My Word: Israel faces double standards when defending itself

‘Incoming!” “Double incoming!” Israelis are used to receiving multiple alerts of rocket, drone, and other attacks, but last Friday’s events were doubly disturbing. 

Two different attacks of a different nature, separated by a great distance, created an impact.

The first, in the early hours, was the drone attack launched by the Houthis in Yemen in which one man in Tel Aviv, 50-year-old Yevgeny Ferder, was killed, and several wounded. 

Israelis were still absorbing that attack when the lawfare projectile launched from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague hit home with a metaphorical thud.

The split-screen reporting of the two stories – punctuated by warnings of more missiles directed at the Jewish state – symbolizes Israel’s unique situation. No wonder we feel under fire from all directions.

It is time to change the terminology. The Iranian-made drone used in the lethal attack is often referred to as a “suicide drone.” This is inaccurate.

It is a killer drone – a lethal weapon that commits murder, not suicide.

The previous day a soldier died of the wounds he sustained in an Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah drone attack on the North. 

These drones are not toys, and those who launch them, whether a few kilometers away or miles away, are not playing around.

Yemen is not physically close to Israel – when Israel responded to the attack in the aptly-named Operation Outstretched Arm, it required a complicated mission covering a distance of more than 2,000 km. to reach targets in the Yemenite port of Hodeidah. 

The Israeli response was significant, marking the first air strike by Israel on the Houthis after they launched hundreds of rockets, mainly aimed at Eilat, and multiple attacks on international shipping.

IT’S A PITY it took a lethal attack in Tel Aviv for the country to respond. 

It’s part of the October 6 mentality, the security misconceptions that predated the October 7 mega-atrocity by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in which some 1,200 people were slaughtered and 250 abducted to Gaza. 

Isarel must defend itself 

Israel cannot ignore incidents in the “periphery.” The lives of the residents North and South are no less precious than of those who live in Tel Aviv and the center of the country.

“Settlers” are also human, but you might need a reminder if you rely on mainstream media, human rights NGOs, the UN and its many branches – including the ICJ. 

There was something between the obscene and the absurd watching an international court once again spending hours zooming in on Israel’s alleged crimes. (Pity the poor starving Sudanese, more than one million of whom are displaced and amid an appalling humanitarian crisis; because Israel can’t be blamed, their fate is not news.) 

Incidentally, some 60,000 Israelis from the North remain internally displaced, unable to return to their homes, as the region is still under constant Hezbollah attacks. 

This is in addition to the thousands in the South whose homes and communities were destroyed during the October 7 invasion, and who are also internally displaced. 

They don’t count according to the international justice system.

Adding insult to injury, the ICJ chief justice Nawaf Salam who delivered the verdict is a Lebanese citizen and former diplomat for the country where Hezbollah is part of the government. 

That’s the same Hezbollah terrorist organization unleashing its weapons on Israel on a daily basis, and, like its Iranian sponsor, continuing to threaten “the Zionist entity.” 

In May, Salam ruled against Israel’s actions in Gaza. Last week, he was back for another convoluted ruling that Israel is “obliged to bring an end to its presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.” 

In case there was any doubt, this includes “the Holy City of Jerusalem” (where Judaism’s most sacred sites have been located for millennia), and Gaza, from which Israel completely withdrew – including uprooting those buried in Jewish cemeteries – in 2005.

The ruling is non-binding but, nonetheless, another weapon to be used in the battle against Israel’s right to exist. 

Note that the court accepts the existence of the State of Palestine, with undefined borders, and plays along with the Palestinian desire that such a state be allowed to be built in Judea and Samaria, free of a Jewish presence. 

It’s clear how such a mindset can be exploited to promote Palestinian terrorism; it’s not clear how it can contribute to creating a real peace.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT by President Joe Biden this week that he would not seek a second term after all created a flurry of articles about his relationship with Israel. I think it’s too early to sum up.

A lot can happen between now and January when he is slated to leave office. It’s hard to forget how Barack Obama, in his last days as president, refused to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2334 – with its implied recognition of Palestinian rights to all parts of Jerusalem according to the 1949 armistice line, giving the Palestinians control of, among other places, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount.

Last week, Israel Hayom journalist Nadav Shragai wrote an opinion piece called “America’s bear hug: How US policies hamper Israel’s war efforts.”

Published before Biden’s announcement that he was pulling out of the race, it nonetheless points to some of his problematic legacy so far, marked by a mixture of strongly stated support and sanctions. Of particular note is the growing US, EU, and even Japanese trend to impose sanctions on individual Israelis.

“When the US imposes sanctions on the Israeli Tzav 9 group that blocks aid trucks headed for Gaza, and its leader Reut Ben Haim, a mother of eight from Netivot – it harms Israeli democracy and freedom of demonstration and expression in Israel but also ridicules its own concern (during the judicial reform period) for those very values,” Shragai wrote.

“The American measures against a legitimate Israeli protest organization, which blocks the path of aid trucks to the enemy... are also the opposite of sanctions that the US imposes in other parts of the world precisely on regimes that harm such value-based and conscientious protests.

“And again – with one hand, the US punishes countries like China and Russia, which harm such protests, and with the other hand, it behaves like those dark regimes and harms here in our country civil and democratic protest of the kind it sanctifies elsewhere.”

The fact that the US initially mistakenly identified one of the Tzav 9 leaders and placed sanctions on the wrong person (who was then unable to access his bank accounts or credit cards) underscores how light America’s finger is on the trigger when the gun is pointing at Israelis from the “wrong” political affiliation.

Biden has turned into a lame-duck president. It is likely that now free of constraints concerning his campaign, he will be eager to leave his stamp on history, at almost any cost.

This does not necessarily bode well for Israel, the Middle East, and indeed the world.

Writing in Commentary recently, Seth Mandel noted: “The grave situation in Israel’s North gives the lie to a fantasy underpinning the West’s desperate push for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza – that there is such a thing as the ‘day after’ for Israel. 

“Rather than a permanent peace being on the table, Israel’s enemies – and America’s, since they are all working on behalf of Iran – merely shift their forever war to a new front each time Israel temporarily pacifies one of the conflict zones on its border.

“Israel will not get a reprieve. There may be a ‘day after’ the Gaza conflict for Western states thousands of miles away, but there will be none for the Jewish state.”

Mandel recalled the “Cherbourg Boats” incident 55 years ago when French president Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on Israel, halting the transfer of five specially modified vessels that Israel had paid for in full.

The story is recorded in Abraham Rabinovich’s The Boats of Cherbourg: The Navy that Stole Its Own Boats and Revolutionized Naval Warfare. The title is its own spoiler.

Whatever transpires during the meetings between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US officials in Washington this week, Israel can take nothing for granted, especially not the enduring friendship of allies. 

Israel ultimately needs to rely on its own strength, creativity, and desire for survival honed over thousands of years of history.