Israel defends itself against Hamas and takes steps to protect civilians. Russia wages a war of conquest with mass atrocities. Guess which one the UN condemns?

This week, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly will gather in New York for their annual meeting.  

Much of the chatter will focus on Israel’s war with Hamas – which Hamas ignited on October 7, 2023 by murdering roughly 1,200 civilians and taking more than 250 hostages. 

Russia – which launched an unprovoked war on Ukraine in 2022 that has killed at least 114,000 Ukrainian civilians and soldiers and 200,000 Russian soldiers – will largely get a pass.  

Genocide Accusations 

Earlier this month, the UN Human Rights Council concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention,” the Council said.  

The 1948 Genocide Convention the Council cites lays out five actions that could qualify as genocide: 

  1. Killing members of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group 
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group 
  3. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, in whole or in part 
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group 
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group 

But the key factor is “intent.” If a country commits any one of these actions with the intent to eradicate a group, they are guilty of genocide.  

The Human Rights Council also found that Russia has committed genocidal actions, but that they did not have genocidal intent. 

This table lays out the UN’s findings against Israel and Russia: 

The UN found that both countries committed four of the five actions; the only difference, in the UN’s eyes, is the (rather arbitrary) intention of the acts.  

Protecting Civilians 

But Israel, for all the criticism, has gone out of its way to protect civilians in Gaza.  

Fighting in a densely populated urban environment will always have tragic, unintended consequences. But Israel, unlike Hamas, is taking steps to defend the innocent and provide humanitarian assistance to those who need it.  

Russia has not done the same. 

And it bears repeating: Israel is doing all this for a war that Hamas started. Israel is taking steps to protect Palestinian civilians even as Hamas is holding Israeli civilians hostage and using innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect weapons caches and Hamas fighters. 

Russia, on the other hand, is neglecting civilian safety in a war they started unprovoked. Russia has also been found guilty of war crimes against civilians by the UN. Their horrific actions have included torture, point-blank executions of people with their hands tied behind their backs, and sexual abuse of victims ranging from four to 82 years old. 

The Double Standard 

By the UN’s standards, Israel and Russia should be equivalent: both are accused of four of the five genocidal acts. 

But that framing misses the real distinction. Russia launched a war of conquest and carried it out with brutality and almost no pretense of protecting civilians. Israel is responding to a terror attack, fighting a difficult war it did not choose and has built-in systems to limit civilian harm. 

Yet the UN chooses to target Israel, not Russia. Why should anyone take its judgments seriously?  

Maybe that’s why faith in the UN is at an all-time low in U.S. opinion polls.