🤥 Israel is singled out and held up to a higher standard than other countries.

Israel is not singled out by the international community, international courts, or any other international body. Israel is subject to the same international laws and standards as all other nation-states, without exception.

Israel is held to the same standard that was used to overturn Jim Crow laws in the United States, dismantle apartheid in South Africa, and to address rights violations and atrocities committed by other states. The cornerstone of this standard is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention, which uphold the inherent dignity and equal rights of all individuals as the bedrock of freedom, justice, and peace.

Despite flagrant violations of international law and treaties, Israel operates with complete impunity, evading sanctions or accountability for its illegal 57-year military occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This occupation and its ongoing, illegal settlement of Palestinian territories since 1967 have involved war crimes, including massacres, mass detention, and forced displacement of civilians. This 57-year occupation is notwithstanding the systematic dispossession of Palestinians of their land, property, houses, and possessions and the destruction of over 580 Palestinian villages in areas Israel has controlled since 1948.

Israel is the foremost violator of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, which are legally binding for all member states. To date, Israel has breached 32 UNSC resolutions, in addition to violating UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 194 (III) (1948), establishing the right of return for all Palestinian refugees, and UNGA Resolution 3236 (1973), reaffirming the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, among others.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared Israel’s separation/apartheid wall, surrounding the Occupied West Bank and constructed on expropriated Palestinian lands, as illegal. Despite this ruling, the wall persists. Furthermore, the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories blatantly violates the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel is also in violation of the 2023 ICJ ruling, which ordered Israel to take immediate measures to prevent acts of genocide, including deliberate starvation of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip.

Israel and its supporters can’t have it both ways. Israel is either “the only democracy in the Middle East” with “the most moral army in the world;” and therefore, must adhere to the “higher” standards corresponding to these claims. Or, Israel must concede that it is neither, and therefore, needs not be held to such “higher standards.”

Under international law, Palestinians living in areas occupied by Israel are considered to be under foreign domination and an illegal military occupation. International law unequivocally upholds the rights of the Palestinian people, as it does for any people living under similar circumstances, to resist their occupation, colonization, and/or foreign domination, including through armed struggle.

In her memoir, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, published mere weeks before the events of October 7, Jewish author and activist Naomi Klein states:

“Where European powers colonized from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish victimization and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.”