The executioners have come to write the rules of mercy.
They arrive polished and solemn, speaking of reconstruction and humanitarian corridors, but their language is a mask for complicity. What is unfolding in Egypt is not a peace conference; it is a council of the guilty.
The Diplomacy of Hypocrisy
For months, Gaza has endured systematic annihilation. Hospitals, schools, and refugee camps lie in ruins. Food and medicine have been turned into weapons. International law—once imagined as a brake on barbarism—has been contorted into justification for it.
The same states that armed the onslaught—the United States, Britain, and their European allies—now gather to broker what they call a “day after.” These are the governments that blocked cease-fire resolutions, funded the weaponry, and defended the perpetrators in every diplomatic arena. When Israel attacked Iran unprovoked earlier this year, they rushed to its defence. Israel continues to strike targets in Syria and Lebanon, maintains an illegal occupation of portions of their territory, and has extended its bombing campaign to Yemen under the banner of “deterrence.” Each act widens the war while these same governments insist that Israel seeks peace.
The entire scene evokes a chilling historical parallel: it is as if the architects of Europe’s fascist wars had been invited to design the post-war peace. One might imagine Reinhard Heydrich—one of the masterminds of the Holocaust—presiding over discussions on Jewish repatriation, or Francisco Franco hosting a summit on democracy after the Spanish Civil War. Instead in Cairo, we have presiding over this assembly of the complicit, a conclave of blood-polished opportunists, is Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt’s own general-turned-president whose repression of dissent rivals that of the dictators once courted by the West. Such images expose the absurdity of the present moment, a grotesque performance, masking imperial guilt behind the language of compassion. where the perpetrators of violence convene to hiss the language of, and moralise about, peace. It’s like inviting Nazi generals to negotiate post-war Europe. The ethical collapse is obscene, and the insult to human life beyond words.
The New Authoritarians
Across the self-styled liberal world, leaders have learned to mimic the vocabulary of morality while practising its opposite. Britain’s Keir Starmer (Heir Starmtrooper) criminalises protest and bans Palestine Action. Emmanuel Macron supplies arms to a war he claims to lament. Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán exalt “civilisation” while normalising ethnonationalism. Donald Trump still defines the imperial mood in Washington, reducing diplomacy to transaction and justice to branding.
Together they rehearse the same script: repression at home, complicity abroad, and the sanctimonious performance of virtue throughout. Egypt merely provides the stage.
A State Without Restraint
At the centre stands the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu—a coalition that has fused religion, race, and militarism into a single creed. Its logic is not defensive but supremacist: the belief that one people’s security requires another’s erasure.
Israel now behaves as a state liberated from restraint: democracy hollowed out, dissent criminalised, militarism sanctified.
The conduct of Israeli forces and armed settlers — better described as state-protected colonists and aggressors—has stripped away every pretence of “security.” In the West Bank they raid villages, burn homes, and execute and murder Palestinian civilians with impunity, while the army either joins in or looks away. These are not settlers seeking safety; they are invaders who kill and displace under the flag of expansion. They are not policing operations — they are state-sponsored terror.
In Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been obliterated, families executed without trial, and basic necessities turned into instruments of control. The denial of food and water being used as weapons. These are the hallmarks of a system that no longer distinguishes between combatant and child, between governance and vengeance. Such acts stand in open defiance of international law and of the moral code that was meant to protect humanity from the return of organised barbarism.
This is not defence—it is a campaign of annihilation, carried out with the approval and material aid of those now pretending to broker peace. The siege of Gaza is not a war but a policy of eradication—a campaign against life itself. The structures of authoritarianism—purity, fear, collective punishment, bureaucratised cruelty—have re-emerged in modern form. What was once condemned as fascism has been repackaged as “self-defence.”
The Erasure of Palestinian Humanity
The imbalance of empathy could not be clearer. Every Israeli hostage is named, photographed, and mourned; every Palestinian held for years without charge is rendered invisible. Israel calls them “detainees,” but in truth they are hostages—men, women, and children seized from their homes, held indefinitely, denied due process, and released without acknowledgment. Western media perfect this asymmetry, transforming one people’s tragedy into human interest and the other’s into background noise. It is not ignorance but design: atrocity sustained by erasure.
From Destruction to Investment
Adding insult to annihilation, the same figures responsible for earlier wars now re-emerge as “advisers” on Gaza’s future. Tony Blair, whose role in the invasion of Iraq remains one of the century’s great disgraces, proposes to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” That he sits in consulting rooms rather than answering questions in The Hague captures the age’s moral rot.
He is joined by Jared Kushner, who marketed Palestinian land through the Abraham Accords; Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who preach de-escalation while ensuring the flow of U.S. weaponry; and pre-Trump’s presidency, Joe Biden’s administration which blocked every serious call for accountability. Together they represent the revolving door between war, business, and diplomacy: the neoliberal face of empire that converts devastation into “development” and moral failure into geopolitical strategy.
This is not diplomacy; it is desecration—the rebranding of catastrophe as opportunity.
The Collapse of Moral Authority
The Egypt conference exposes the final bankruptcy of Western moral authority. Those who defend war crimes cannot deliver peace; those who profit from occupation cannot claim neutrality. The vaunted “rules-based order” is not law but privilege, shielding the powerful while condemning the powerless.
If justice retained its meaning, this summit would be a tribunal. The attendees would be answering questions, not seated at conference tables drafting communiqués. Instead, they perform compassion like theatre while the machinery of destruction grinds on—relentless, unpunished and unashamed. When the architects of war crown themselves as peacekeepers, justice is not merely wounded; it is executed in public view.
A World Watching
Beyond these air-conditioned halls, millions refuse the charade. Across continents, people march because they recognise Gaza’s destruction for what it is: deliberate policy, not collateral tragedy. They understand that every bomb dropped, every protest criminalised, every truth suppressed indicts not only the perpetrators but the entire moral architecture that protects them.
History will not remember the communiqués from Cairo. It will remember who armed the killers, who censored the truth, and who stood against them. And when accountability finally arrives—as it always does—it will not come from the summits of the guilty but from the conscience of those who refused to look away.
They arrive polished and solemn, speaking of reconstruction and humanitarian corridors, but their language is a mask for complicity. What is unfolding in Egypt is not a peace conference; it is a council of the guilty.
The Diplomacy of Hypocrisy
For months, Gaza has endured systematic annihilation. Hospitals, schools, and refugee camps lie in ruins. Food and medicine have been turned into weapons. International law—once imagined as a brake on barbarism—has been contorted into justification for it.
The same states that armed the onslaught—the United States, Britain, and their European allies—now gather to broker what they call a “day after.” These are the governments that blocked cease-fire resolutions, funded the weaponry, and defended the perpetrators in every diplomatic arena. When Israel attacked Iran unprovoked earlier this year, they rushed to its defence. Israel continues to strike targets in Syria and Lebanon, maintains an illegal occupation of portions of their territory, and has extended its bombing campaign to Yemen under the banner of “deterrence.” Each act widens the war while these same governments insist that Israel seeks peace.
The entire scene evokes a chilling historical parallel: it is as if the architects of Europe’s fascist wars had been invited to design the post-war peace. One might imagine Reinhard Heydrich—one of the masterminds of the Holocaust—presiding over discussions on Jewish repatriation, or Francisco Franco hosting a summit on democracy after the Spanish Civil War. Instead in Cairo, we have presiding over this assembly of the complicit, a conclave of blood-polished opportunists, is Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt’s own general-turned-president whose repression of dissent rivals that of the dictators once courted by the West. Such images expose the absurdity of the present moment, a grotesque performance, masking imperial guilt behind the language of compassion. where the perpetrators of violence convene to hiss the language of, and moralise about, peace. It’s like inviting Nazi generals to negotiate post-war Europe. The ethical collapse is obscene, and the insult to human life beyond words.
The New Authoritarians
Across the self-styled liberal world, leaders have learned to mimic the vocabulary of morality while practising its opposite. Britain’s Keir Starmer (Heir Starmtrooper) criminalises protest and bans Palestine Action. Emmanuel Macron supplies arms to a war he claims to lament. Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán exalt “civilisation” while normalising ethnonationalism. Donald Trump still defines the imperial mood in Washington, reducing diplomacy to transaction and justice to branding.
Together they rehearse the same script: repression at home, complicity abroad, and the sanctimonious performance of virtue throughout. Egypt merely provides the stage.
A State Without Restraint
At the centre stands the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu—a coalition that has fused religion, race, and militarism into a single creed. Its logic is not defensive but supremacist: the belief that one people’s security requires another’s erasure.
Israel now behaves as a state liberated from restraint: democracy hollowed out, dissent criminalised, militarism sanctified.
The conduct of Israeli forces and armed settlers — better described as state-protected colonists and aggressors—has stripped away every pretence of “security.” In the West Bank they raid villages, burn homes, and execute and murder Palestinian civilians with impunity, while the army either joins in or looks away. These are not settlers seeking safety; they are invaders who kill and displace under the flag of expansion. They are not policing operations — they are state-sponsored terror.
In Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been obliterated, families executed without trial, and basic necessities turned into instruments of control. The denial of food and water being used as weapons. These are the hallmarks of a system that no longer distinguishes between combatant and child, between governance and vengeance. Such acts stand in open defiance of international law and of the moral code that was meant to protect humanity from the return of organised barbarism.
This is not defence—it is a campaign of annihilation, carried out with the approval and material aid of those now pretending to broker peace. The siege of Gaza is not a war but a policy of eradication—a campaign against life itself. The structures of authoritarianism—purity, fear, collective punishment, bureaucratised cruelty—have re-emerged in modern form. What was once condemned as fascism has been repackaged as “self-defence.”
The Erasure of Palestinian Humanity
The imbalance of empathy could not be clearer. Every Israeli hostage is named, photographed, and mourned; every Palestinian held for years without charge is rendered invisible. Israel calls them “detainees,” but in truth they are hostages—men, women, and children seized from their homes, held indefinitely, denied due process, and released without acknowledgment. Western media perfect this asymmetry, transforming one people’s tragedy into human interest and the other’s into background noise. It is not ignorance but design: atrocity sustained by erasure.
From Destruction to Investment
Adding insult to annihilation, the same figures responsible for earlier wars now re-emerge as “advisers” on Gaza’s future. Tony Blair, whose role in the invasion of Iraq remains one of the century’s great disgraces, proposes to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” That he sits in consulting rooms rather than answering questions in The Hague captures the age’s moral rot.
He is joined by Jared Kushner, who marketed Palestinian land through the Abraham Accords; Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who preach de-escalation while ensuring the flow of U.S. weaponry; and pre-Trump’s presidency, Joe Biden’s administration which blocked every serious call for accountability. Together they represent the revolving door between war, business, and diplomacy: the neoliberal face of empire that converts devastation into “development” and moral failure into geopolitical strategy.
This is not diplomacy; it is desecration—the rebranding of catastrophe as opportunity.
The Collapse of Moral Authority
The Egypt conference exposes the final bankruptcy of Western moral authority. Those who defend war crimes cannot deliver peace; those who profit from occupation cannot claim neutrality. The vaunted “rules-based order” is not law but privilege, shielding the powerful while condemning the powerless.
If justice retained its meaning, this summit would be a tribunal. The attendees would be answering questions, not seated at conference tables drafting communiqués. Instead, they perform compassion like theatre while the machinery of destruction grinds on—relentless, unpunished and unashamed. When the architects of war crown themselves as peacekeepers, justice is not merely wounded; it is executed in public view.
A World Watching
Beyond these air-conditioned halls, millions refuse the charade. Across continents, people march because they recognise Gaza’s destruction for what it is: deliberate policy, not collateral tragedy. They understand that every bomb dropped, every protest criminalised, every truth suppressed indicts not only the perpetrators but the entire moral architecture that protects them.
History will not remember the communiqués from Cairo. It will remember who armed the killers, who censored the truth, and who stood against them. And when accountability finally arrives—as it always does—it will not come from the summits of the guilty but from the conscience of those who refused to look away.
⏩ Cam Ogie is a Gaelic games enthusiast.
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