance. Arms shipments continued. Diplomatic cover held. Not a single binding sanction emerged. This was dissent as stagecraft.
In the end, these three leaders form a tableau—middle powers seeking a script. Their pivot toward Gaza is not a movement to end genocide, but a maneuver to disassociate from it. Their condemnations arrive after the atrocity, not to prevent it but to preempt judgment. Once the cameras are rolling. Once history’s lens is fixed.
This is not the dawn of a new moral foreign policy. It is the choreography of exhausted legitimacies. The playbook is clear: act late, act loudly, and exit with reputation intact.
Recognize Palestinian Statehood
At the preparatory meeting for the UN conference on Palestine , Saudi Arabia urged states to recognise Palestinian statehood—not as the outcome of peace, but its necessary foundation. Co-chairing the conference with France, Riyadh framed recognition as the starting point of any credible two-state solution.
The conference, described as a break from endless process and a step toward implementation, places fresh pressure on Western holdouts like the UK and France, both of whom have yet to recognise Palestine. President Macron has signalled openness to recognition, but only within a coordinated multilateral context. The UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy echoed that caution, insisting recognition must be timed for “maximum impact.
And so, on 17 June 2025, the United Nations was to host a High-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine. Co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, it was touted as the moment when gesture would give way to action. It did not. Earlier on June 7, The Guardian reported the conference had “weakened its ambition,” downgrading its aim from full recognition of Palestinian statehood to vague, procedural “steps.” Then, Iran was attacked by Israel. The conference was postponed indefinitely.
This failure is not diplomatic inertia. It is a willful retreat. The ICJ, just a year earlier, had issued an advisory opinion declaring the Israeli occupation illegal, setting a twelve-month deadline for withdrawal. UN Resolution A/RES/ES-10/24 was to convert that legal mandate into political momentum. Instead, key Western states blinked. France sought to be both a bridge and a backbone and became neither. Canada offered procedural platitudes, unable to stand by its principles. Britain muttered about complexity.
Why? Because moral clarity, when applied to Palestine, becomes too costly. It threatens the pillars of Western consensus: the inviolability of Israeli sovereignty, the criminalisation of Palestinian resistance, and the strategic alliance architecture inherited from the Cold War. To recognise Palestine is not to reward terror—it is to interrupt a seventy-five-year delay in justice. And that interruption demands not only diplomacy but a reckoning.
While their governments have failed to halt or even name the genocide in real time, Macron, Starmer, and Carney are not stepping into moral leadership. They are choreographing their place in the post-crisis narrative. They are preparing their footnotes for history.
But history may not be so generous.
In Gaza, the reckoning has already happened. It is only in Paris, London, and Ottawa that the language still pretends otherwise.
What then, is being condemned? Not the genocide, it would seem, but its visibility. The purported “red line” has not been drawn at mass death, but at uncontainable spectacle. Netanyahu’s government, said to have “gone too far,” has merely unmasked the enduring logic of Israeli settler-colonialism—made it too difficult to ignore. The only crime, it seems, is making the West complicit in full view of its electorates.
Thus, the trio’s theatrical shift blames the messenger. The problem is not the genocide, but that Netanyahu has let it become a PR disaster. The plan now is to recast him—not Israel—as the problem. Netanyahu becomes the rogue figure. The genocide becomes a misstep. The state remains sacred.
Netanyahu’s Infinite Loop
Amid the silence, one voice never falters. Benjamin Netanyahu, illusionist-in-chief, returns to his familiar refrain: Iran is three to five years away from the bomb. He has said this since 1995. He said it in 2010. He repeats it in 2025. The repetition is not failure—it is strategy. The aim is not to convince but to redirect. As long as Iran looms as a nuclear spectre, no one needs to look too closely at Israeli policies in Gaza, in the West Bank, or East Jerusalem.
This is not a security policy. It is dramaturgy. Netanyahu’s genius lies not in deception but in theatrical excess. He can turn a cartoon bomb into a doctrine. He can starve a population and call it containment. He can burn an olive grove and call it agricultural reform. The Western world, trained to see Israel as an extension of its moral project, plays along.
Here, too, the crisis is not merely a geopolitical one. It is epistemological. The frame through which the West views Israel was constructed in the aftermath of the Holocaust and hardened by Cold War realpolitik. Within this frame, Jews are cast only as victims, never as sovereign actors capable of state violence. Palestinians, conversely, are not merely dehumanised—they are ontologically suspect. They are either extremists or enigmas, never political subjects.
Gardens, Jungles, and the Cartography of Conscience
Challenging these myths requires more than policy critique. It requires intellectual and moral disobedience. This is what Edwy Plenel offers in Le Jardin et la jungle: adresse à l’Europe sur l’idée qu’elle se fait du monde (2024) and Palestine, notre blessure (2025). These are not just books. They are counter-narratives, etched in memory and sharpened by outrage.
If Le Jardin et la jungle is the diagnosis, Palestine, notre blessure is the site of infection. In a series of essays—journalistic yet lyrical, factual yet furious—Plenel chronicles the long betrayal of Palestine. But he does not treat it as a regional conflict, a distant problem, or a historical stalemate. Instead, he situates Palestine as the fault line along which Europe’s commitment to justice shatters. Gaza becomes not just a strip of land under siege but a mirror in which the West sees its ethical collapse.
Plenel begins with Borrell’s metaphor and detonates it. The garden, he argues, is not a sanctuary—it is a zone of exclusion. It is manicured through fences, built on forced labour, and protected by militarised borders. The jungle, far from being Europe’s opposite, is its consequence. The migrants who scale the garden wall are not invaders. They are returns—embodiments of colonial afterlives, emissaries from wars financed and waged by the very countries that now wall them out.
Palestine, in this schema, is not an exception. It is the lens. Gaza is not merely a strip of land under siege—it is the site where Europe’s commitment to human rights dissolves into smoke. Plenel catalogues the names of children, the coordinates of bombings, and the legislation violated. But he does not write merely to mourn. He names the journalists who equivocate. He cites European leaders who abandoned the principle for political gain.
He refuses neutrality. To be neutral in the face of apartheid is to uphold apartheid. To equivocate as hospitals are destroyed and children buried is to align, tacitly, with those who issue the commands. In an age when moral clarity is derided as naïve, Plenel reclaims it as a form of fidelity, not to ideology, but to human dignity.
Funhouse Multilateralism
Before that reckoning, however, comes performance. Nowhere is this more visible than in the spectacle of the G7—a geopolitical nostalgia act in an age that has moved on. Born in an era when its members truly stood at the pinnacle of the global economy, the G7 now clings to relevance through stage-managed unity and photo opportunities, much like a dinner club. In the 1970s, its expansion to include Canada and Italy made sense; today, it is a curio of Cold War architecture, conspicuously silent as the economic and political centre of gravity shifts toward the Global South.
The 2025 G7 summit resembled less a leadership forum and more a diplomatic séance. Leaders fretted not over Gaza or global equity but over whether Zelenskyy’s appearance might provoke the ire of a former U.S. president. The alliance’s strategic calculus has degraded to the point where Trump’s tantrums dictate the margins of international engagement. This is not diplomacy—it is superstition masquerading as statecraft.
Even worse, the G7’s hand-wringing over Trump’s nostalgia for a G8 that included Russia reveals how hollow its claims of principled leadership have become. If NATO’s capacity to confront Russia or uphold international law is held hostage by fears of domestic populism in the United States, then the alliance is not facing a geopolitical crisis—it is confronting a collapse of credibility.
The slide from the G7’s nostalgic pantomime into NATO’s Cold War muscle memory marks a more profound incoherence. When moral legitimacy falters, the West turns not to introspection but to the blunt instruments of the past: deterrence, containment, and militarisation. These institutions, stripped of adaptive purpose, now operate like shadows of themselves—unable to lead, only to react, and poorly.
Collapse and Reckoning
What is happening in Gaza is not a crisis. It is the end of a grammar. The language of human rights, once invoked with solemnity by Western states, now rings hollow. The collapse of the June 2025 conference marks more than a failure of diplomacy; it also signifies a significant setback for the international community. It is the unravelling of a consensus that could once hold contradictions at bay.
The Global South sees this. Palestine has become a litmus test of global sincerity. Once silent, states are now speaking. Movements once fringe are becoming mainstream. Recognition is no longer a prize. It is the price of credibility.
In contrast, the West recites arguments so threadbare they border on satire:
- “Recognition encourages Palestinian intransigence.”
- “It threatens Israeli security.”
- “It rewards October 7.”
- “The right of return is demographic aggression.”
Each claim is a mirror turned backwards. It is not recognition that destabilises—it is occupation. It is not returned that offends justice—it is expulsion that defies the law. The real inversion is not legal. It is moral.
And yet, the West continues to speak of “both sides,” as though parity exists between oppressor and oppressed. It calls for “de-escalation,” as though the root problem were tempers, not tanks. It funds the war and then funds the aid, playing the role of arsonist and firefighter in the same breath.
What Remains
So what remains when the mirror breaks? When the metaphors are exhausted, when the performances end, when the smoke lifts, and we see, at last, what was always there?
Plenel offers no easy comfort. But he offers a wager. That Europe, if it dares to look into the eyes of the migrant, the wounded, the child beneath the rubble, might still recover something of itself. Not the imperial Europe of moral imposition but the dissident Europe of Camus and Fanon. Not the garden, but the soil.
To reach that soil, we must strip away the scaffolding of policy, of euphemism, of historical amnesia. We must speak not in code but in truth. The future will not be secured through ceasefires alone. It demands a dismantling of the myths that make violence legible and justice mute.
Plenel echoes Camus when he asks: What kind of world requires the silence of the just to keep functioning? And what kind of justice begins with breaking that silence?
The answer, if it comes, will not arrive at a conference table. It will arrive when the mirror shatters, and we choose not to look away.