THE Bogota summit bringing more than 20 countries together from tomorrow to determine “concrete measures against Israel’s violations of international law” marks a watershed moment.

All the talk of Western politicians claiming to uphold a “rules-based international order” supposedly threatened by the likes of Russia and China stands exposed by their complicity in a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

Israel has, as Colombian President Gustavo Petro points out, been allowed to commit extreme violations of international law with impunity — bombing hospitals and schools, murdering journalists and aid workers, imposing mass starvation on the whole Gaza Strip and then using its control of food aid to draw Palestinian civilians into free-fire zones and kill them in cold blood.

To say its allies, including Britain, have allowed this to happen is to understate their guilt. The US-led camp is an active facilitator of the war crimes. Britain’s role is not limited to arms sales to Israel, which continue, but involves the use of our bases in the Mediterranean to help supply Israel, the deployment of RAF spy planes to assist the Israel Defence Forces, and ongoing training of Israeli soldiers in Britain itself.

Israel’s ultimate sponsor is the United States. It is its main supplier and funder: the economist Michael Roberts has drawn attention to statistics indicating Washington has “shouldered 70 per cent of Israel’s military costs since October 7 2023;” bankrolling the apartheid state, as Stop the War Coalition convener Lindsey German notes, to the tune of $124 million every day for the last year.

The US is involved too in punishing countries and institutions trying to hold Israel to account. It has imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan because the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli politicians for war crimes; it has now sanctioned the UN’s special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, for continuing to detail Israel’s behaviour; it has promoted absurd allegations that South Africa is conducting a genocide against white farmers in revenge for that country’s effort to bring Israel’s actual genocide before the International Court of Justice.

Violations of international law by the US and its allies are nothing new. But there has not, since the establishment of the United Nations, been a time when Washington has so openly or systematically pitched itself in opposition to international legal frameworks.

Colombia and South Africa, jointly hosting the Bogota summit this week, are acting in defence of the UN, multilateralism and the principle that laws should apply to everyone and might does not make right.

The conference will include multiple UN officials, from Albanese to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency chief Philippe Lazzarini and officials with briefs ranging from the right to healthcare to combatting the use of mercenaries in conflicts.

Participants include two leading powers in the Brics bloc confronting the domination of international institutions by the West (China and Brazil), countries which have shown what sort of measures need to be enacted to put pressure on Israel to stop the killing such as Namibia and Malaysia, which have cut off access to their ports by Israeli ships, but also Middle Eastern countries with close military ties to Washington such as Qatar and Turkey — and, importantly, European countries including Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

This is a group which has the potential to take multilateral action affecting Israel and one broad enough in its make-up to resist being depicted as enemies of the West. British ministers should face pressure to explain their absence from it, and to join actions to end the genocide that the summit decides on.

And the peace movement should use the contrast between these mainly global South countries’ commitment to international law and the appalling conduct of the British and US governments to promote wider understanding of who the real rogue states are — and oppose their push for rearmament and war.