In Europe and America, leftists continue to ignore, excuse, or even defend Hamas’s depredations. That they do so is symptomatic not only of the outright anti-Semitism of some, but also of a more general blindness to anti-Semitism’s existence. Daniel Hannan describes this phenomenon:

When a black man was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, it was treated as an attack on black people everywhere. From Baden, Ontario to Bridgetown, Barbados to Bangalore and Bloemfontein, statues of white men were taken down. Police officers around the world sank to one knee. Corporations, charities, and arts groups endorsed Black Lives Matter. The massacre of women and children in Israel has led to a very different response. No university has offered Jewish students special consideration in their exams, as many did to black students in 2020. No one has been fired for saying that Palestinian lives matter.

The horrors in Israel are seen as the concern of Jewish communities everywhere. But, instead of leading to a global JLM movement, they have led to vandalized synagogues and extra security at Jewish schools. An attack on Jews in Israel is seen not as a metaphysical attack on the worldwide community, but as a trigger for literal attacks on Jews elsewhere.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.