There is a comforting myth — beloved by civics teachers, true crime podcasters, and people who genuinely believe in the phrase “no one is above the law” — that when powerful people do terrible things, something eventually happens to them. Justice, delayed but not denied. The arc bending, slowly, toward accountability.
This article is not about that myth. This article is about what actually happens, which is: nothing. Or more precisely, something happens — to the wrong people. The whistleblowers get prosecuted. The journalists get car-bombed. The survivors get defamed. And the people who ran the scheme, signed the papers, or attended the parties go on to collect honorary degrees and give keynote speeches at conferences about ethical leadership.
What follows is not a comprehensive list. A comprehensive list would be a library. This is a curated top ten — a highlight reel, if you will, from the ongoing festival of impunity that we have collectively agreed to call “Western democracy”.
Pull up a chair. Pour something strong. Try not to throw your phone.
10. The Iraq War (2003–Present Consequences: Zero)
In 2002 and 2003, the governments of the United States and United Kingdom told their populations, the United Nations, and anyone else within earshot, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction so numerous and so imminent that the only possible response was a full-scale military invasion. This turned out to be — and there is no polite way to put this — a lie. Not a mistake. Not an intelligence failure, as the preferred euphemism goes. A coordinated, deliberate, documented lie, supported by fabricated evidence, suppressed dissent, and the deliberate destruction of careers of anyone who questioned it.
The result: approximately 200,000 civilian deaths, the destabilisation of the entire Middle East, the creation of the power vacuum that birthed ISIS, and the displacement of millions of people whose lives have still not recovered twenty-three years later.
The consequences for Tony Blair and George W. Bush: a series of extremely lucrative memoir deals, speaking fees ranging into the hundreds of thousands per engagement, and in Blair’s case, a fucking knighthood. Bush took up painting. He seems to be enjoying it.
The one person who faced genuine legal jeopardy for the Iraq War was Chelsea Manning, for telling the public it was happening.
9. The 2008 Financial Crisis (Accountability Score: 0/∞)
In the years leading up to 2008, the major banks of the Western world constructed an elaborate pyramid of fraudulent mortgage products, sold them to pension funds and ordinary investors as safe assets, collected enormous bonuses for doing so, and then — when the pyramid inevitably collapsed — triggered the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, wiping out the savings, homes, and retirement funds of millions of people who had nothing to do with any of it.
The response of Western governments was to give the banks several trillion dollars of public money to make them solvent again, describe this as an unfortunate necessity, and then spend the next decade imposing austerity on the public whose savings had just been used to bail out the institutions that robbed them.
Number of senior banking executives criminally prosecuted in the United States for causing the 2008 financial crisis: one. His name was Kareem Serageldin. He was a mid-level trader at Credit Suisse. He served two and a half years. The CEOs who ran the institutions, designed the products, and collected nine-figure bonuses while the whole thing burned: all fine. Several of them were appointed to government advisory panels on financial reform. You genuinely could not make this up, and yet here we are.
8. The Catholic Church (Est. Impunity: Approx. 1,700 Years)
The Catholic Church, operating across every continent on earth, maintained for decades — and in many documented cases, centuries — a systematic internal protocol for handling priests who sexually abused children. That protocol was: move them to a different diocese, suppress any complaints, threaten victims with spiritual consequences if they spoke out, and under no circumstances involve law enforcement.
This was not the behaviour of rogue individuals. It was institutional policy, documented in internal memos, carried out by bishops, cardinals, and in multiple cases directly overseen by people who subsequently became Pope. The scale, when investigators finally started pulling at the thread, was almost incomprehensible — tens of thousands of victims across Ireland, the United States, Australia, Germany, France, Chile, and beyond.
Some local prosecutions followed. Some compensation funds were established, generally after decades of legal warfare against the survivors making claims. The institution itself: intact. Still diplomatically sovereign. Still collecting tax exemptions. Still lecturing the rest of us about moral frameworks.
The Vatican did release a lengthy report on one case. It was 461 pages long and concluded that the matter had been handled “with great discretion.” Great discretion. That’s the phrase they chose.
But it is in Australia — and specifically in a ruling handed down in November 2024 — that the Catholic Church produced its most philosophically audacious legal manoeuvre yet. Ballarat, Victoria, was one of the most catastrophic sites of abuse documented by Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Survivors told the inquiry that the suicide rate was “through the roof” — one prominent campaigner believed it exceeded the road toll — driven in significant part by what the clergy had done to the children of that city across decades.
In 2020, a survivor known only as DP — who had been five years old when he was sexually assaulted twice in his family home by Father Bryan Coffey during pastoral visits in 1971 — commenced proceedings against the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat, seeking compensation for psychological injuries. The trial judge believed him. The Victorian Court of Appeal believed him. Both courts found the Diocese liable. The case went to the High Court of Australia, which overturned them both.
On 13 November 2024, the High Court unanimously ruled that vicarious liability could not exist in the absence of an employer-employee relationship. The priest was not an employee or agent of the Diocese. His actions were not done with the express or implied authorisation of the Diocese. The abuse happened. The courts accepted it happened. There was simply, in law, no one responsible for it.
The question this raises — who, then, employs a Catholic priest? — was answered with admirable directness by Judith Courtin, a lawyer and advocate who has spent years representing institutional abuse survivors in Australia. “The church has always argued that priests, brothers and nuns are not employed,” she said. “They are employed by God, if you like.”
Employed by God. Which means, in the practical application of Australian common law as it currently stands, that you cannot sue. DP left the High Court without compensation. The abuse was real. The harm was real. The institution responsible for moving abusive priests between parishes for decades: not liable. The Church: tax-exempt. Still running schools.
7. The Epstein Network (Justice Served: One Convicted Accomplice, Approximately 0 Clients)
Jeffrey Epstein, a financier of contested and largely unexplained wealth, ran for decades a systematic operation to traffic minors for the sexual abuse of powerful men. This is not contested. This is established. There are names in the flight logs. There are names in the little black book. There are civil depositions. There are photographs. There are victims who have given testimony under oath, at considerable personal cost, about who was present and what happened.
Epstein himself died in a maximum-security federal facility under circumstances that the official record describes as suicide and that a meaningful portion of the forensic pathology community describes as inconsistent with suicide. His primary accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving twenty years.
The clients — the politicians, the royals, the billionaires, the academics, the financiers who appear in the documentary record as having participated in or benefited from this operation — have, with vanishingly few exceptions, faced no criminal consequences whatsoever. Several have received enhanced legal settlements that sealed relevant records. At least one reached a non-prosecution agreement with the federal government so sweeping that a judge later found it had been illegally concealed from the victims.
The relevant prosecutor who signed that agreement went on to serve as Secretary of Labor. He resigned eventually — not because of the non-prosecution agreement, but because journalists kept asking about it.
6. Hillsborough, U.K. (Thirty-Year Cover-Up, Consequences: Administratively Tiresome)
On 15 April 1989, ninety-seven Liverpool football supporters were killed in a crush at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, in a disaster caused by catastrophic failures of police crowd management. Within hours of the disaster, South Yorkshire Police began constructing a false account placing blame on the victims — accusing them of arriving drunk, of forcing gates, of picking pockets of the dying.
This lie was fed to the press, including most notoriously, Murdoch’s The Scum — AKA: The Sun, which ran it on its front page. It was repeated in official inquiries. It was used to deny justice to the victims’ families for over thirty years. The families, led by people like Anne Williams and Margaret Aspinall who simply refused to stop asking questions, eventually forced multiple reinvestigations, a new inquest, and in 2016 a jury finding that the ninety-seven had been unlawfully killed.
Criminal prosecutions followed. They collapsed. The officers involved were acquitted or had cases discontinued. The match commander, David Duckenfield, was found not guilty of gross negligence manslaughter in 2019. Thirty years. Ninety-seven dead. A documented, coordinated cover-up by a police force. Nobody in prison.
The families are still fighting.
5. HSBC’s Drug Cartel Money Laundering (Fine Paid, Brunch Resumed)
In 2012, the United States Department of Justice announced that HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks, had spent years laundering money for Mexican drug cartels — including the Sinaloa cartel — as well as processing transactions for states under US sanctions including Libya, Sudan and Iran. The figures involved ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars. HSBC had, in the literal sense, been the financial infrastructure of international drug trafficking.
The penalty: a fine of $1.9 billion, roughly five weeks of profit for the bank at the time. No criminal charges against any individual executive. The Department of Justice explained that prosecuting the bank itself could have caused “collateral consequences” to the financial system.
So to be clear: if you are caught with a small quantity of drugs in the United States, you go to prison. If you are a bank that laundered the money of the people who produced those drugs at industrial scale, you pay a fine that your shareholders can absorb, your executives keep their bonuses, and the DOJ issues a press release describing this as “a landmark enforcement action.” No executives were charged. Not one.
The phrase “too big to jail” entered the political lexicon around this time. It was meant as a criticism. It is now simply an accurate description of policy.
4. The Sackler Family and the Opioid Crisis (Philanthropy Ongoing)
The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures OxyContin. Beginning in the 1990s, Purdue ran an aggressive and deliberately deceptive marketing campaign to convince doctors that OxyContin was a safe, non-addictive painkiller suitable for a wide range of patients. This was false. The company knew it was false. Internal documents, when they eventually emerged, showed explicit awareness of the addiction potential and deliberate suppression of that information.
The result was an opioid crisis that has killed, by the most conservative estimates, half a million Americans since 1999. Entire communities were hollowed out. Life expectancy in parts of the United States dropped measurably. The human cost is, in the technical sense, incalculable.
Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy. The Sackler family negotiated a settlement that initially included sweeping immunity from future civil lawsuits — a provision later struck down by the Supreme Court on the basis that you cannot, in fact, buy immunity from justice for mass death. The family has paid significant sums in various settlements. Individual family members remain wealthy, free, and, in a detail that should make you question the entire concept of institutional reputation, still listed as donors on the walls of museums and universities that accepted their money during the years the opioids were flowing.
The Louvre. The Tate. The Met. The Guggenheim. Several of them eventually removed the Sackler name from their walls, which is the art world’s version of a life sentence.
3. The News of the World Phone Hacking Scandal (Murdoch Empire: Structurally Intact)
For years, journalists and private investigators working for another of Rupert Murdoch’s trash rags, the News of the World hacked the voicemails of politicians, celebrities, crime victims, and — in the case that finally broke the story publicly — murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, whose family spent years believing she might be alive because someone was deleting messages from her phone to make room for new ones. The staff at the paper were intentionally deleting messages from a dead girls phone so they could hear the new ones as they came in. To be clear, they were deleting evidence in a murder case for scoops. Evidence the police never got to hear.
The scandal brought down the 168-year-old newspaper. It led to the Leveson Inquiry. Several journalists went to prison. Private investigator Glenn Mulcaire served time. Rebekah Brooks, the editor at the height of the hacking, was arrested, tried, but then she was acquitted, and subsequently rehired by News UK as chief executive. She is still running the company.
Rupert Murdoch appeared before a parliamentary select committee, described it as “the most humble day of my life,” and was then hit in the face with a foam pie by a protestor, which his then-wife Wendi Deng deflected with a speed and commitment that suggested she was the only person in that room genuinely looking out for Rupert Murdoch’s interests. Sweet.
His media empire continues to operate on four continents. His papers continue to tell you which politicians to trust.
2. The VW Emissions Scandal (Or: How To Lie To Every Government On Earth And Pay A Manageable Fine)
In 2015, it emerged that Volkswagen had spent years installing software in eleven million of its diesel vehicles specifically designed to detect when the car was being emissions-tested and reduce pollution output accordingly. During actual driving conditions, the same cars emitted nitrogen oxides at up to forty times the legal limit.
This was not a corner cut, an oversight, or a rounding error. It was a sophisticated, multi-year, company-wide fraud against regulators in the United States, Europe, and beyond — a deliberate deception of every government that had set emissions standards, and of every consumer who had bought a diesel car believing it met those standards.
VW paid approximately $33 billion in fines, settlements, and vehicle buybacks — a genuinely substantial sum by any normal measure, and one that nonetheless left the company profitable and operational. Several executives were charged in the United States; most faced trial in Germany, where proceedings moved at the pace of a particularly unhurried glacier. VW’s then-CEO Martin Winterkorn was charged with fraud in Germany in 2019. His trial, at time of writing, remains ongoing, having been delayed repeatedly on grounds of his health.
The cars are still on the road. So, as it turned out, was everyone else’s.
Because what the VW investigation exposed — when regulators, stung into action, actually started testing other manufacturers’ vehicles under real-world conditions — was not a German aberration. It was an industry. Opel (GM) was caught in 2015 using defeat device software that changed engine behaviour depending on whether two or four wheels were rotating — software that could detect a test stand by the simple fact that the rear wheels weren’t moving. Fiat Chrysler received an EPA notice of violation in January 2017 for over 100,000 diesel vehicles — including the Dodge Ram 1500 and Jeep Grand Cherokee — fitted with software allowing them to exceed nitrogen oxide limits undetected by standard testing. Mitsubishi. BMW. Renault. Nissan. In December 2023, American engine manufacturer Cummins was fined $1.675 billion by the US Department of Justice for installing defeat devices on 960,000 Dodge and Stellantis RAM pickup truck engines across a decade of production. Nearly 850,000 claimants are currently before the UK High Court alleging that Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Nissan, Renault, Peugeot, and Citroën did the same, with NOx emissions reportedly running in some cases at up to twelve times legal limits under real driving conditions.
In each case, the pattern was the same as with VW: fines issued to the company, paid by shareholders, absorbed as a cost of doing business. Opel paid €64.8 million. Mitsubishi paid €25 million. BMW paid €875 million. Large numbers. Manageable percentages of revenue. No senior executive at any of these companies served prison time for what was, in each case, a deliberate, multi-year fraud against governments and consumers across multiple continents. The software didn’t write itself. Someone commissioned it, approved it, and signed off on it at every model year for years running. That person — at every one of these companies — is fine.
What VW revealed, in other words, was not a scandal. It was a standard. A continent’s worth of governments had actively incentivised diesel vehicles on the basis of emissions figures that turned out to be fiction. The air quality data from a decade of European cities — the respiratory illness, the premature deaths attributed to NOx pollution — was built on numbers that the manufacturers knew were false when they submitted them. The fine is how you close the file. The executives are how you keep it closed.
1. The Panama Papers (Crime: Exposed. Journalist: Assassinated. Criminals: Fine.)
In April 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers — 11.5 million documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, revealing in extraordinary detail how the wealthiest individuals and institutions on earth had constructed a global infrastructure of shell companies, offshore accounts, and legal fictions specifically designed to hide wealth from taxation and, in many cases, from any regulatory scrutiny whatsoever.
The list of names included heads of state, royalty, oligarchs, arms dealers, sanctions-busters, and a supporting cast of the globally comfortable so extensive that it read less like a scandal and more like a directory of how the world actually works. The documents showed not isolated tax avoidance but a coordinated, industrialised system — with major Western banks, law firms, and accounting practices as its willing and profitable infrastructure.
The consequences: Iceland’s Prime Minister resigned after being named. Pakistan’s Prime Minister was disqualified from office. A handful of other political figures faced domestic pressure. The vast majority of individuals named: nothing. The financial system that made it possible: intact and operational. The law firm at the centre of it: eventually dissolved, though its principals were not prosecuted.
Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist who had spent years exposing the corruption documented in the papers — and who was one of the contributors to the Panama Papers investigation — was murdered in October 2017 when a bomb placed under her car detonated as she drove away from her home. She had filed a police report about death threats seventeen days earlier.
Three men were convicted of her murder. The businessman alleged to have ordered it has faced trial in Malta; proceedings have been characterised by delays, legal challenges, and an atmosphere that many observers have described as consistent with a country in which powerful people do not expect to face consequences.
Her sons continue to publish her work.
The Pattern Is The Point
It would be comforting to read this list as a collection of failures — moments when the system stumbled, when justice was delayed or botched or poorly resourced. It would be comforting, and it would be wrong.
The pattern is not failure. The pattern is function. These are not cases in which accountability was attempted and fell short. These are cases in which the mechanisms that might have produced accountability — criminal prosecution, regulatory enforcement, asset seizure, institutional reform — were either not deployed, or were deployed at a level calculated to produce the appearance of consequence rather than consequence itself.
The system does not fail to punish the powerful. The system protects the powerful. It has always done so. The difference now is that we have the documents. We have the flight logs. We have the shell company registrations. We have the emissions test defeat software. We have 11.5 million files from a law firm in Panama.
And we have journalists who die in car bombings, and whistleblowers who go to prison, and victims who spend thirty years demanding that someone, somewhere, acknowledge what happened to them.
The arc of history does not automatically bend toward justice. It bends in the direction that powerful people push it. And powerful people, as this list illustrates with some thoroughness, push it in a very specific direction.
Away from themselves.
I know what you’re thinking…
You’ve read ten entries. You’ve nodded along. You’ve possibly felt a mounting, clarifying rage. And somewhere around entry six or seven, a nagging voice in the back of your head — the voice that reads the news, that watches the footage, that has been watching the footage every day for the better part of three years — started asking an obvious question.
Where is Israel?
It’s a fair question. It is, in fact, the question. Because everything on this list — the protected institutions, the ignored courts, the dead journalists, the laundered money, the fines instead of prosecutions, the cover-ups dressed as investigations — all of it is, in some sense, a rehearsal for the main event. A warm-up act for the single most comprehensive, most documented, most publicly visible, most thoroughly ignored exercise in consequence-free criminality in the history of the modern international order.
I left it off the list not because it doesn’t belong. I left it off because it doesn’t fit in a list. It is the list. It is the thing the list was invented to describe. It is the reason that every other entry on this list was possible — because if you can do what Israel has done, in full view of every court, every camera, every rapporteur, every satellite, every legal framework the post-war world constructed specifically to prevent exactly this, and face no meaningful consequence, then the message is clear. The message has always been clear.
The rules don’t apply to the right people.
The Entry That Gets Its Own Section: Israel and the Complete and Total Non-Enforcement of Everything
Let’s begin with the legal architecture, because the legal architecture is important. The post-1945 international order was built — explicitly, deliberately, in direct response to specific atrocities — on a set of frameworks designed to make certain things impossible. The Genocide Convention. The Geneva Conventions. The Rome Statute. The International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court. These institutions exist because human beings, after the second catastrophic world war in thirty years, looked at what had happened and said: never again. We will build mechanisms. We will create courts. We will write treaties. We will make it structurally impossible for states to commit mass atrocities and simply walk away.
Every single one of those mechanisms has been activated with respect to Israel’s conduct in Gaza since October 2023. And every single one of them has, in practice, been neutralised — by political veto, diplomatic silence, delayed enforcement, or the blunt refusal of the world’s most powerful states to do what international law requires.
Here is the state of play.
The ICJ. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued interim orders instructing Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide, and in April 2024, the same court issued a second order unanimously ruling that “famine is setting in” in Gaza and ordering Israel to increase aid flow without delay. Israel did not increase aid flow without delay. Israel decreased it. A conservative assessment would lead to the conclusion that, at a minimum, the ICJ’s orders should have triggered an immediate duty to act. Instead, genocidal violence continued in Gaza with serious risk of expanding to the West Bank. No one has been investigated or prosecuted, let alone punished.
The ICC. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. All 125 ICC member states, including France and the United Kingdom, are required to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter the state’s territory. Multiple countries have since allowed Netanyahu to fly through their airspace. Hungary hosted him. Italy waved him through. France initially claimed he enjoyed immunity. The United Kingdom muttered something about obligations and then said nothing else. The United States called the warrants “outrageous” and Trump issued an executive order imposing penalties on ICC officials involved in “targeting” Israel.
To be absolutely clear about what this means: the sitting prime minister of a country allied with every major Western power has an active arrest warrant from the international court established specifically to try heads of state for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is travelling the world. He is meeting with leaders. He is attending functions. The warrant is, in practice, decorative.
The UN Special Rapporteur. In March 2024, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council titled “Anatomy of a Genocide”, stating “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israel had committed at least three genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza. The response of Western governments was to call for her dismissal and accuse her of antisemitism. The response of the United States was more direct: in July 2025, the Trump administration placed sanctions on Albanese, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio citing her push for ICC prosecution of Israeli officials as the legal basis. After the sanctions were imposed, Albanese’s bank cards stopped working. A hotel reservation booked by the European Parliament was cancelled. Medical insurance was denied.
So: a UN legal expert presented documented findings to a UN body that an ongoing genocide was being committed. She was sanctioned by a major world power for doing so. She described it as “mafia-style intimidation.” She kept working anyway. The genocide continued.
The Journalists
As of April 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ preliminary investigations show that at least 262 journalists and media workers have been killed across Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Israel, and Iran since the Israel-Gaza war / genocide began on October 7, 2023. Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ began collecting data in 1992, making this war the deadliest on record for journalists.
Read that again. More journalists than any other government. In the history of CPJ’s records. By a significant margin.
According to a report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the war in Gaza has led to the deaths of more journalists than the combined total killed during the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan.
Combined. All of them. More.
CPJ has documented instances in which journalists targeted by Israel in Gaza were known to have reported at length on apparent Israeli military conduct before their deaths. In 2025, the Israeli army created a special unit known as the “Legitimization Cell” to link Palestinian journalists to Hamas in order to justify their killings. First, kill them. Then explain why they deserved it.
The Committee to Protect Journalists stated that Israel is “engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.”
And the foreign press? In May 2024, Netanyahu’s cabinet voted to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, weeks after the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered to be a “threat to national security.” In September 2024, Israeli forces stormed Al Jazeera’s offices in the occupied West Bank, confiscating equipment and documents. The Israeli parliament subsequently approved an extension of the law for two more years.
Israel did not merely ban Al Jazeera. Israel also sanctioned the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz over coverage considered critical of its actions, and throughout 2024, Israel’s military censor fully blocked 1,635 articles from being published and imposed partial restrictions on another 6,265 — an average of roughly 21 interventions per day, more than twice the highest previous daily tally.
Israel is conducting what the UN’s own legal experts describe as a genocide. It has banned the primary international broadcaster covering it. It has killed more journalists than any government in modern recorded history. It has created a special military unit to posthumously designate those journalists as terrorists after killing them. And foreign press, when permitted to enter at all, must submit their material to Israeli military censors before publication.
The information environment surrounding the single most documented conflict in history has been methodically dismantled. This is not incidental. It is policy.
The Aid Workers
On 1 April 2024, Israeli drones targeted a three-car convoy belonging to World Central Kitchen in the Gaza Strip, killing seven aid workers. Those killed included a dual US-Canada national, as well as people from Australia, Poland, three from the United Kingdom, and a Palestinian. The WCK team was travelling in a “deconflicted” zone in two armoured cars branded with the WCK logo and a soft skin vehicle. Despite coordinating movements with the IDF, the convoy was hit as it was leaving the Deir al-Balah warehouse, where the team had unloaded more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza on a maritime route.
The cars were marked. The route was pre-approved and coordinated. The IDF knew exactly who was in those vehicles and where they were going. The destroyed cars were clearly marked on the roof and sides and travelled along a route preapproved and coordinated with the IDF, but the war room of the unit responsible for security of the route ordered the drone operators to attack. This is all confirmed by Haaretz.
Netanyahu described it as unintentional. Two Israeli officers were subsequently dismissed. No criminal charges were filed. World Central Kitchen, after pausing operations, eventually returned. On 30 November 2024, an Israeli airstrike on a World Central Kitchen vehicle in Khan Yunis killed five more people, including three aid workers.
This is the pattern. Commit. Describe as regrettable. Investigate internally. Dismiss a junior officer. Repeat.
Starvation as Strategy
In August 2024, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that starving the entire Gaza population was “justified and moral”, even if two million people consequently died. This statement was made publicly. On record. By a senior member of the Israeli cabinet. It was not followed by his resignation, his prosecution, or any formal censure from Western governments whose aid agreements with Israel contain explicit human rights clauses.
On 6 May 2025, Smotrich said that Gaza would be “entirely destroyed” and that Palestinians would “leave in great numbers to third countries.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed this, calling for Israel to block all humanitarian aid into Gaza and referring to expulsion of Palestinians as “voluntary migration.”
These are members of Israels sitting government. Speaking publicly. Describing the deliberate starvation and displacement of a civilian population as policy objectives. The response of Western capitals: carefully worded concern. Strongly worded letters. The occasional summoning of an ambassador for what diplomats call a “frank exchange of views,” which is the international relations equivalent of tutting at someone.
The Ships
If you want a single image that captures the current state of international law, consider what has happened in international waters since 2025.
In June 2025, Israeli Navy forces from Shayetet 13 seized the vessel Madleen about 185 kilometres from Gaza in international waters, and towed it to Ashdod. Among the twelve people on board were Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and French MEP Rima Hassan. The ship was carrying baby formula, flour, rice, nappies / diapers, medical kits, and children’s prosthetics.
A UN expert stated: “This attack against unarmed civilians on the high seas is yet another violation of international law by Israel.” The interception was understood to have taken place in international waters, contrary to international law.
In July 2025, Israel boarded and seized a second vessel, the Handala, in international waters. In October 2025, Israel intercepted about 40 vessels of the Global Sumud Flotilla, abducting and detaining more than 450 activists in another aid convoy also attempting to deliver supplies to Gaza. Among those detained: the grandson of South African leader Nelson Mandela. Several activists reported physical and psychological abuse in Israeli custody.
And then, just days before publication, it happened again. Israel intercepted a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in international waters near Greece, arresting 175 activists, with officials saying blockade enforcement was vital to stop weapons reaching the territory. Turkey called the event an “act of piracy.” Spain labelled the seizure “illegal.” Germany and Italy expressed “grave concern.” The European Commission’s spokesperson stopped short of condemning the interception or explicitly calling it a breach of international law — a cautious line that underscores the EU’s reluctance to directly confront Israel over the operation.
To summarise: Israel is boarding civilian aid ships — flagged under European nations, crewed by activists, journalists, doctors, and elected parliamentarians from allied countries — in international waters, using drones and armed naval commandos, hundreds of miles from Gaza, and detaining the passengers. This is being described by Turkey as piracy. It is being described by Spain as illegal. It is being described by the European Commission as a matter of concern. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said: “These repeated attacks on unarmed civilians demonstrate Israel’s deliberate escalation and the total failure of governments to enforce international law.”
The ships keep coming. The navy keeps stopping them. The statements of concern keep being issued. The food does not arrive.
Amsterdam: When the Cover Story Falls Apart
In November 2024, violence erupted in Amsterdam surrounding a Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. The initial narrative, amplified by Israeli officials and much of the Western press, was of a pogrom — Jewish fans hunted through the streets of a European capital by antisemitic mobs.
The fuller picture, which emerged incrementally and received considerably less prominent coverage than the original framing, was somewhat different.
The evening before the match, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were filmed pulling Palestinian flags from houses, making racist anti-Arab chants, assaulting people, and vandalising local property. Violence did follow against Maccabi supporters. Both things are true. What became politically convenient was only one of them.
What was rather less covered, until it wasn’t: Dutch police told their British counterparts that over 200 Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans who wreaked havoc in Amsterdam were “linked to the Israel Defense Forces”, and that hundreds more were “experienced fighters”, “highly organised” and “intent on causing serious violence.”
The original police assessment recorded that Dutch police informed their British counterparts that “500-600 fans” were “experienced fighters who were highly organised and co-ordinated. They were intent on serious violence and were not afraid of fighting with police.”
When the city of Birmingham subsequently banned Maccabi fans from attending their next European fixture based on this intelligence, British Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy criticised the ban in parliament, claiming it was “based in no small part on the risk posed to those fans that are attending who support Maccabi Tel Aviv, because they are Israeli and because they are Jewish.” She had the police intelligence. She said this anyway. Jeremy Corbyn, amongst other things, called it a lie.
The narrative of the Amsterdam “pogrom” was then deployed by Israeli officials and their allies in Western governments to deflect attention from everything else on this page. It worked, for a while. Most narratives do.
This is not a collection of failures. This is a system doing exactly what it was designed to do. The ICC issues warrants and Western governments find procedural reasons not to enforce them. The ICJ issues binding orders and Israel ignores them without consequence. The UN appoints a special rapporteur who documents genocide and the United States sanctions her credit cards. Journalists are killed at a rate that exceeds every recorded conflict in history combined and a law is passed to ensure the survivors can’t report freely on what’s happening. Aid workers are killed in clearly marked vehicles on pre-approved routes and a junior officer loses his job. Civilian ships carrying baby formula and crutches are boarded by armed commandos in international waters and the European Commission issues a statement of grave concern.
And there is the meta-crime — the one that makes all the others possible. The selective application of a rules-based international order that turns out to be neither rules-based nor international when the right governments push back hard enough. Every court, treaty, and framework on this list was built to be universal. The moment it became apparent they would not be applied universally, they stopped being frameworks and became decorations. Expensive, earnestly maintained decorations, behind which the actual business of power continues unchanged.
The Panama Papers showed us the offshore machinery. The Epstein case showed us the protected client list. The Iraq War showed us the cost of manufactured consent. Gaza is showing us all of it simultaneously, in real time, with more documentation than any atrocity in human history, and the lesson is the same lesson it has always been.
The system does not fail to punish the powerful. The system is the powerful. The difference now is that we have the documents. We have the satellite images. We have the flight logs. We have the ICC warrants. We have 262 dead journalists and a UN rapporteur operating from a hotel room with a cancelled credit card. We have civilian ships intercepted by naval commandos hundreds of miles from their destination. We have the Israeli Finance Minister on camera saying that starving two million people is justified and moral.
And we have the statements of grave concern.
And then we have… Nothing.
Until we decide that nothing is no longer acceptable.
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What a damning report on the state of humanity and its "leadership." Shadowy or brazenly operating in the open, the powers that be abuse the world in countless ways. What's a would-be law-abiding responsible citizen to do then if not descend into utter cynicism? Has it always been thus?
Great header photo! What a bunch. What the French call "une belle brochette" - literally 'a fine kebab' (of heads on a skewer. One can only wish, in the case of this lot). Excellent article James, in which you've nailed pretty much everything.