By Alex Brummer
On a recent morning listeners to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme will have woken up to an UN official aerating on famine in Gaza. In precise detail he sought to elucidate, with some complex definitions, on how Israel’s actions in the territory had created ‘the worst humanitarian crisis I have seen in 50-years.’
Another UN official Marin Griffiths, would claim on Sky News, that what he had witnessed in Gaza was more alarming than the Syrian civil war and the ‘horrors’ of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s.
All humanitarian crises are terrible and no one, even the hardest hearted Israel supporters, could not be moved by some of the pictures beamed from Gaza or the possibility of a catastrophe. Yet the language and data deployed by UN officials was apoplectic.
More so when one considers 825,000 people, or 25pc of the population, died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia: a genocide marked alongside the Shoah on Holocaust Memorial Day.
What was especially troubling about the Today exchange was that soon afterwards the presenters did a promo for a special report, to be broadcast later in the day from Sudan. The substance of the dispatch was that the forgotten conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces ‘has created a humanitarian crisis in Sudan.’
The numbers affected by the Sudan conflict are truly horrifying. Some 24.7m people, 14 million children, in in need of urgent assistance. Some 3m children had been uprooted and many killed and injured (UNESCO data). All comparisons of child deaths and famine are invidious. The presenters emoting about the scale of the tragedy in Gaza, as described by the UN, were unable to process the idea that however bad it may be the scale of harm is as nothing as what was going on in nearby Sudan: south of Egypt and on the Red Sea.
Supporters of Israel cannot but think that when it comes to Israel and the Gaza conflict the media and the West has a double standard. In an appearance on the US broadcast ‘Face the Nation’ in early March Benjamin Netanyahu retorted, after tough questioning:
‘What would America do after something like the October 7 attack? Would you not be doing what Israel is doing.’ The World Jewish Congress has pounced on the West for ‘criticising Israeli defensive operations, but not those of other Western democracies’ as an example of anti-Semitism.
So is there a double standard? It is unquestionably true that the world’s media and Western democracies are scrutinising Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, in the West Bank and Gaza, more closely than most of the other horrors in the world such as what is happening in Sudan.
The vehemence of claims of famine by the UN and comparisons with past horrors are unacceptable. Defenders of Israel and those who value the work and independence of the UN and its agencies have every right to resist the bile and bias.
The difficulty is that Israel always holds itself up to a higher standard than its regional neighbours. How many countless times, when caught up in a debate about the Middle-East, do Israel’s supporters talk about it being the only vibrant democracy in the Middle-East. The narrative also includes descriptions of how the IDF sets the standard among military forces for the care it takes to preserve civilian life in conflict.
There are undoubtedly double standards in diplomacy, reporting and at the UN. But the restrictions Israel imposed on clean water supplies, power, telecoms and medical and food assistance in Gaza does not conform to its reputation as a civilised and humanitarian state. The lies, exaggerations and loose use of language and false testimony by medics and others about what is going on in Gaza are outrageous.
But Israel and the IDF, in defence of the state and the well-being of hostages, should be better than their enemies even in the most horrifying circumstances.
This op-ed was first published in Jewish News.
Alex Brummer is City Editor of the Daily Mail in London.