The World Against Israel: Double standards

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The World Against Israel: A Global Alliance of Hostility Disguised as Human Rby Raphael Shore
October 15, 2024
Double standards, ancient hatred, and the real war Israel faces today.
Israel stands at the center of a growing storm. The threats it faces today are not limited to the battlefield but extend across the global stage in forms both overt and insidious. A powerful alignment of state actors, terrorist groups, and international organizations is lining up against Israel, threatening Israel's security, sovereignty, and even survival.

Some of Israel's enemies, like Hamas and Hezbollah, openly call for its destruction and commit unspeakable atrocities in their pursuit of that goal. On October 7, Hamas launched an assault on Israel that was one of the largest terror attacks in modern history, resulting in mass murder, rapes, kidnappings, and thousands of casualties. It was the opening salvo of a genocidal campaign. Hezbollah and other groups joined, unprovoked, and together they have rain 23,000 missiles on Israeli towns in just one year.

Iran funnels millions into these terror organizations, providing them with the resources and firepower to carry out their genocidal agendas. Iran’s goal is clear: the elimination of Israel through proxy wars and direct confrontation.

While the world condemns Israel for its attempts to defend itself, it fails to hold Hamas, Hezbollah, and their backers accountable for mass murder, hostage taking, the use of human shields, the indiscriminate firing of missiles at civilian populations, and many other blatant violations of international law.

However, it’s not just bullets and bombs that Israel is up against. A different, more subtle war is being waged through the delegitimization of Israel on the global stage. International organizations, human rights groups, media, college professors and even state governments present themselves as morally upstanding defenders of justice, yet they consistently apply double standards to Israel. While the world condemns Israel for its attempts to defend itself, it fails to hold Hamas, Hezbollah, and their backers accountable for mass murder, hostage taking, the use of human shields, the indiscriminate firing of missiles at civilian populations, and many other blatant violations of international law.

Geopolitical Realities: A Global Alignment Against Israel
Israel is not just facing war on five physical fronts - Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian terror groups in the West Bank, Yemen, and Iran - the war it faces extends into the realm of international diplomacy, media, and lawfare. While terrorists murder, kidnap, and launch thousands of attack drones and rockets at Israeli civilians, much of the world stands by, issuing condemnations not at the perpetrators, but at Israel itself for daring to defend its people.
Consider the hypocrisy in the way global powers treat different conflict zones. In the recent wars in Ukraine and Syria, 40 nations received more than 10 million civilian refuges, humanely allowing them to evacuate war zones. Yet, these same powers closed ranks in the Gaza war, refusing to allow Palestinian civilians to evacuate. As Gazans were pleading to be let out, and as Israel appealed for the same, the global community rose as one, declaring a new moral principle that was apparently created for a conflict that involved Jews, exemplified by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s strange slogan, “No forcible displacement.”
This refusal not only reveals a staggering double standard but constitutes a clear violation of international law. Under the Geneva Conventions, civilians in conflict zones have the right to seek safety. The international community’s selective enforcement of these principles when it comes to Israel exposes their hypocrisy. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board observed, “Only when it can damage Israel does it become the liberal position to close the borders and keep refugees penned in a war zone.”

After abandoning the Palestinians to a war zone, these same global powers, media outlets, and international bodies obsess over Palestinian casualties, far more than they do over the deaths of Ukrainians, Somalis, or any other civilians caught in conflict. This selective outrage conveniently shifts blame onto Israel, and ignores both their own role in allowing the inevitable to happen and the role of terror groups like Hamas in strategically engineering these tragedies. When Israel strikes back, it is condemned for harming civilians—even though those civilians are being used by Hamas (and the international community) as human shields. Indeed, Hamas’ October 7 playbook took for granted that the world would react this way, which is the clearest revelation of the deep anti-Jewish bias at play, and the ultimate indictment of Western ‘moral standards’.

Instead of supporting Israel’s legitimate defense against the radical Islamist drive to annihilate it, global leaders pressure Israel to stop its military efforts prematurely, ensuring that Hamas and Hezbollah survive to attack again. The cycle repeats, all under the guise of "human rights" and "justice." But the double standards are glaring.

The United Nations’ Complicity
The United Nations, supposedly a neutral body committed to peace, has been complicit in this anti-Israel bias. UN facilities and employees have repeatedly been found aiding Hamas by allowing terrorists to use their buildings as launch sites or human shield zones. UNRWA, the agency tasked with aiding Palestinian refugees, operates under a unique and deeply flawed definition of refugee status—one that is applied only to Palestinians and passed down through generations. This double standard perpetuates their refugee status and ongoing misery, while being wielded as a political bludgeon against Israel. UNRWA has also been implicated in the radicalization of young Palestinians and in allowing its schools to be used for storing weapons. Yet, when Israel defends itself, it is Israel that is condemned, while the UN's role in sustaining both the conflict and Palestinian suffering goes largely unnoticed.

Resolution 1701 promised Israel the disarmament of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the cessation of rocket attacks. Yet today, Hezbollah has amassed an arsenal of over 150,000 missiles, and has fired 10,000 in the past 12 months right under the noses of 10,000 UN peacekeepers from 50 nations.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in the UN’s failure to enforce its own resolutions, and then to use that very failure against Israel. Resolution 1701, passed in 2006 to end the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, promised Israel the disarmament of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the cessation of rocket attacks. Yet today, Hezbollah has amassed an arsenal of over 150,000 missiles, and has fired 10,000 in the past 12 months right under the noses of 10,000 UN peacekeepers from 50 nations. Until Israel responds, there is global silence in the face of these war crimes. When Israel responds, headline news begin, global concern pours in with calls for Israeli restraint and immediate diplomatic efforts for ‘ceasefire’. And just this week, when Israel requested the peacekeepers leave to avoid potential collateral damage, 40 countries refused, and these peacekeepers are transformed – again by the global community - from failed peacekeepers into this war’s convenient second batch of human shields.

The global response to Israel’s efforts to defend itself is marked by staggering hypocrisy. As journalist Daniel Greenfield characterized it, when Israel is involved, “rape is resistance and beepers are genocide”.

A Cynical Alliance Disguised as Morality
This global alignment of powers against Israel, dressed up in the language of human rights, is both cynical and immoral. They demand that Israel cease defending itself and negotiate with groups that openly seek its annihilation. They want Israel to stop fighting so that Hamas, Hezbollah, and others can survive—and strike again. All of this is done under the pretense of morality, but in truth, it is a coordinated effort to weaken and isolate Israel, leaving it vulnerable.

This is not a new phenomenon. It’s an age-old story, one that has been repeated throughout Jewish history. During World War II, the Nazis played the role of the murderers. The rest of the world either assisted them or turned a blind eye in silent acquiescence.

My birth country, Canada, famously said “None is too many” when asked how many Jewish refuges they were willing to save from the Nazi Holocaust. As George Steiner wrote in his haunting 1981 novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., where he imagines Hitler surviving the war and being captured in Argentina by the Israelis, Hitler's defense during a makeshift post-war trial includes a chilling claim: “When I turned against the Jew, no one came to his rescue. No one. France, England, Russia, even America, despite its large Jewish population, did nothing. They were glad the exterminator had come. They did not admit it openly, I grant you that, but secretly, they rejoiced.” (p 164-7)

A Prophetic Parallel
We have to ask why. Why, after centuries of persecution, does the world still only empathize with Jews when they are dying, and try to stop the Jewish people from building and defending their homeland? Why does the international community fail to see the blatant antisemitism driving these efforts?

Remarkably, what we are seeing today aligns with ancient prophecies found in the Torah that predict the events that will happen at the End of Days, many of which are read in synagogues during the upcoming Sukkot holiday. The prophet Zechariah (14:2) declared: "For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle." Ezekiel (38:14-16) also foretold a time when nations would converge against Israel: "You will come up against My people Israel like a cloud to cover the land." While we may have envisioned Zecharia and Ezekiel speaking of physical armies, perhaps today we are seeing this prophecy take shape through diplomatic, economic, and ideological forms. The nations may not all send soldiers, but they are united in their desire to undermine Israel.

The global campaign against Israel is part of a deeper, more ancient struggle foretold in the Bible and played out across millennia.

Zecharia (12:3) also wrote, “And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will make Jerusalem a stone of burden for all the peoples; all that burden themselves with it shall be sore wounded; and all the nations of the earth shall be gathered together against it.” In today’s world, that battle is as much ideological and political as it is physical. The international community’s attempts to pressure Israel into submission through both military and diplomatic means reflect this prophetic warning. The battle is not only for the land but for the legitimacy of Israel's very existence.

The global campaign against Israel, veiled in the language of justice and human rights, is nothing new. It is part of a deeper, more ancient struggle foretold in the Bible and played out across millennia. As King David wrote, "See how your enemies make an uproar, and those who hate You have exalted themselves. They make shrewd plans against Your people... They have said, 'Come, and let us wipe them out as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more'" (Psalm 83:2-4).

But just as Israel has survived every attempt to destroy it, so too will it withstand the current storm. Israel’s enduring strength and the survival of the Jewish people are a testament not only to their resilience but to the fulfillment of ancient promises.

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