Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers smashed through the Russian border a week ago in a surprise attack, and they now occupy 28 settlements and between 500 and 1,000 square kilometers of Russian land.
That is far larger than all of Gaza.
Not only that, but some 200,000 Russians had to be evacuated and are now displaced from their homes.
I have no idea why Ukraine decided to do this. Its President said it was a matter of security because Russia had launched attacks from that region.
Where are the journalists, human rights advocates and world leaders expressing concern over an aggressive attack, taking of territory and and hundreds of thousands of displaced people? Isn't attacking another nation an act of aggression?
Well, Ukraine is in a defensive war. Just like Israel was in 1967.
Ukraine is trying to dissuade further Russian attacks. Just as Israel is today.
Ukraine is not targeting civilians. Neither is Israel, although Russia isn't so immoral as to hide its troops underneath civilians to use them as human shields. It has some concern for its own citizzens, after all.
Analogies are rarely perfect and people can point to differences. But how come those differences always seem to go against Israel's position?
The fact is that people, and nations, and the media, and human rights NGOs, act how they act for their own often selfish or other subjective reasons, and then come up with justifications like "international law" after the fact. The excuses justify the actions after the fact but they are rarely the reasons for the actions or statements.
This is something that the Palestinians know far better than Israelis. They know that the world wants to hate Jews, just as the West wants to hate Russia. They make up excuses so the antisemites can point to reasons for their hate, but the hate precedes the excuses.
The Palestinians also know that people love to join the crowd, ansd when they get enough antisemites to go into the streets, plenty of others want to be on the "right side of history."
Jews, possibly due to centuries of Talmudic law study, still think that logic and arguments win the day. They know their positions and facts are right, and think that the world would believe them if they would just listen and look at the evidence.
It doesn't work that way. And I say this as someone who spends hours a day making ironclad, logical and often irrefutable arguments to prove Israel's case.
The double standards for Jews are all over the place. One of the submissions to the International Criminal Court about its decision to seek an arrest warrant against Israel's leader detailed one of them:
Some have questioned OTP’s motives in seeking issuance of the arrest warrants. Moreover, on the day that the Prosecutor announced his application for arrest warrants, a State Department spokesman questioned OTP’s professionalism as well: “The Prosecutor’s staff was supposed to land in Israel today to coordinate the visit, and instead, Israel was informed that the Prosecutor’s staff didn’t get on their flight around the same time that the Prosecutor himself went on television to announce these charges. These circumstances call into question the legitimacy and credibility of this investigation.” To cite but one comparison : In 2004, OTP commenced its preliminary examination of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Colombia. OTP engaged with Colombian authorities for years and finally, in 2021, Prosecutor Khan closed the matter on complementarity grounds, on the basis that Colombian authorities “could not be characterised as being inactive, nor unwilling or unable to genuinely investigate and prosecute relevant Rome Statute crimes.”
Or, as another submission points out, Israel has a comprehensive and widely respected multi-tiered legal system, and "It is difficult to reconcile an allegation that a manifestly unlawful policy (in contravention to Israel's clear legal obligations and publicly stated positions) could be instituted at the highest political echelon and implemented throughout the civilian and military authorities, with the system of legal advice described above."
Yet the ICC did it anyway, and it can come up with lots of justifications for why Israel is treated differently from every other nation. And so do other parties that made their own submissions supporting the lie that Netanyahu is a war criminal, Palestine is a real country and Israel's extensive and independent legal system is not adequate to handle cases of crimes against humanity.
Jews think that the world has fundamentally changed when Jews exited the ghettoes and managed to become successful in business and politics. And it did - but not as much as we would like. The prejudices still exist, a little under the surface. The startling language of the ancient kinot we said today mirrors the massacres of last year a little too closely.
But the world made up their minds before any evidence even existed, they just need a little bit of staged or out-of-context video or statements by "officials" to fully buy what they wanted to believe to begin with.
