Jordan’s king lectured Israel on Palestinians. His father shelled their camps

The king, emir and presidents who condemned Israel this week have records of their own, from Amman in 1970 to Tehran this January.

On September 17, 1970, King Hussein sent his army against the Palestinian armed groups in Amman, Irbid and the refugee camps around them. Artillery hit camps where fighters lived among civilians. Fifty-six years and five days later, his son, King Abdullah II, told the UN General Assembly that the Israeli government’s sense of impunity has reached “terrifying levels.”

By July 1971 the PLO had been driven out of Jordan. Estimates of the fighters killed run from 2,000 to 4,000; the civilian dead were never counted. Jordan said it was defending itself from armed groups that had built a state inside its state. Israel says the same about Hamas. No one at the UN called Jordan’s war genocide.

Abdullah was eight that September. In 1988 his father’s kingdom turned about a million Jordanians living in the West Bank into stateless Palestinians. Under Abdullah, from 2013, Jordan turned back Palestinians fleeing the war in Syria at its border, while taking in more than 600,000 Syrians. Nearly 175,000 Palestinians whose families fled Gaza in 1967 still live in his kingdom without citizenship. They pay foreigners’ tuition at its universities and are shut out of its public health insurance.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Gaza “the most inhumane and shameful concentration camp of our time.” In 2015 and 2016, his security forces put more than 30 Kurdish towns and neighborhoods under round-the-clock curfew and shelled them. The UN Human Rights Office counted between 355,000 and half a million people displaced and about 2,000 dead. In Cizre, witnesses described up to 189 people, children among them, trapped for weeks in basements without water or medical care before they died in fires caused by shelling. No one was prosecuted. Ankara said it was fighting PKK terrorists hiding in cities.

Qatar’s emir called Gaza genocide in the fullest sense of the word. His country was built by migrant workers. The Guardian counted more than 6,500 workers from five South Asian countries dead in the decade after Qatar won the World Cup, and Qatar’s own World Cup chief admitted 400 to 500 deaths on tournament projects. In 2024 Qatar abolished the only national election it had ever held. Doha has hosted Hamas’s political leadership since 2012.

On Wednesday, Masoud Pezeshkian accused Israel of genocide and told the Assembly that Iranians had spent seven months in the streets every night in support of their state. In January they were in the streets against it. The regime cut the internet, as it had in November 2019, and opened fire. Most of the dead were killed in two nights, January 8 and 9. The youngest on the list Iran Human Rights published six days before his speech was four and a half months old. Nobody knows the real toll. It is thousands for certain, and the head of Iran Human Rights calls estimates above 36,000 realistic.

Emmanuel Macron called Gaza “a spectacle that shames us all.” Israel owes answers for Gaza, and its own courts and press demand them every day. But the Assembly Macron addressed adopted 15 resolutions on Israel last year and 11 on the rest of the world combined. None on Sudan, where more than 150,000 people have been killed and 12 million driven from their homes. None on China. Since 2006, the Human Rights Council has condemned Israel 112 times and Iran 16.

During the intifada I served in Golani. Our orders were exact. A man in civilian clothes became a target the moment he held a weapon. Once in Jenin, two men ran up to our armored personnel carrier and opened fire. Both had rifles, and both were killed. Two hours later, two more came with one rifle between them. The first fired and fell. Nobody shot the second man while he stood beside the body. He was shot when he picked up the rifle and raised it at the carrier. Hamas built its war around rules like these, with hundreds of kilometers of tunnels under homes and rockets fired from residential streets, so that every Israeli strike would land among civilians. On October 7 it showed what it does with no rules at all.

Israel will answer for Gaza to its voters, its judges and its journalists. The men who condemned it this week answer to none of them.