The level of hypocrisy and racism that has been exposed in the last week during the crisis in Ukraine has been outrageous and chilling. It has been especially pertinent and personal for Palestinians, who are seeing that resistance tactics that have resulted in their demonization are now considered heroic. Making Molotov cocktails in Ukraine is courageous, “like cooking”. But even the suspicion of doing the same in Palestine is a clear justification for an extrajudicial assassination, and Western governments and media will rationalize and nod approvingly of such Israeli brutality. 

Multiple factors are at play here and may require a university dissertation to dissect them all. But it has been made clear: the legitimacy of your struggle is not the issue. What is important is whether your struggle fits the US imperial agenda and whether your enemy is or is not a US ally. The colonialist supremacist attitude of white “civilized” Europe has also been reflected in a lot of media coverage.

Social media has been full of posts challenging this blatant double standard in recent days, especially by Palestinians who have seen their struggle criminalized and denigrated for years by the US-Zionist lobby. There are even reports of photos from Israeli aggressions on Gaza being passed off as Russian attacks; the most ludicrous was a post showing an old photo of Ahed Tamimi challenging an Israeli soldier, claiming she was a “brave Ukrainian girl”!

This massive Western media hype is intended, at least in part, to obscure the continuing legacy of US hegemony as the largest threat to world peace and security. Former US president Jimmy Carter in 2019 called the US “the Most Warlike Nation in the History of the World;" a study by Zoltán Grossman, a US professor, documented US aggressions and war crimes against the people of the world since 1890. Let us also not forget that, in addition to the premeditated aggression against the Arab region, the US still occupies, by force, Syrian and Iraqi territories against the will of their people.

In Canada, one of the more egregious examples of this hypocrisy came from multiple provincial governments, who after just 2 days pulled Russian liquor products off store shelves. Never mind that for years there has been a campaign calling to de-shelve Israeli apartheid wines; never mind those politicians had any number of excuses as to why this was not possible.

Canada Palestine Association in Vancouver issued the following statement on this situation:

“We have been campaigning for years to have illegal Israeli settlement wines pulled off the shelves of publicly owned liquor stores in British Columbia. Successive governments, including the current NDP one, have either ignored or rebuffed our demands to even investigate this situation. We have been told it’s a matter of “consumer choice” or under “federal jurisdiction”. The previous NDP minister responsible for this portfolio, David Eby, flat out refused to meet with us in 2018.

So imagine our shock when in just 2 days, the BC NDP government joined other provinces in putting a “…halt to the importing and sale of Russian liquor products from our BC Liquor Stores and provincial liquor distribution centres”. So it can be done and done quickly, it seems. It just depends on who you are and what political agenda is being served. And clearly, the “consumer choice” argument was nothing but a big lie.

This is just one small concrete example of the stunning hypocrisy displayed by Canadian and Western officials this week. This double standard has not gone unnoticed; social media has been abuzz with multiple comments, pointing out that what is framed as legitimate resistance in one country is labelled terrorism in another. That what determines the response of Western governments, as Palestinian writer Ali Abunimah put it, is a matter of “who we are, not what we do”. That Israeli occupation, oppression and apartheid that has lasted for over 70 years stands unchecked. And that the mass killing and forced starvation of civilians in Yemen goes unnoticed for 7 years, and is continuing in real time, as politicians here show they are capable of swift action within 2 days when it suits their purposes.

This action by the BC (and other provincial governments) is a slap in the face to not only Palestinian-Canadians, but to anyone who cares about the trajectory of political discourse in Canada. Because the message here is clear. International law and the much-touted “rules based order” are not neutral policies that will help the Palestinians and other oppressed peoples achieve their liberation. Activists need to rethink the approach of appealing to politicians’ moral compass, as clearly they don’t have one; their support of Israeli war crimes and apartheid is a conscious choice, and we must acknowledge it as such.”

Perhaps this crude approach by Western governments may have an unintended benefit, as Palestine activists engage in a serious re-think of how to approach Western politicians and a re-evaluation of the precious resources that go into lobbying self-seeking politicians (and electoral politics in general), resources that are often clearly wasted. This can’t happen soon enough for the people of Palestine and oppressed peoples all over the world.