The Double Standards of the Gaza War
By Dr. Susan Michael, ICEJ USA Director
The world’s response to Israel’s war with Hamas that began on October 7 is nothing short of a travesty. Not only has Israel had to defend its defensive war against those who carried out the barbaric attack against Israeli civilians and threatened to repeat it, but it has faced a wave of double standards. The last few issues of Word From Jerusalem featured a series of articles on false and antisemitic accusations against Israel; I will now discuss the deafening silence from many people and organizations toward more egregious situations—a silence that reveals the antisemitism behind their focus on Israel.
Silence of women’s organizations regarding the sexual assault of Israeli women
It’s no secret that the atrocities of October 7 involved systematic acts of sexual brutality against women—acts too inhumane to print here. The typically vocal women’s rights groups we would expect to respond have been slow to condemn Hamas rapes. They have been peculiarly quiet, and have even questioned the integrity of the accusations—this despite the ample proof found in photographs, eyewitness testimony, and reports from doctors. What happened to believing women and the #metoo movement? For these groups to remain silent makes them complicit. In response, some Jewish women started the hashtag #metoounlessyoureajew.
Even the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women took eight weeks to issue a statement and call for an investigation. The UN and other organizations are finally saying something, but it shouldn’t have taken so long to admit reality. Likely, these organizations are disinclined to make a statement because many align with leftist movements that oppose Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. However, rape as an act of war should be condemned regardless of political affiliation.
Silence of the anti-Israel progressives on all other wars in the world
There is no doubt the war in Gaza has been devastating to the people who live there and have been uprooted from their homes, not to mention the loss of Gazan lives. Yet anti-Israel progressives have focused their attention on pushing false narratives about Israel as an evil colonist oppressor bent on wiping out the Gazan people while they remain quiet on other wars, like the Russian War on Ukraine and civil wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Ethiopia. There are some 110 armed conflicts around the world, and some 45 of them are in the Middle East—yet all the attention is on the war in Gaza.
Silence of the World Court (ICJ) on other genocides in Sudan and other countries
In January 2024, South Africa took Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging Israel violated the 1948 Genocide Convention with its military acts in Gaza. Yet the ICJ disregards Hamas’ genocidal jihadist agenda, spelled out in its founding charter as a sacred Islamic duty to eradicate the Jews in Israel and around the world. In the time since the Genocide Convention was enacted, there have been several clear acts of genocide worldwide, such as the Hutu tribe’s mass slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, identity-based killings of civilians in Ethiopia, and the Khartoum regime’s massacre of non-Arabs in the Darfur region of Sudan that continues today. In Congo, an ongoing genocide has taken the lives of more than 5 million people. Yet of those genocides, the ICJ remains quiet.
Silence of the UN about the Egyptian refusal to let the Gazan people out of Gaza
The most common reasons refugees leave their home country in hopes of finding a better life are armed conflicts and wars. The ongoing Syrian civil war, for example, produced 5 million refugees who have, for the most part, remained in other Middle Eastern countries like Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. More than 3 million Ukrainians applied for temporary residence in countries such as Poland and Germany in just a few months after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. America’s invasion of Iraq generated 2 million international refugees.
However, when Israel’s war with Hamas started, the Egyptian government almost immediately ruled out any possibility of accepting Palestinian refugees and continues to refuse to open that border—even temporarily, to ease the humanitarian crisis. The US administration hasn’t pressured Egypt to open its border to Gazan refugees seeking asylum in Western countries. Neither has the United Nations—even though fleeing a war zone and seeking asylum in a neutral country is a human right enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. Why the silence?
Egypt’s refusal to accept Palestinian refugees is likely deliberate, the result of US-supported policies that serve the political interests of Arab nations. Keeping refugees imprisoned in Gaza allows those Arab countries to then blame Israel for any unfolding humanitarian crisis.