ISLAMABAD: Western governments, not their own citizens, are the ones only now catching up to Israeli conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, a veteran Middle East analyst and former UN official said, days after Britain's sharpest rupture with Israel in decades.
Speaking on Pakistan TV Digital's South Speaks with Saqib, Andrew Whitley, founder of Geo-Political Advisory Services and former policy director of The Elders, said the gap has always sat between public opinion and official policy, not public awareness itself.
“Western governments have woken up to it. Western publics have been aware of it for a long time,” Whitley said, describing a longstanding gap between public outrage, including in Britain, and government caution.
Whitley said the gap was driven by double standards in how Western governments treated human rights concerns over Gaza compared with Ukraine, and that the disparity has “really hurt” many Western governments politically.
He was responding to this week's rupture between Britain and Israel, after Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband declared the West Bank occupation unlawful and banned imports from Israeli settlements, prompting Israel to order Britain's East Jerusalem consulate closed within 30 days.
Earlier, Pakistan welcomed the decision announced by the UK to impose a ban on items originating from illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank.
He credited the move as a genuine shift rather than posturing, while stopping short of calling it sufficient.
“I would not dismiss it as political posturing... there has been a genuine shift, and we need to give credit where it is due,” he said, though he separately called the settlement import ban itself “too little and too late.”
Whitley said accompanying restrictions on financial services linked to the occupation were more significant, noting Britain had mobilized roughly a dozen countries to join the statement.
Earlier, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the UK confirmed their intention to introduce national and/or support European restrictions on trade in goods with settlements that are illegal under international law, according to the government of England.
Whitley placed the shift in a longer arc, saying governments gave Israel “undue license” for years out of residual guilt over the Holocaust and, in the US case, strategic alliance.
"There has been an evolution from having treated Israel, molly-coddling it, if you like, in a soft way, to one in which they are finally waking up to the nature of the crimes being committed, very serious crimes, genocide, I would call it, in Gaza," he added.
He said Britain breaking from Washington's lead on this issue was itself significant, given the UK has “tended, until now, to follow the lead from Washington.”
He said the gap between Western human rights rhetoric and its treatment of Israel has damaged the idea of a rules-based international order, particularly in the eyes of the Global South.