Hundreds of thousands fill the streets of London, New York, and Sydney protesting against Israel and its actions in Gaza over the last two months. On college campuses across the Western World, thousands of students accuse Israel of the worst crimes imaginable. The United Nations has gone into overdrive in an attempt to force Israel to end its operation in Gaza and protect Hamas from being removed from power, with UN officials moved as never before by the suffering of the people of Gaza.
The accusations against Israel are endless. Disproportionate force (without knowing that the definition of proportionate force is force commensurate with achieving the goal of an offensive), collective punishment, colonialism, racism, Apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocide. These accusations have been made for decades and reached a fever pitch in the months since the massacre of over 1,200 people in southern Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7.
To an outside observer, some of these accusations may make sense at first. After all, more than ten times as many people have been killed in Gaza than were killed on October 7. Is that not disproportionate force? How many people have to die before something can be called a genocide?
However, none of these accusations against the State of Israel are made in good faith, and all of them would still be made even if the IDF was as perfect as a cartoon superhero and not a single civilian was killed in Gaza.
Want proof? Look at the response of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to an IDF operation that was in fact perfect. In July, following repeated terrorist attacks in which dozens of Israeli civilians were murdered, the IDF launched Operation Home and Garden, a two-day counter-terrorism operation in the city of Jenin. During this operation, twelve people were killed, all of them combatants. Not a single civilian was killed.
What was Guterres’ response to this remarkable achievement? His response was to say, “obviously in this situation, there was an excessive force used by Israeli forces.”
If literal perfection is not enough for Guterres, what would be enough? That Israel act like Batman, and not kill any terrorists? That there be no one injured – something not even Batman can do even in the most outlandish comics?
This is the same Guterres who said in response to the Hamas massacre of October 7 that the massacre “did not happen in a vacuum.” When he decries the suffering in Gaza, with far more conviction and emotion than he has ever had for the Israeli women and children who were brutalized, raped, murdered, and taken hostage, this is where he is coming from, a worldview that holds Israel to the fantasy standards of children’s comic books.
The UN as a whole lives in this world of make-believe. UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese has called Israel’s right to self-defense "non-existent" even in the aftermath of October 7.
“Israel cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies, from a territory that is under belligerent occupation,” she claimed.
In Albanese’s fantasy world, any action taken by Israel to prevent genocidal Jew-haters from murdering Israeli children is an illegal war crime, regardless of the intent or the results. According to her, Israel must let Hamas murder every one of the seven million Jews and two million others in Israel and cannot lift a finger to save a single life.
And she is far from alone. There is an old joke, first told by Abba Eban, that if Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions. That is an accurate reflection of the bizarro world inhabited by the UN, the most welcoming place brutal dictators and actual human rights abusers have ever known.
The leaders of the anti-Israel protests on Western streets and college campuses are much the same. It is not the death toll in Gaza that motivates these protests, but the fact of Israel’s existence and that Israel is attempting to defend itself at all.
How can those who accuse Israel of genocide themselves chant genocidal slogans, including ‘from the river to the sea,’ an obvious call for the obliteration of the world’s only Jewish State? Because the point of the accusation is not to call out a true crime, but to handicap Israel and erode support for the country so it will be easier for Hamas and its supporters to commit the very crimes they accuse Israel of. Because the accusation of genocide against the Jews is a deliberate attempt to co-opt the Holocaust so that a second Holocaust can be committed against the Jewish people.
Many of those at these protests are simply ignorant, especially the young. Often, they turn out to not even know what river and sea they refer to. But the leaders and masterminds of these movements take advantage of the stupidity and ignorance of the young to push messages and agendas that share the same goals as the Third Reich, and they know full-well what they are doing.
The protests against Israel began as soon as reports of the October 7 massacre began to emerge, before Israel has even begun to respond to the worst mass-killing of Jews since the Holocaust. Because the goal of these protests was never to protect Gazans, but to celebrate Hamas’s crimes against humanity and to protect Hamas so that it will be free to commit more massacres and a true genocide. This is why they harass and attack Jews on their own campuses.
The fact is that, even if the casualty figures published by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry could be trusted, which they cannot, the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in Gaza would still be about two to one, which is a historically good casualty ratio.
According to the UN itself, the average civilian-to-combatant death ratio since World War Two has been nine to one. Western armies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, achieved a ratio of three to five civilians killed for every combatant killed, according to Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of the British armed forces in Afghanistan.
Facing much of the same challenges as America and its allies did when combatting Al Qaeda and ISIS, a terrorist organization which does not wear uniforms, hides among civilians, uses civilians as human shields, deploys suicide bombers, and actively attempts to maximize the amount of its own civilians who are killed, Israel has achieved an even better combat ratio. And that is before taking into account that many of the casualties in Gaza were caused not by the IDF, but by rockets launched at Israel by Hamas and other terrorist organizations which misfired and landed in Gaza or by Hamas deliberately shooting and killing civilians who fled the fighting rather than allow themselves to be used as human shields.
To Israel’s critics, everything is an excuse to accuse it of every crime which can be thought of, regardless of the facts. The protestors who claim to care so much about the suffering of Gazans have not a word of condemnation for Hamas for using human shields, turning hospitals into military bases, using schools for military purposes, stealing humanitarian aid from its own people, refusing to build bomb shelters or take any steps whatsoever to protect the civilians it rules over, or even killing its own people.
The criticism against Israel would be largely the same even if not a single civilian in Gaza had been killed, or even a single Hamas terrorist. The accusations of genocide and excessive force have never had anything to do with the death toll and would be made just as forcefully even if there were zero deaths, because they have been made in just such circumstances and because the purpose was never to save Palestinian Arab lives, but to facilitate the murder of Jews.
If the IDF was as perfect as Batman and could fight without ever making a mistake or killing anyone, perhaps the ignorant masses who have flocked to the calls of the radical, genocidal antisemites leading these protests would have an easier time seeing through the lies they have been fed, but the same lies would still be made day-in and day-out, and little would change about the UN.
Gary Willig is a member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.