Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 14 May 2023. © Richard Kemp
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Western governments, international organizations, media and human rights groups quite rightly rallied round without hesitation, recognising the need to give unreserved moral support to a nation defending itself from violent attack.
We see a very different picture today as Israel is assaulted by aggressors in Gaza, to all intents and purposes a foreign country.
There is some commonality between the two conflicts, although they are on an altogether different scale. Russia and Gaza’s Islamic Jihad both believe the countries they are attacking are illegitimate, have no right to exist and need to be destroyed in their current forms by violence. Neither Ukraine nor Israel has any territorial ambitions or aggressive intent against their attackers — both Ukraine and Israel are fighting purely defensive wars to protect their civilian populations.
There is another common factor. Islamic Jihad in Gaza is an Iranian proxy terrorist group, funded and directed from Tehran. Iran’s hand is behind this conflict and the ayatollahs have pressured Hamas terrorist leaders to join Islamic Jihad’s assault on Israel while doing all they can to prevent a ceasefire brokered by Egypt. Iran’s role in Ukraine is not as significant, but we should not forget that it has supplied Russia with explosive drones to fire at Ukrainian civilians.
I do not recall any Western government or international body suggesting moral equivalence between the aggressor and the defender in the Ukraine war, but that is exactly what we have seen repeatedly in this and previous conflicts between Israel and Gaza, with the UN Secretary General calling on ‘both sides’ to exercise restraint.
Unlike the immediate condemnation of Russian violence, we have seen only silence in the US and Europe since Islamic Jihad’s rockets began to fall on Israel. The best we have heard from the White House is that ‘Israel has the right to protect itself’, a statement of the blindingly obvious. None of this is good enough when what is needed is the strongest support for Israel and the most blunt condemnation of Islamic Jihad, along the lines we see over the Ukraine war.
The usual media suspects, such as the BBC and CNN, both cheerleaders for Ukraine’s defensive operations, have predictably been doing their best to slant their coverage against Israel. BBC commentary went as far as to imply that the killing of Gaza civilians is a deliberate policy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government while a CNN interviewer claimed that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. In Israel Haaretz published an article branding the IDF’s operation as ‘patently illegal’ and accused its soldiers of war crimes. Continue reading