Gaza Exposed the Double Standards in Justice

The past nineteen months of Israel’s devastating onslaught on Gaza, as well as on the West Bank, have called into question the value of international law and what is referred to as the world order. 

We saw the application of international law to Russia following its invasion and occupation of Ukraine. It has been considered an illegal occupier of another people’s land. Most Western countries came to Ukraine’s aid to help it defend itself and to recover the land Russia occupied by force. They supplied it with weapons worth billions and shared intelligence with it. Heavy sanctions were imposed on Russia, and they were increased as the conflict escalated. Images of Ukrainian women making Molotov cocktails were shared by Western media and celebrated in the West as examples of the resilience and bravery of the Ukrainians. States like the United Kingdom helped collect evidence of Russia’s crimes and referred Russia to the International Criminal Court, resulting in the Court issuing an arrest warrant against Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Had a similar approach been followed in 1967, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Egyptian land might have been reversed. Instead, the same Western rescue that came to Ukraine’s aid did not come to the aid of the Arab countries whose land Israel occupied in 1967.

Israel tries to paint a picture of 7 October 2023 as the start of the conflict, claiming it has a right to self-defense against Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. The same Western states that supported Ukraine as an occupied country stood not with the occupied Palestinians, but with their illegal occupier, Israel.

It should be noted that not only is Israel the illegal occupier of Palestine, but it is also a serial violator of international law and international humanitarian law. In fact, it has breached over 1,000 United Nations resolutions, both in the Security Council and the General Assembly. No other state today has a worse record than Israel.

When Israel was referred to the International Court of Justice by South Africa, it is being investigated if committing genocide according to the Genocide Convention. Anyone following the live footage of Israel’s atrocities against Gaza would quickly come to the conclusion that Israel was deliberately targeting the Palestinian people as a whole in Gaza, regarding them as human animals and making no distinction between civilians and combatants. When asked how many Palestinians Israel would kill in revenge, I thought ten times the casualties on October 7, which were about 1,200. I therefore thought that, based on previous aggressions, it would stop after 12,000 Palestinians had been killed. Never did I or most observers think that tens of thousands would be killed and that the number of children killed would reach 20,000.

Israel also deliberately breached known rules of war. It has committed an atrocious number of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It destroyed all of Gaza’s universities. It destroyed the medical infrastructure, many schools, water treatment plants, electricity generators, and the list goes on.

What was astonishing is the failure of any of the so-called international community, or more specifically the Western governments, to rein Israel in even from a humanitarian point of view, which renders them complicit in the eyes of many people, if not partners in these crimes.

Israel feels it has complete impunity to do as it wishes. It can bomb, kill, destroy, assassinate, and attack other sovereign countries with no accountability. As for international law, it applies to everyone else but not to Israel. An example of this was its insistence that Lebanon implement UN Resolution 1701 while it breaches all UN resolutions that it should implement.

The message this sends to other rogue states is that they can bypass international law if they become allies of Western states, for Israel is completely shielded from accountability by the US and the UK, for starters.

The double standards applied by Western democratic states, which claim to uphold human rights, when it comes to Israel—while its genocide is televised live on our TV screens—have called international law and the world order into question. The scenes of starving children and those who have no safe place because of Israel’s actions, and children killed by Israeli pilots dropping American bombs, have normalized the murder of children like never before.

Just as Israel has emptied antisemitism of all its meaning, it has done the same to international law, which after the Second World War was set up to ensure that dark chapter of history would never be repeated. The world is a less safe place for all because of Israel’s actions, but it is safe to say that it is more despised now than it was before October 7.