Yarmouk, where 160,000 Palestinians had once lived, was a vibrant refugee camp, bustling with activity: shops hawking their wares, food stalls selling falafel and shwarma, children playing soccer. But then came the indiscriminate bombings, the constant artillery and sniper fire, and, gradually, widespread famine and disease.
Their homes destroyed, their streets in ruins, and with no basic services, tens of thousands of Yarmouk’s Palestinian residents fled to neighboring lands or were internally displaced. Nearly 4,000 of them were killed during the violence.
You’re probably thinking that I’m talking about Gaza. You would be wrong, however. Yarmouk is just outside of Damascus – in Syria. It was once that country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp until it was totally destroyed by Syrian government troops during the bloody civil war that began in 2011 with the ruthless repression of anti-government protesters. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 617,000 people – 164,000 of them civilians – have been killed since the war’s start.
And yet, in the US, even as the Palestinian (and overall civilian) death toll climbed, there were no rallies against the Bashar Assad regime in our public squares. No protest encampments on university campuses. No grassroots calls for a ceasefire. There was only a deafening silence.
Absent were the social justice warriors from Columbia and Harvard, radical teachers’ unions, and pro-Palestinian solidarity movements as Syria’s Palestinians were being slaughtered. Could it simply be that since it wasn’t Israel committing these atrocities, no one bothered to pay attention?
The double standard is hard to miss
On October 7, Hamas committed the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and by the next day the anti-Israel Left had launched its campaign against the Jewish state. Israel had barely begun its response against Hamas in Gaza when there were already accusations of “genocide” and calls for a ceasefire.
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, waited only three days before issuing a demand for “an immediate ceasefire and de-escalation.” Apparently, AOC, a member of the far-left “Squad,” didn’t understand that a premature ceasefire – when Israelis were just coming to grips with the sheer brutality of the attack – would deprive Israel of its legitimate right to defend itself and shield Hamas from the consequences of their murderous rampage.
Throughout history, the primary obligation of any state has been to defend its inhabitants against outside aggression. But when Israel does it – and only when Israel does it – Israeli political and military leaders are almost instantly portrayed as war criminals.
In other words, even a large-scale massacre of Jews doesn’t entitle the Israelis to a little leeway in trying to prevent another one from happening. It matters not the lengths that Israel goes to avoid civilian casualties against an enemy that embeds itself deeply among the civilian population and stores weapons in and fires rockets from apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques.
Undeniably, the IDF has been less than perfect in conducting the war in Gaza, but the relatively low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio is “unprecedented in modern warfare” according to John Spencer of the Modern War Institute at West Point. “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history,” argues Spencer.
In fact, Israel has done better than the US did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Notably, to defeat 5,000 Islamic State terrorists in Mosul (compared to 30,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza), the American-led coalition killed around 10,000 civilians in nine months. I don’t recall anyone accusing the US of genocide.
This double standard also exists in media coverage. I have in a file folder an article from The New York Times dated June 20, 2004. It’s a report of an American airstrike that reduced to rubble four homes in Falluja, Iraq, killing 17 civilians. I kept it because I was astounded that this tragic “mistake” wasn’t front page news – it was buried on page 10. Just another day at the office. By contrast, whenever the IDF inadvertently harms civilians, it is routinely the lead story of major media outlets.
Israel, moreover, continues to face what I call structural antisemitism. Consider the UN Human Rights Council, which counts as members such human rights stalwarts as China, Cuba, Libya, Qatar, Russia, and Venezuela. It has made the Jewish state the only country to be the subject of a permanent agenda item. In a typical year, more resolutions are adopted against Israel than all other countries combined (between 2015 and 2020, Israel was condemned 112 times; Syria, a mere eight).
This double standard shows how the nation-state of the Jewish people is treated as “the Jew among the nations.” It also affirms the very reason we need a Jewish state in the first place. ■The writer is Chief Community Relations and Public Affairs Officer at the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.