-Analysis-
PARIS — Do Israelis realize the scale of the disaster? They have lost the battle of world public opinion, when on Oct. 7, the whole planet shared their shock at the scale and barbarity of Hamas’ attack on civilians, and their emotion at the images of young girls and elderly people taken hostage in Gaza.
Nearly eight months later, Israel is still reeling from the humiliating rulings of international justice, the hostile clamor of student movements in the United States and Europe, and calls for boycotts that had — until now — remained marginal.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
The first instinct, fueled by prophets of doom, is to blame an inherently hostile world, a resurgent antisemitism. The posture of defiance was summed up by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech on Jan. 27 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day): “If Israel is forced to stand alone, we will stand alone.”
Fighting alone
Some of Israel’s friends around the world are joining it in this defensive withdrawal, appalled — and rightly so — by signs of antisemitism, whether overt or due to simple ignorance, cropping up here and there.
But this attitude is accompanied by a refusal to see the undoubtedly dominant reason for this growing hostility: the revulsion aroused by the images coming out of the Gaza Strip; the testimonies of the few humanitarians on the ground; and the sheer scale of the human catastrophe unfolding there.
Dreaming aloud of ethnic cleansing.
The strategy followed by the Israeli government and army since Oct. 7 could only go wrong: strike the Palestinian territory disproportionately hard; collectively punish the more than 2 million civilians under the pretext that Hamas fighters are hiding among them, or that they constitute an even greater number of “human shields;” and rule out any political solution for the “aftermath.” That is not to mention the extremists pushing to recolonize Gaza — dreaming aloud of ethnic cleansing.
Two parallel sorrows
This description of eight months of war will seem unfair to Israelis: They don’t see the same images as we do. The main Israeli media ignore these images, and avoid anything that might arouse empathy for the “enemy.”
The shock will be all the greater when the international press is admitted to Gaza and recounts the tragedy that has occurred there. The same goes for the Palestinians, of course, who are subjected to the same one-sided images. These two parallel sorrows do not intersect. They can neither dialogue nor cancel each other out. They fuel the rising hatred.
Yet the right to self-defense does not authorize anyone to disregard international humanitarian law.
In this context, the decisions of international courts are incomprehensible to Israelis. The fact that their prime minister — although despised by a majority of his fellow citizens — is accused of crimes against humanity is beyond comprehension for those still reeling from the shock of Oct. 7, especially when more than a hundred hostages remain in the hands of Hamas.
Yet the right to self-defense does not authorize anyone to disregard international humanitarian law. That is what the judges of the UN’s International Court of Justice and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, meant.
Denying these legitimate bodies, or even seeking to sanction them, as the United States is announcing, will only widen the already worrying gulf between the West, equated with the United States alone, and this “Global South” that Moscow and Beijing are courting by making people forget their own turpitudes.
The tragedy of war thus doubles as a political catastrophe.
