Historian Skewers Western Hypocrisy on Israel

Ignoring their own past, leaders brazenly distort the present.

Troops advance in south Gaza. (The Times of Israel)

In a column this week in the Wall Street Journal, the historian Walter Russell Mead made some observations about the Gaza war that may be the most compelling I’ve come across since the war began almost two years ago:

[T]he Western leaders who flaunt their self-perceived moral purity as they condemn Israel forget the foundations on which they stand. Today’s liberal, rules-based Western order is the product of a far bloodier history than anything Israelis have done or even could do in Gaza.

The liberal world order whose fruits modern Europeans have enjoyed for so long is grounded on the Allied victory in World War II. The Allies, like the Israelis, weren’t the aggressors in that war, but in their efforts to extirpate the scourges of Nazi nihilism and Japanese militarism, they killed as many as three million German and another one million Japanese civilians [my emphasis, here and below]. They created mass homelessness, destroyed some of the world’s greatest cultural and religious monuments, disrupted medical and educational services, and subjected millions to ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and British Labour leader Clement Attlee scoffed at suggestions that the Allies provide humanitarian aid to enemy civilians while the war continued. As the British Foreign Office reminded Lord Lothian, its ambassador to the U.S., “supplies admitted to the occupied territories either fall into enemy hands or release other supplies for the enemy.”

Those who criticize Israel for demanding the return of all hostages as the price of a cease-fire forget that Allied demands for unconditional surrender had much bloodier consequences in World War II. Those demands were issued in the full knowledge that they would likely prolong the war and increase civilian suffering. But FDR thought this might be a feature rather than a bug. The Germans, in his view, had been willing to venture another world war because the first one had ended without any serious fighting inside Germany itself. Real peace could come only if the Germans and the Japanese had the spirit of resistance beaten out of them.

As for ethnic cleansing, more than 11 million Germans were forced from their long-term homes in Poland and Czechoslovakia after the guns fell silent, often in winter amid terrible shortages of food, medicine and safe water.

. . . Israel faces genuinely hellish choices in Gaza. But Western leaders who insist that Israel’s actions are historically unprecedented and morally unjustifiable betray an ignorance of history and unseriousness of purpose that raise fundamental questions about their fitness for the offices they hold.

There is not much that can be added about the hellish hypocrisy Israel has been subjected to by Western countries and their leaders in this war. But, a few points:

1. Western countries pelting Israel with accusations are not located in the heart of the Middle East and are not under murderous attack by Sunni and Shiite jihadists on all sides. Yet they express constant, smug outrage at Israel’s efforts to cope with that reality.

2. Israel finds itself in an appalling double jeopardy. On one hand, it’s been required—in a manner unprecedented in the history of warfare—to devote tremendous resources to feeding and caring for an enemy population. Israelis remember the horrifying scenes on October 7, 2023, when masses of Gazan civilians poured across the border in the wake of the terrorists to join the onslaught of murder, rape, mutilation, and kidnapping; and, within Gaza, lined the streets to wildly cheer passing vehicles flaunting kidnapped or murdered Israelis. But Israel, under enormous pressure to do so, has gone on tending to all the Gazans’ needs.

On the other hand, none of this—alongside unprecedented measures to reduce civilian casualties with warnings and evacuations from combat zones—has stopped Israel from being assailed with blood libels about “starvation” and “genocide,” not only in the Islamic world but throughout the Western world as well. It’s double jeopardy of the nastiest kind.

3. Western countries should, instead of embargoing arms to Israel, be supplying it liberally with the weaponry it needs to fight jihadist terror that threatens them as well; and instead of turbocharging the blood libels, be praising Israel for its strenuous attempts to minimize the carnage. Instead they ply it with relentless demands that, if heeded, will ensure that Hamas stays on its feet and the bloodshed continues.