I recently noted that the cost of persistent anti-Israel bias may be to make Israel care less and less about international opinion at all. This prediction may be confirmed by some remarks from Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. in an interview with a Jewish newspaper:
However, if Israel’s adversaries believe that they can put Israel on the defensive by shaming it in the court of public opinion through the use of human shields, Oren says, they may have miscalculated. For if the Jewish state is condemned when it plays by the normal rules of warfare that apply to the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, then maybe Israel will stop trying to figure out how to satisfy the capricious dictates of the international community and act to defend itself and defeat its enemies.
“Our critics don’t get it,” Oren said. “In Jenin, we went house-to-house and sent 23 soldiers to their death. But if we’re going to be called war criminals no matter what we do, then maybe that changes our thinking.”
The danger of further tragedy may not be merely hypothetical. Israel’s enemies are adept at exploiting international concern for human casualties to put Israel in a no-win situation:
When I remarked that many Israelis are expecting war this summer, Oren made no efforts to dispel it as a rumor. “We are concerned about this,” he said, explaining that with sanctions coming up at the United Nations, the Iranians may once again try to spark a war in Lebanon, as they did when their nuclear program was referred to the U.N. Security Council in 2006. “We face a different situation than we did in 2006, and it is much worse,” Oren said. “Hezbollah has rearmed so that it now has 42,000 missiles that can hit Eilat,” Israel’s southernmost city. In 2006, the Israelis destroyed all of Hezbollah’s long- and medium-range missiles during the war’s opening salvo, but now, said Oren, “Hezbollah has hidden all of its medium- and long-range missiles under schools and hospitals. They internalized Goldstone.”
In other words, while it was widely reported during the course of the Gaza war that the Hamas leadership was hiding out in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital, Israel knew that an attack on a hospital would earn it the opprobrium of the international community. Even then Israel still wound up facing the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, commonly known as the Goldstone Report.
What this translates into is the remarkable conclusion that some of Israel’s critics are, either willingly or unknowingly, being played for suckers by Hezbollah and Hamas leaders who have no compunction about hiding themselves and their weapons in schools and hospitals. If Israel attacks those caches, its critics in the “international community” will scream bloody murder. If Israel doesn’t attack them, well, those caches of weapons are used to kill Israeli civilians, to nary a whimper of protest on Israel’s behalf.
The double standard here could not be more blatant. And the consequences aren’t likely to remain just rhetorical for long. Until the “international community” and, more importantly, the international media applies the same standards of judgment to the behavior of Israel AND its enemies, tragedy and Israeli intransigence will remain inevitable. No one likes being played for a sucker, and that’s exactly what many of its critics are asking Israel to do.