Before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could make Israel’s case to the United Nations on Thursday, scores of diplomats got up and left. They did not walk out after hearing his defense of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. They walked out before hearing it. The timing was almost too perfect.
For nearly three years, a familiar formula has accompanied much of the world’s criticism of Israel: “Oct. 7 was horrific, but …”
The atrocity is acknowledged. Hamas is condemned. Sympathy is expressed for the hostages. Then comes the pivot, and Oct. 7 gradually recedes from the moral calculation of everything that followed.
Ed Sheeran offered a revealing example last weekend. At a Philadelphia concert, he called the Hamas attack “horrific” and said it “compounded centuries of Jewish pain.” Then came the pivot: What was happening in Gaza, he said, was “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate.”
This week, the same rhetorical structure reached the United Nations.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Oct. 7 an “abhorrent” terrorist attack. His next words were: “What followed was an onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza,” with killing and destruction on a scale unlike anything he had witnessed as secretary-general.
Criticism of Israel is not inherently a double standard. Israeli military decisions and government policies should be scrutinized. Israelis themselves have been scrutinizing them, loudly and relentlessly, throughout the war.
But something peculiar happens when acknowledging Oct. 7 becomes almost ceremonial.
Call the Oct. 7 attack horrific. Condemn Hamas. Express sympathy for the hostages. Establish that you understand Jewish suffering.
Then comes the “but.”
Everything before it can become less context than a disclaimer — a few words establishing a faux balance before the argument returns almost entirely to Israel.
Netanyahu came to the General Assembly determined to put Oct. 7 back into the discussion. He recounted the massacre and the hostages, defended Israel’s conduct of the war, and argued that Israel had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect Palestinian civilians.
Those claims do not settle the debate over Israel’s conduct. They are arguments to be tested, not accepted merely because Netanyahu made them.
But some of the underlying facts cannot simply disappear.
In a Washington Examiner op-ed published the morning of Netanyahu’s speech, I wrote about Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, once celebrated by Time magazine as Gaza’s “eyes and ears.” Azaiza acknowledged that he filmed Palestinians beating Israeli hostages after they were brought into Gaza on Oct. 7, then withheld the footage because, he said, he feared Israel could identify and target the people shown.
Hours later, Netanyahu invoked the same episode from the U.N. podium.
Azaiza’s account does not make Gazans collectively responsible for Hamas. Nothing could. But rejecting collective guilt does not require ignoring evidence of individual participation. An independent U.N. Commission of Inquiry verified evidence that civilians from Gaza entered Israel and joined militants in attacks at Nir Oz, Be’eri and the Nova music festival. In several cases, it concluded on reasonable grounds that they were not members of Palestinian armed groups but civilians directly participating in the hostilities.
The moral distinction matters: A civilian population cannot be held responsible for the crimes of Hamas. But neither should the label “civilian” erase what particular individuals actually did.
Hamas’s conduct afterward matters, too: its extensive tunnel network and its operations amid civilian infrastructure in densely populated Gaza.
None of that gives Israel an unlimited license. The laws of war apply to Israel regardless of Hamas’s violations. Palestinian civilians’ suffering does not become irrelevant because Hamas helped create the battlefield on which those civilians were endangered.
But Hamas cannot become a footnote while Israel’s response becomes the entire story.
That is where Guterres’s own warning this week becomes especially important. The U.N. Charter, he told the General Assembly, must be defended “without double standards.”
He is right.
But “without double standards” is an empty slogan if the secretary-general himself applies one standard to Israel and another to everyone else.
That does not mean insulating Netanyahu or his government from criticism. Israel is a democracy, and Israelis have fiercely debated the conduct of this war: the fighting, the fate of the hostages, humanitarian aid, ceasefire proposals, and Netanyahu’s decisions.
The question is not whether Israel should be judged.
It is whether Israel is being judged by the same standard that would be applied to another democracy confronting an enemy that massacred its civilians, seized its citizens as hostages, and then embedded itself within a civilian population.
The standard should not be lower for Israel.
It should not be higher either.
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Nearly three years later, the ritual acknowledgment that Oct. 7 was horrific has become almost perfunctory.
The real test is whether the horrors of Oct. are acknowledged only to be dismissed once the speaker reaches the word “but.”
Arie Blitz, M.D., M.B.A., is a retired physician and independent writer in Weslaco, Texas, who writes on foreign policy, medical ethics, and public policy.