Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva created controversy last Sunday, while attending the African Union summit, when he stated, “What’s happening in the Gaza Strip isn’t a war, it’s a genocide. It’s not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It’s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children. What’s happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people hasn’t happened at any other moment in history. Actually, it has happened: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”
To many Jews, comparing Israel’s behavior to a Nazi regime that organized the mass murder of Jews during World War II was unacceptable. That is why Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement saying, “Drawing comparisons between Israel and the Nazis and Hitler is to cross a red line.”
While one might understand the reaction, Israel and its supporters should consider that a major part of the problem derives from their systematic trivialization of the term “antisemitism.” The concept of antisemitism, on which rested the Nazi annihilation of the Jews, perhaps the greatest crime in history, is increasingly being used as a political weapon to target critics of Israel. In that way, it has gradually lost credibility as a term, because in light of the supreme horror of the Holocaust, antisemitism was always seen as something obscenely transcending politics.
In the polarized atmosphere after October 7, 2023, critics of Israel have been routinely labeled “anti-Semites” by Israel’s supporters, and even concepts such as “intifada” have been unjustifiably reinterpreted as calling for the genocide of the Jews. In such a toxic environment, no one is going to refrain from condemning Israel for its slaughter of Palestinians merely to avoid a term that Israel has politically loaded to pursue its agenda against Palestinians. And in that gesture of defiance, any valid notion of what antisemitism means has been utterly lost.
This battle over antisemitism reflects a far greater rift that the Gaza war has provoked. By and large, the antisemitism accusation has been more effective in Western countries than in what can be called the “global South.” That’s because the Holocaust was largely a Western phenomenon and the desire to seek redemption can be limitless. It’s also because, in many countries outside Europe, Israel is viewed as a colonial phenomenon. In that context, the Gaza war has become a sharp line dividing the West, and in particular Western elites, from the rest of the world. More importantly, it is emerging as a key moment in the self-definition and self-affirmation of the “global South” and its emerging powers against the West.
Not all the countries of the “global South” are on the same wavelength, of course. India’s government has supported Israel, while it has also banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations, in part because the Palestinian-Israeli divide seems to reflect that between Hindus and Muslims, and could revive separatist sentiments in Kashmir. However, India did go along with the majority in the United Nations General Assembly last December in voting in favor of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
In countries such as Brazil and South Africa (and even India until not so long ago), the Palestinian cause has continued to have resonance. The disconnect between the position of South Africa, which accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the Biden administration’s arrogant dismissal of this otherwise legitimate step as “unfounded [as] there’s no basis for accusations of genocide against Israel,” had considerable symbolic value. Even when the ICJ’s interim decision showed, at the very least, that there was a credible basis for such an accusation, the United States still insisted there was “no indication that we’ve seen that validates a claim of genocidal intent or action by the Israeli Defense Forces.”
Such disagreements over Israel’s behavior between the “global South” and many in the West, especially Western political elites, are having two contradictory effects. On the one hand, certain European governments that rushed to Israel’s side after October 7 have since taken their distance from the sheer brutality of its response. For example, France is now calling for a “lasting ceasefire” in Gaza and “a massive influx of humanitarian aid.” The United Kingdom, often an appendage of the United States, did the same on February 19, with Foreign Secretary David Cameron demanding “a stop to the fighting right now,” as opposed to endorsing a planned Israeli offensive against densely-populated Rafah.
The British government is also now considering recognizing a Palestinian state before any agreement is reached between Palestinians and Israelis over final-status issues in negotiations to end their conflict. The British approach is widely viewed as being tied to a U.S. intention to do the same, angering Israel’s government. The United States is increasingly uncomfortable with its duplicity in the Gaza conflict—pushing for a ceasefire to liberate Israeli hostages and reduce Palestinian casualties while also continuing to supply Israel with weapons.
At the same time, many Western governments’ endorsement of Israel’s behavior has created leverage for emerging “global South” countries such as Brazil and South Africa to challenge the West’s dominance of international affairs. By resorting to the ICJ, the South Africans took their case to an international judicial institution with which Washington has had a mixed relationship, as the United States dislikes submitting to international law when this might challenge its political interests. Similarly, the Americans never ratified the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, because, in the words of a former legal advisor to the U.S. State Department and National Security Council, they were concerned “the prosecutor for the court would be given too much power unchecked, and he or she could conduct politically-motivated prosecutions of U.S. soldiers.”
The war in Gaza has also prompted many states fed up with U.S. veto power in the UN Security Council to resort to the General Assembly in order to increase the pressure for a ceasefire. While the General Assembly’s decisions are not binding, and the body has long been regarded as an international white elephant, it has been successfully transformed in recent months into a moral counterweight to the deadlocked Security Council, one that reflects the opinion of a global majority. This has put on embarrassing display the fact that a large number of states seek a ceasefire, while the U.S., Israel, and their few allies continue to block this.
This constitutes an imaginative use of international institutions to put the United States and Israel’s other supporters on the back foot. If such institutions can be effective only if they assert and preserve the primacy of Western decisions, what better way for global upstarts to gain ground by highlighting this anomaly?
However, things may be shifting slightly. In late February the Biden administration prepared a draft Security Council resolution that called for a ceasefire in Gaza for the first time, and that warned Israel against mounting an offensive in Rafah. It did so because Algeria was preparing another ceasefire resolution, which Washington vetoed on February 20. To respond to the growing chorus of condemnation of U.S. actions, the Biden administration had to present a credible alternative.
In doing so, the United States showed it could accommodate its critics. Shifts such as these can only be explained by the fact that many Western countries are facing growing domestic and international outrage over Gaza, particularly from countries in the “global South.” Palestinian casualties are rising and Gaza’s inhabitants are being denied adequate quantities of food, which the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem described in stark terms: “Israel is starving Gaza.”
The United States has long taken an unconscionable position on Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories. It began by undermining the UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal from the territories captured in June 1967. Then it spent decades funding Israel to the tune of billions of dollars annually, while allowing U.S. individuals and organizations to finance illegal settlements. And finally it recognized Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights during the Trump years, a decision contravening international law and previous U.S. positions.
This legacy has done much to damage the claim that the United States plays a leadership role in seeking to implement a rules-based international order. Sometimes it does, but often it doesn’t, and indeed the Americans have frequently worked hard to weaken international institutions they regard as a threat to their power. As a global realignment takes place, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, at least when it comes to the Middle East, to allow other states to have more of a say in the region’s future. Their path may be paved with fewer bad intentions.
