Israel’s War Against Hypocrisy
The Jewish state’s response to Hamas’ October 7th pogrom has exposed gross double standards across academia, the modern Left, Europe, NGOs, Qatar, and beyond.
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In the hours after Israel’s attack against Hamas leaders sheltering in Qatar last week, a notable U.S. media outlet ran an article with the headline: “Israel Attacks Qatar’s Relevance.”
The more accurate description would have been: Israel attacks hypocrites, some of whom happen to be in Qatar.
Israel’s war since October 7th has not only been a war for survival, but also a war against hypocrisy. For decades, the Jewish state has been lectured about morality by elites, intellectuals, and international institutions that excuse or ignore the world’s gravest crimes while inventing new standards for Israel alone.
Israel is the only country expected to feed its enemy. If Israel laid down its arms, there would be no more Israel; if Hamas laid down its arms, there would be regional peace. Israel is the only country expected to warn its enemies before striking them. Israel is the only country whose capital is denied recognition by much of the world. Israel is the only country singled out as a “colonial project” (despite being the only indigenous people to return to their ancestral land). Israel is the only country penalized for defending its citizens with technology that works too well.
Israel is the only country that people shout “No peace on stolen land” to — while they themselves are living on “stolen land.” Israel is the only country whose enemies magically appear as nothing but women, children, and journalists. Israel is the only country told to accept a ceasefire less than 24 hours after being brutally attacked. Israel is the only country whose very existence is treated as a crime.
Israel is the only country accused of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” while the population supposedly on the receiving end continuously grows, and its society openly calls for Israel’s extermination. Israel is the only country where the death of terrorists is reported as the death of “civilians.” Israel is the only country that somehow draws moral equivalence to a jihadist terrorist organization.
The brutal massacre of October 7th, followed by Israel’s military campaign to destroy Hamas — a worthy cause by any moral measure — has ripped the mask off these hypocrisies and revealed just how hollow, selective, and politically motivated so many of the world’s self-proclaimed moral guardians truly are.
On university campuses that champion “free speech,” Jewish students have learned quickly that speech is only free for those who chant for Israel’s destruction. Professors who romanticize “resistance” turn a blind eye when resistance means raping women, butchering families, and burning civilians alive.
“Progressive” departments that mobilized instantly against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine tie themselves in knots to avoid condemning Hamas. Conformity is enforced by intimidation: Students are free to chant the genocidal slogan “From the River to the Sea!” but not to express pride in their Jewish identity. The academy, once a place for intellectual rigor, has become a theater for political performance, its moral compass calibrated not by principle, but by ideology.
The hypocrisy is not confined to academia. “Progressive” movements that preach feminism, LGBTQ rights, and racial justice betray those very causes by vying for “the Palestinians” whose society is among the most illiberal in the world. Western activists who demand safe spaces for themselves cheer a terrorist organization that massacred young women at a music festival, kidnapped children from their beds, and broadcasted rape as a weapon of war.
Queer activists march under Palestinian flags despite the fact that Hamas would imprison or execute them for who they are. The “progressive” conscience proves not universal but tribal, betraying its own principles the moment Jewish survival collides with ideological fashion.
Europe too has revealed its duplicity. European governments lecture Israel about proportionality while cheering Ukraine’s right to full-scale war in defense of its sovereignty. They turned a blind eye to the slaughter in Syria or the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, but rediscovered their humanitarian instincts only when Jews fight back.
“Never again” has become a hollow slogan when Jewish blood is treated as cheaper than any other. In Vienna, Berlin, and London, Jews are warned not to wear a kippah in public, while the very governments that fail to protect them issue sermons to Jerusalem about restraint. Europe’s old hypocrisies have returned in modern dress, proving that for all the rhetoric about lessons learned from the Holocaust, when Jews defend themselves, they are condemned just the same.
The NGO industry has only deepened the charade. Organizations branding themselves as humanitarian or rights-based often act as cover for Hamas. Some coordinate directly with the terror group to distribute aid, knowing full well that Hamas seizes food, fuel, and medicine for its tunnels and rockets.
Others produce glossy reports accusing Israel of war crimes while omitting Hamas’ systematic use of human shields. International NGOs that rushed to document every alleged Israeli airstrike casualty remained silent about the mass rape, torture, and execution of October 7th. Instead of being neutral arbiters, these groups amplify Hamas propaganda and launder it into the language of human rights. Their hypocrisy is particularly dangerous because it cloaks terror in the aura of legitimacy.
The United Nations and its agencies embody this corruption on a global scale. The UN has passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined, turning the Jewish state into a permanent scapegoat while shielding tyrannies.
UNRWA (the Palestinian UN agency) in particular has been exposed as a breeding ground for terror: schools filled with antisemitic propaganda, teachers directly involved in the October 7th massacre, and decades spent entrenching refugee status rather than solving it. An agency supposedly devoted to peace has functioned as Hamas’s social welfare wing, paid for by Western taxpayers. The moral bankruptcy is staggering: The very institution charged with preventing another genocide has become complicit in enabling those who dream of one.
The Arab world has played its part in this duplicity. Arab governments posture as defenders of Palestinians, but many treat Palestinians with contempt within their own borders — stripping them of citizenship, barring them from professions, corralling them into refugee camps for generations. Egypt and Jordan, who publicly pressure Israel, quietly cooperate behind the scenes because they know Hamas threatens them as much as it threatens Israel. The Palestinian cause is wielded not out of love for Palestinians, but as a weapon against Israel and the West. It is hypocrisy of the most cynical kind.
Western media, for their part, claim neutrality, yet their selective framing parrots Hamas talking points. October 7th atrocities were initially minimized, buried in the back pages, or cast in the passive voice. Every Israeli strike, by contrast, is reported in lurid detail, stripped of the context that Hamas embeds itself among civilians. Headlines decry “Israeli bombs” while failing to mention Hamas’ rockets fired from hospitals and schools. The result is a moral inversion: The terrorist becomes invisible, the defender becomes the aggressor, and truth becomes another casualty of war.
Even religious leaders have revealed their own duplicities. Clergy members and clerics who speak with clarity about poverty or climate change lose their voices when Jews are slaughtered. Statements from the Vatican and other institutions have been filled with vague appeals to “peace” and “dialogue,” refusing to confront Hamas’ barbarism by name. The moral clarity that faith is supposed to provide vanishes in the fog of political convenience, exposing a reluctance to defend Jewish lives as vigorously as others.
Much of this hypocrisy has come from the political Left, and in doing so it has revealed just how hypocritical that side of the political spectrum has become. The Left’s credibility has withered because it cannot hold to its own stated values when Jews are the victims and Israel is the target. Its universalism has turned out to be conditional. Its moral principles dissolve when they come into contact with Jewish survival. The selective outrage reveals that much of the modern Left is not animated by justice, but by resentment; not by compassion, but by ideological loyalty. The double standards have stripped bare its moral pretenses.
Israel’s war has shown much of the Left to be more committed to slogans than to people, more comfortable defending fashionable “oppressors” than confronting uncomfortable truths. It has exposed an emptiness at the heart of “progressive” politics: a readiness to abandon its own causes if keeping them would mean standing with Jews. The language of “justice” becomes a mask for political tribalism, and the mask has slipped.
And beyond the West, many countries in the Global South have used the Palestinian cause as a symbolic weapon against the West, while ignoring the oppression within their own borders. Regimes guilty of censorship, political imprisonment, and ethnic violence posture as defenders of freedom when it comes to Gaza. They condemn Israel as a “colonial power,” even as they themselves preside over authoritarian states. The irony is that many of these nations, far removed from the conflict, are invested in the symbolism of opposing Israel more than in the lives of Palestinians themselves.
Few examples of duplicity are as stark as Qatar’s. A U.S. ally, home to America’s largest military base in the region, and a self-styled mediator, Qatar openly bankrolls Hamas and hosts its leadership in luxury hotels.
When Israel struck Hamas leaders meeting in Doha, Qatar feigned outrage about sovereignty. Yet this is the same Qatar that welcomes Western sports teams, media companies, and universities while simultaneously financing Islamist terror. The double game is transparent: Qatar profits from both Western approval and jihadist patronage, all while presenting itself as indispensable to peace.
The (defensive) war Israel fights on seven fronts is therefore more than a military campaign; it is a moral reckoning. By standing up to Hamas, Israel has forced the world to reveal what it truly believes about morality, justice, and human dignity.
If international institutions condemn Israel more than the perpetrators of October 7th, it is not Israel that is on trial; it is the institutions themselves. If activists defend terror in the name of liberation, it is not Israel’s morality in question, but their own. If NGOs, media outlets, and religious leaders bend truth and betray their principles, the hypocrisy stands exposed for all to see.
Israel’s war against hypocrisy is far from over. It is fought on campuses and in newsrooms as much as on the battlefield. It is fought against the elites of Europe, the rulers of Qatar, the NGO industry, the United Nations, and the self-declared champions of justice who betray their own values when confronted with Jewish survival.
The tragedy of October 7th revealed the depths of evil. Israel’s response has revealed the depths of hypocrisy.
It is more important in a tough neighborhood to be feared than to be loved
Excellent!! Anyone reading this superb essay should forward it to their friends who are critical of Israel defending its people.