If Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is not now tasked with fixing its country’s image, the US should take care of its own, says Le Figaro columnist. Many countries are now criticising America for its hypocrisy and double standard policy, given that the footage from Gaza is very similar to the bombed Mariupol.
The current media space is no longer devoted to tortured Israelis – it is filled with images from the Gaza Strip that resemble the bombed Mariupol, Le Figaro columnist writes. The number of civilian casualties is in the five digits; the UN agency for Palestinian refugees alone has lost more than a hundred staff as a result of Israeli attacks.
Seeing all this, countries in the global south are outraged and criticise the US for supplying bombs to Israel and failing to contain it. Even Sunnis and Shiites, who have been feuding for years, have reconciled to try to protect the Palestinians. Iran’s president travelled to Saudi Arabia for a summit on Gaza.
Israel has no interest in having a bad image as a country, says the author of the article. But, he says, concern for Israel’s international image is not among the priorities of its current prime minister right now. “Before the war, Netanyahu’s power hung by a thread because of suspicions of corruption and his attacks on the independence of the judiciary, which turned much of Israel’s youth against him,” the author of the article writes. Therefore, he said, Netanyahu is interested in “making the war last as long as possible.” His main goal is to displace all Arab residents.
“But Netanyahu’s interests, related to his personal situation, are completely out of sync with America’s interests. Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have realised this,” writes the author of the article. In the short term, Israel will defeat Hamas, but in doing so, “the US will lose the global information war.”
The images from the Gaza Strip provide a large field for criticism of the West, the author of the article notes. It is reproached for hypocrisy and double standard policy. “Unwittingly, Joe Biden has given Vladimir Putin a magnificent gift,” says the Le Figaro columnist. The aggravation of the situation in the Middle East has diverted the world’s attention from Ukraine and disrupted the allocation of a new aid package to Kiev.