Queen Rania warns of threat to ‘rules-based world order’ as Israel’s war on Gaza continues

NEW YORK – Her Majesty Queen Rania has warned that the world’s failure to prevent Israeli atrocities in Gaza sets a “very dangerous precedent” for the rest of the world, urging the international community to use political leverage to compel Israel to “end the war and let aid in.” 

“As cruel and ugly as the war in Gaza is, the state of our rules-based world order is looking exponentially worse,” Queen Rania said in an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ in New York, which aired on Sunday. 

 “People are looking at Gaza as a reflection of the rest of the world, where the rules don’t matter, where international law doesn’t matter, where UN resolutions can be ignored,” she said. “I think that sets a very, very dangerous precedent,” according to a statement from Her Majesty Office.

The Queen noted that, while some of Israel’s allies – including the US – are critical of what is happening in Gaza, they are reluctant to take decisive measures against it.  

She also stated that Israel has continuously dismissed the advice and warnings of allies regarding its conduct, explaining that its supporters do it a “great disservice” when they fail to hold it accountable for its actions, creating a culture of impunity.

 “That has been the situation for decades, where they feel that they can be the exception to every international law and standard. Either you’re part of the international community, and you abide by the rules, or you’re a pariah state that’s made an exception to every rule,” she said, underscoring that accountability “will be for Israel’s best interests in the long term,” the statement said.

Her Majesty also highlighted the dire humanitarian catastrophe Israel has created in Gaza, resulting in the death of almost 35,000 Palestinians, 75% of whom are women and children, as well as the displacement of 1.7 million Gazans and widespread hunger. 

“Cities have turned to wasteland. Growing, happy children have been reduced to skin and bone. 2.3 million people in a small area have been going through hell every single day,” she said. She also mentioned reports from UNICEF that teenage girls in Gaza are wishing for death over life under such disastrous conditions, and that Gaza is now home to the world’s largest cohort of child amputees. 

Citing the “unprecedented” hunger figures in Gaza, Her Majesty urged the immediate flooding of Gaza with aid in order to avoid a mass famine, explaining that it would be “a major stain on our global conscience to see this happening in slow motion and not do something about it.” 

The Queen also called on the international community to prevent Israel from committing a full-scale invasion of Rafah, describing  it as “the end of the line” for Gazans, who have been “pushed systematically further and further south” since the start of the war. 

Queen Rania went on to explain that the decades-long dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society has been “an intentional approach that Israel adopted in order to numb people to Palestinian suffering.” 

“Israelis are surprised when the word ‘genocide’ is used, because they cannot see Palestinians as anything but as a security threat,” she said. However, she underscored that dehumanization works both ways. “When you lose your ability to empathize towards the other side, you become hardened yourself. It degrades your own humanity,” she said.

Asked about the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests spreading across US university campuses, Her Majesty stressed the importance of maintaining law and order. However, she urged the public not to lose sight of what students are actually protesting.

“They’re saying...clearly there are different standards…that humanitarian law is applied selectively…that our lives don’t matter,” she said, elaborating that protestors are also enraged at the normalization or war crimes and collective punishment, questioning how it is acceptable “for almost 15,000 children to be killed, 19,000 to be orphaned…[and] infrastructure to be obliterated.” 

“For them, the issue of Gaza and the Palestinian conflict is more about social justice. They are standing up for human rights [and] for the principles that underpin international law. They’re standing up for the future they’re going to inherit,” she explained. 

Condemning anti-Semitism as “the worst kind of bigotry,” Her Majesty noted that Muslims should be “at the forefront of fighting antisemitism, because Islamophobia is the other side of the same disease and it’s also on the rise.” However, she also made clear that conflating criticisms of Israel with antisemitism is misleading, and that it is “wrong to hold the Jewish community responsible for the actions or the policies of Israel.”

Her Majesty said that when people speak out against the war on Gaza, they “speak against collective punishment, when you deprive people of food as a weapon of war, when an entire population is displaced, when there’s indiscriminate bombing.” 

When asked about that long-term impact of this war, and whether it was likely to radicalize younger generations, Her Majesty agreed, suggesting that the war on Gaza “is probably one of the largest recruitment events that we’ve seen in recent history because it’s turned a lot of people away and it’s making people feel like there’s just no justice in this world.” She also argued that this war is not making Israel or the world a safer place. 

“Peace is not about politics only,” she underscored, reflecting that it is also about people, culture, and a state of mind. “It’s about choosing tolerance over suspicion. It’s about choosing compromise and reconciliation over the false promise of victory,” she said.