Israel stands accused of genocide as it fights to destroy Hamas in response to its savage terrorist attack last October. Is the world’s only Jewish state being held to a different standard? Many Israelis believe this to be true and they are, undeniably, right. It doesn’t, however, make all criticism of the war in Gaza either unfair or anti-semitic.
It’s surely true, to name one example, that the appalling death toll in Gaza — now estimated by the Hamas-led health authority at about 36,000 — cannot alone explain the scale and depth of the international outcry it has caused. Where were the campus protesters and genocide claims when at least 10 times that number of ethnic Tigrayans were killed or deliberately starved to death by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments in a war that ended only last year?
Equally indisputable is that prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have set a precedent by recommending arrest warrants on war crimes charges for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. If the court approves that request, it will be the first time since the ICC’s inception in 2002 that it has targeted the sitting leaders of a democracy, even though other democracies have, of course, done some very bad things. Invading Iraq on a lie, at the cost of hundreds of thousands dead, would be one candidate.
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