When Arabs kill Arabs (vs. when Israel kills terrorists)

Last week, over a thousand Alawite civilians were killed in Syria. And yet, despite such atrocities occurring just 400 miles from the Land of Israel, the global response has been strikingly muted. Contrast this with the fierce and immediate backlash Israel faces when it conducts military operations against Hamas and the other terrorist groups who dedicate their existence – their money, soldiers, food – to attacking Israel, and the disparity is painfully difficult to ignore.

Arab-on-Arab violence, even at the scale of mass executions such as this, barely registers with the international community, all while Israel’s defensive actions trigger mass protests and media outrage on such a scale that has rarely been seen in our history.

In its toll, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said that 973 civilians had died since 6 March in what it described as ‘killings, field executions and ethnic cleansing operations’ at the hands of security personnel in the community to which the former President belonged – an Alawite minority area. Note, too, that the Observatory also reported at least 125 members of the Syrian security forces and 148 fighters loyal to Assad who were killed.

Part of the reason for the discrepancy between attitudes towards Israel and attitudes towards the rest of the Arab world is so-called political unity. Collective outrage over Israeli actions serves a broader strategic purpose for both Arab regimes and the Western activists who spout such absurdity. For the former, condemning Israel and its actions in areas where terrorists reside allows such authoritarian Arab governments to deflect domestic anger away from their own issues; economic mismanagement, corruption, human rights abuses, et cetera. It is, after all, easier to blame the Jewish state than to confront the systematic failures of one’s own government.

For the latter, the anti-Israel narrative long absorbed into broader ideological frameworks has crept its way into those concerned with standing firmly ‘on the right side of history,’ as I was told once. Progressive activists, eager to denounce Israel’s supposed colonialism – their racism, imperialism, apartheid, and whatever next insult will be thrown the way of the sole democracy of the Middle East – have successfully framed Israel as a colonial aggressor. This is despite the fact that Israel’s very existence stems from Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland dating back millennia, granting anti-Israel activists free rein to position themselves as moral crusaders of sorts; all the while ignoring the complexity of it all, or the fact that Israel’s military actions, those they denounce so harshly, are generally defensive responses to terror attacks that target Israeli civilians. Make no mention of the fact that Hamas deliberately operates from within civilian areas, or their use of Gazans as human shields, either.

The political convenience of criticising Israel is further reinforced by a distressingly overlooked lack of geopolitical consequences: condemning Israel costs the Western governments and activists little, while confronting the Arab regimes who commit such atrocities would likely weaken diplomatic and economic relationships, already destabilised by myriad instances that would be an entire post in itself. Western governments, therefore, have little incentive to hold Syrian forces accountable for the massacres they committed – and continue to commit – when in doing so, they could threaten strategic partnerships with neighbouring Arab states or disrupt oil markets. But Israel is an easy target, so that makes it alright.

Israel’s status as a Western-aligned democracy in a region as volatile as it, makes it a uniquely valuable scapegoat for Arab regimes, the condemnation of Israel serves as a tool for domestic control – rallying nationalist sentiment, thus diverting public attention from government failures in a staple strategy of state-controlled media in a vast collection of Arab nations. The logic is simple, of course: as long as Israel can be successfully blamed for the Middle East’s instability, Arab governments are shielded from accountability for their oppression of their own people.

The consequences of this double standard, though, extend far beyond the matter of Israel’s security. The demonisation of Israel as the state of the Jews place Jewish communities in Western countries, thousands of miles from the Middle East, at risk. The perception that Israel’s actions, too, are uniquely immoral to itself, and not at all applicable to its neighbouring countries, acts to further undermine and call Jewish self-determination into the question: if Israel’s very existence is an act of colonialism, is Jewish sovereignty even legitimate at all?

The moral hypocrisy at play is quite simply staggering. If human rights and civilian casualties were really the primary concern of the global institutions, the global response to the Syrian massacres would mirror, and likely exceed, the outrage being directed at Israel for its crime of self-defence. The fact that it doesn’t, therefore, suggests that issues of human rights are not the driving factor behind the disproportionate condemnation of Israel; political expediency, deep ideological biases, and blatant antisemitism that play a far more significant role than those who protest against Israel are prepared to admit. And, while they often argue that holding a democratic state to higher moral standards is justified, holding Israel to an impossible standard – while, at the same time, allowing Arab regimes a free pass for even the most egregious human rights violations as we see with each day women that are arrested in Iran for the crime of not covering their hair – only serves to reveal an agenda that is, at the fundamental level, inherently dishonest.

The question we should be asking is not why Israel faces the scale of criticism that it does: democratic states such as it are, quite rightly, held to high standards of conduct. The real question we should be asking is why Arab regimes are not held to any standards at all: over one thousand Syrians have been murdered in cold blood. Where are the protests? Where are the emergency UN sessions? Where are the calls for sanctions?

The consequences of such moral hypocrisy extend far beyond the borders of Israel – and Jewish communities around the world continue to pay the price.