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Source: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-906656
The World's Double Standard toward Israel: Prejudice Dressed as Principle
(Jerusalem Post) Amb. Alan Baker - Why has Israel become the convenient scapegoat for virtually every political, social and humanitarian problem in the Middle East - and increasingly, in the wider world? Why are Jews, representing barely 0.2% of the world's population, so frequently portrayed as responsible for events over which they have neither control nor influence? And why is Israel held to standards that are applied to virtually no other country? These questions go to the heart of a disturbing phenomenon in contemporary political discourse: the normalization of anti-Israel prejudice, frequently dressed up as legitimate political criticism. There is a fundamental difference between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and the systematic, blind and naive demonization of Israel as uniquely evil, illegitimate or criminal by much of the international community. Where are the comparable demands for international sanctions against countries that deliberately murder, torture or expel their own populations? Where is the same outrage directed at regimes that suppress women, LGBTQ communities, persecute minorities, imprison political opponents or launch wars of aggression? Israel did not create the Arab-Israeli conflict. It did not initiate the rejection of the 1947 United Nations partition proposal. It did not invent terrorism as a political instrument. And it did not compel generations of Palestinian and Arab leaders to reject opportunities for negotiated accommodation. Nor did Israel create Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah or Iran's policy of seeking Israel's destruction. Yet whenever Israel defends itself against terrorism or armed attack, the aggressor disappears from the narrative, while Israel becomes the principal culprit. This inversion of responsibility is not merely intellectually dishonest. It can have deadly consequences. The Oct. 7 massacre demonstrated what happens when a terrorist organization operates on the assumption that Israel's response will be constrained by international condemnation while the terrorists themselves will be shielded by political rhetoric. The victims of terrorism are then transformed into the perpetrators, while those who deliberately attack civilians are presented as freedom fighters. Israel should be judged by the same standards as every other country - certainly not by impossibly higher ones. The alternative is not justice. It is prejudice masquerading as principle. The writer, former Legal Adviser and Deputy Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, heads the international law program at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.