Afrasianet - The year 2023 revealed the magnitude of the wide distance in the divergence of Western positions and its dual rhetoric towards the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the massacres of Israel in Palestine.

On February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine, and on October 7, 2023, the Palestinian resistance conducted military operations in parts of the occupied Palestinian territories.

The first case was in the heart of the European continent, and the second case was in the heart of the Arab world. Does the difference in geographical locations call for a duality in the positions of the West?

In both cases, were the same values and principles adopted by the West applied, or were those principles singled out and demanded to be respected in the Ukrainian case and forgotten, if not buried, in the Palestinian case?

Doesn't this difference in the two cases of conflict confirm what one Western writer rightly said, that Third World countries view the EU as a mere club for gathering colonial empires?

Is the value of the lives of other migrants, victims of armed conflict, not equal to the value of the life of a European individual?

Isn't it surprising that the government of Ukraine and its president did not express the slightest solidarity with the Palestinian people as a response to the solidarity of some Arabs with them when Russia invaded them, and the solidarity of some of them by providing them with financial assistance, while in the face of the drama taking place in Gaza and the West Bank, voices have not been raised condemning Israel's barbarism in killing children and women by the thousands on the grounds that Israel, as most European Union countries and the United States claim, has the right to defend itself!

Fortunately, the positions of Western peoples were more affected by the scenes of massacres committed by Israel than their governments, and the major demonstrations that swept the capitals of most Western countries led to a relative decline in the absolute support of Western governments for Israel, although this differed regarding the position of the Biden administration away from a number of Western countries by virtue of the personality of President Biden himself and his foreign minister, as the first did not hesitate to say that it is not necessary to be Jewish to become a Zionist, and the second appeared On his first trip after October 7 to Israel, he publicly said that he came there not as Secretary of State of the United States but as a Jew; he came there in solidarity.

Isn't it as exciting that many EU countries criminalize anti-Zionism as they criminalize anti-Semitism? While no Western country has criminalized Islamophobia? Is it conceivable that things in the West and in the European Union and in particular Germany would get this far? Germany recently passed a resolution cancelling its financial support for some Arab civil society organizations for human rights that had been helping it for decades. Germany canceled its aid just because it condemned in statements massacres, genocide and crimes Against the humanity that Israel is committing against Palestinian women and children.

Worse than that is the German position, which was published by the BBC about the state of Saxony introducing a new condition for obtaining German citizenship that applicants must declare their support for Israel's right to exist, and the decree issued by the Ministry of Interior states that "the right of the Israeli state to exist is the reason for the existence of the German state", and therefore applicants must recognize this in writing!

The German state sees it as having a "special responsibility" to Israel because of the Holocaust; its commitment to the Israeli state is not just a political goal, but an essential part of Germany's existence at the moment.

Such fanaticism was refuted by Katerina Galor, an academic of Jewish studies at Brown University, who holds dual German-Israeli citizenship, saying that "there is a clear historical link in Germany between the Holocaust and the necessity of creating Israel, but the other link that the German government ignores is the relationship between The Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba, which led to one of the world's largest refugee crises," as the saying goes, and a witness testified, as the writer here in this newspaper referred in a previous article to the dialectical relationship between the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.

In terms of international law, Russia invaded Ukraine and occupied parts of its territory.

Israel did the same thing and occupied the Palestinian territories, and with explicit recognition through several international resolutions, the international organization considered that what Israel had done was an occupation of Palestinian territories in contravention of international law.

Why, as one prominent writer pointed out, did the two cases not meet with the same attitude by the West?

That the United States and Europe stand by the countries that were attacked instead of the aggressor countries. I

n the early days of The Ukraine war Europe opened its borders to millions of Ukrainian refugees, while they did not receive refugees in Iraq and Afghanistan with the same hospitality and generosity.

Is the reason for the difference, as one British journalist wrote, that Ukrainians look like us – they watch Netflix, have Instagram accounts, and read free newspapers like us?

Washington and Brussels When the Russians invaded Ukraine, they imposed severe sanctions on Moscow (oil embargo, restriction of trade and banking transactions...) None of these sanctions were directed against Israel.

Boycott organizations have been accused of being anti-Semitic, banned in the United States, Canada, Germany, and in France prosecuted before Courts! The West supplies Ukraine with weapons while Israel, which occupies the Palestinian territories, with weapons, warning and threatening retaliation against those who try to support the Palestinians militarily.