For decades, the United States and Israel have stuck closely to their respective, scripted roles in the Middle East: the job of good cop and bad cop.

The charade has continued despite Washington’s active participation in Israel’s 25-month slaughter of Gaza’s people - and a dawning realisation among ever-larger sections of western publics that they have been duped. 

The central conceit of the good cop, bad cop narrative ( which the United States and Israel have stuck closely for decades) is that both the US and Israel are the ones upholding the law and fighting the criminals, (and the intended audience are the onlookers: western publics.)

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Why has Gaza dropped off the front pages?

Last week, Trump publicly applauded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … for sticking to the president’s so-called "peace plan". "Israel has lived up to the plan, 100 percent," Trump declared. 

The reality, however, is that Israel violated the "ceasefire" nearly 1,000 times in the first two months after it was supposed to go into effect, in mid-October. Israel continues to kill and starve the people of Gaza, if at a slower rate. 

Last week Israel announced it was banning 37 humanitarian organisations from Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders, which supports one in five emergency hospitals beds in the strip. The group noted that Israel was "cutting off life-saving medical assistance for hundreds of thousands of people". 

The ceasefire is just the latest storyline in a two-year piece of theatre.

Crimes of the Century

Horrifying dream

While western capitals and the media stubbornly adhere to the good cop, bad cop narrative, western publics have started waking from it, as if from a bad dream. 

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Britain illustrates especially starkly the authoritarian, repressive trends visible across the West. 

There, protests against genocide have been designated "hate marches". Slogans in solidarity with the Palestinians are now grounds for arrest for antisemitism. Journalists critical of the government have been arrested or their homes raided.

Support for practical action to stop the genocide, by targeting the weapons factories supplying Israel with killer drones, is now classed as terrorism. 

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Scrapping jury trials

The task of western establishments - and their media - has been to shore up a patently duplicitous narrative to excuse their complicity in the Gaza genocide: that the more vocal the criticism of Israel, the more evident the antisemitism. 

The implication is clear. The correct response to that genocide is silence. 

To no effect, a group of United Nations legal experts – called special rapporteurs – expressed grave concern last month at the UK’s flouting of international law in its treatment of the hunger-strikers, who face prolonged detention on remand in violation of British law.

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Bank accounts frozen

Already, under government direction, judges in political trials - notably in climate protest cases - have been denying defendants the chance to explain their motivations and reasoning to juries.

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Last month it emerged that the National Crime Agency, a body answerable to government ministers, was likely behind efforts to economically intimidate and vilify the wider Palestinian solidarity movement. 

The bank accounts of solidarity groups in Manchester and Scotland have been frozen, as part of investigations into Palestine Action, despite neither having an affiliation with the direct-action group. 

These underhand, extrajudicial moves by the government hamper efforts to raise or donate money to charities that help feed Palestinians in Gaza, treat the wounded and house those without shelter in the winter.

It is hard to get one’s head round the depravity of these decisions.

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Declared non-person

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United Nations special rapporteurs – independent legal experts – have issued a series of damning reports on Israel’s genocide and western complicity.

The US responded last week by slashing $15bn from its funding of UN humanitarian agencies. 

Most visible among the rapporteurs has been the UN’s expert on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese. Washington’s response to her has been illuminating. 

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In July she was placed on a US Treasury sanctions list normally reserved for those accused of terrorism, drug trafficking or money laundering. Her listing came a few days after she published her report on the complicity of western corporations in Israel’s genocide.

The sanctions violate the diplomatic immunity she enjoys as a UN official and make it impossible for her to attend meetings at UN headquarters in New York. 

With the US effectively exercising a stranglehold on the international financial system, the sanctions also mean no banks or credit cards will allow her to use their services. She cannot be paid by employers. She cannot book a flight or hotel.  

Universities, human rights institutions and charities have cut her adrift for fear of facing reprisals themselves if they continue to have dealings with her. 

Her assets in the US have been frozen, including her bank account and an apartment. It is unlikely her new book on Palestine can be distributed in the US.

Effectively, Albanese has been turned into a non-person, with the silent consent of western politicians and media. 

ICC sanctioned, ICJ judges threatened

The State Department justified the sanctions on the grounds Albanese had recommended that the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

In fact, ICC judges approved the arrest warrants in November 2024 after the court’s prosecutors amassed evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Netanyahu and Gallant chiefly over their imposition of an aid blockade to starve Gaza’s population. 

It was no surprise, therefore, that the Trump administration has issued similar sanctions against eight judges at the Hague war crimes court, either for approving those arrest warrants or for authorising an investigation into crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan. 

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You might imagine that this lawless move against some of the most renowned jurists in the world would have provoked considerable pushback in Europe. You would be wrong. The all-out assault on one of the main pillars of international law has been barely mentioned.

Le Monde broke ranks in November to interview French judge Nicolas Guillou. He detailed the impact since he was sanctioned in August: "All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed…Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s."

European banks, fearful of the US Treasury, also closed his accounts, and European companies refuse to provide him with services. 

He concluded: "Putting someone under sanctions creates a state of permanent anxiety and powerlessness, with the intent of discouragement."

Washington has sanctioned too the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, and two of his deputies. 

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That included threats, reported by Middle East Eye, from the then UK foreign secretary David Cameron that the UK would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute that founded the ICC if Khan did not back down. 

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Most explosively, the ICJ ruled in January 2024 that a "plausible" case had been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. As a result, the ICJ is currently investigating Israel for this, the ultimate crime. 

The wheels of justice turn slowly at the World Court. But its judges are undoubtedly watching the treatment of Albanese and the ICC with alarm. 

Like gangsters, Israel and the US are sending a very direct message to each of the ICJ judges: you will be punished too, if you dare to find us guilty. 

ICC judge Nicholas Gillou notes that Europe could show solidarity with the victims of these sanctions by invoking what is known as "a blocking statute": – a mechanism that protects EU citizens and companies from the effects of sanctions imposed by third countries. 

But any hope that Europe will break ranks with the US and Israel over this naked attack on the two main courts upholding international law - bulwarks against a return to "might is right" global politics – is almost certainly forlorn. 

Last month, drawing on the Trump playbook, the European Union imposed economic sanctions on a dozen of its own critics. 

Notable was the inclusion of Jacques Baud, a former colonel in the Swiss army. His distinguished military career includes leading peacekeeping missions for the UN, including in Rwanda and Sudan, and serving as a Nato senior strategic analyst. 

Reputational assassination

Baud was accused of no crime. His offence is being deeply critical of European officials and the strategic coherence of their support for war in Ukraine. Given his military expertise, his analyses are embarrassing European establishments.

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A precedent has thereby been set that means anyone who challenges western leaders - whether judges, journalists, lawyers, or human rights groups - could similarly end up destitute.

What the US and the EU are rolling out are extrajudicial reputational assassinations and economic incarcerations as a way to silence critics and watchdogs, that cannot be appealed. 

This is a model Israel and its lobbyists in the West have been trialling for years. 

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Criminals in charge

Washington – the gangster-in-chief posing as global policeman – refuses to accept any limitations on its actions. If legal authorities, whether domestic or international, try to stand in its way, they are either punished or pushed aside. 

In this topsy-turvy world, Trump’s naked exercise of colonial violence is feted as peace-making. As he was massing troops off Venezuela’s coast last month, Fifa, the international football federation, awarded him its inaugural peace prize - an honour created specifically to stroke his ego. 

US overseas military footprint

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The complete abandonment of long-standing international legal safeguards puts everyone in jeopardy – all the more so when technological developments mean states have near-absolute control over their citizens’ lives, and super-powers can use ever more sophisticated weapons to wreck countries at little cost to themselves in blood or treasure. 

But paradoxically, the very act of dismantling the global system of international law is still being dressed up in the garb of law enforcement. 

Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza is supposedly needed to defeat Hamas’ "illegitimate" rule. The abduction of Maduro from Caracas is sold as the enforcement of drug-trafficking "violations". 

European leaders’ response to Trump’s crime of aggression against Venezuela signals where things head next. 

Britain’s Starmer effectively welcomed Washington’s criminal regime-change operation and threat to occupy Venezuela to control its oil. He said he "shed no tears" for Maduro. 

Similarly, Kaja Kallas, Europe’s foreign policy chief, emphasised Maduro’s supposed lack of "legitimacy". 

Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Canada – all in Washington’s sights – should fear that similar "legal" pretexts will be found to justify attacks on their own sovereignty. 

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Now, having shredded international law, the "good cop" looks ready to discard an outdated disguise and reveal the serial villain underneath.

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