Why the Global South Is Accusing America of Hypocrisy

The war between Israel and Hamas is bad news for Ukraine. The conflict has already shifted news coverage and public attention in the West away from Russian aggression. It may also force Western exporters to divert portions of their arms supplies from Ukraine to Israel, as the United States is already thought to have done. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned last week of a “long and difficult war ahead,” which could give Russian President Vladimir Putin an additional incentive to drag out the war in Ukraine, betting on the West’s declining interest in—or capacity to—arming Kyiv as time goes on.

But a potentially more damaging problem for Ukraine are the accusations of hypocrisy that observers and policymakers from across the global south are leveling at the West. Many in the developing world have long seen a double standard in the West condemning an illegal occupation in Ukraine while also standing staunchly behind Israel, which has occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967 and maintains settlements in the former—moves that are considered illegal by most of the international community. Israel has also held Gaza under a land, air, and sea blockade since 2007.

While Western governments were quick to condemn Russia for violating international law when it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, observers in the developing world say the West has been far more reluctant to forcefully condemn Israel both for the enduring occupation and for not doing enough to prevent the deaths of thousands of civilians in its ongoing assault on Gaza. Israel’s siege of the enclave is a response to Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which killed more than 1,400 people and took over 200 hostages.

Western capitals, led by the United States, have strongly denounced Hamas’s assault and underscored Israel’s right to defend itself. But so far, they have chosen not to put much pressure on Israel to adopt a cease-fire even as civilian casualties from Israeli bombardments mount and humanitarian conditions in Gaza worsen. So far, at least 9,000 Palestinians in Gaza are reported to have died since the war’s outbreak, and the United Nations has expressed concern about “the clear violations of international humanitarian law” taking place in Gaza.

In the global south, this perceived inconsistency may prove to be particularly damaging to Western claims of a “rules-based order”—the central refrain leaders from Europe and the United States invoke to rally support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. Many developing countries see the West’s posture on Israel-Palestine as evidence that it is applying international rules and norms selectively—according to geopolitical interests rather than in a universal fashion. In conversations with me, several diplomats, both from the West and the global south, have said that this double standard will harm efforts to bring non-Western countries into Ukraine’s corner.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s Oct. 19 remarks from the Oval Office were a stark example of how resolute U.S. support for Israel may make sense in terms of domestic politics but undermine Washington’s efforts to build broader global support for Ukraine. Biden’s decision to link Ukraine’s struggle to that of Israel—arguing that both are democracies facing enemies that seek to “completely annihilate” them—seemed designed to try to convince congressional leaders to approve a budget request for additional military aid for both countries.

Yet Biden’s comments raised eyebrows in developing countries, where the comparison between Ukrainians and Palestinians is more intuitive than between Ukrainians and Israelis. That’s because many view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the prism of occupier vs. occupied. Palestinians, in particular—almost half of whom back Ukraine against Russia’s invasion—were disappointed when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed immediate, unyielding support for Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal attack but said little about Gaza or Palestine.

As Fiona Hill aptly summed it up in a recent interview with Foreign Policy, Biden’s comparison was “good congressional politics—but it’s not good global politics.” (In the end, it may not even have been good congressional politics; new House Speaker Mike Johnson has asked Biden to separate his funding requests for Ukraine and Israel as Republicans grow more skeptical of supporting Kyiv.)

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has made similar remarks. Though nearly 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza had already been killed by Israeli bombardments, von der Leyen compared Israel’s role in the conflict to Ukraine’s defense against Russia at an Oct. 22 political event in her native Germany, arguing that “these conflicts have one thing in common: They are about the struggle between those who seek peace, balance, freedom and cooperation—and those who do not want any of this because they profit from the chaos and disorder.”

She was already in hot water. On Oct. 9, two days after Hamas’s attack, Israel’s infrastructure minister announced that Israel would cut off all water supplies to Gaza—and a video of an October 2022 speech by von der Leyen quickly began circulating across the global south. In it, she argued—referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—that “attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes. Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming—these are acts of pure terror. And we have to call it as such.” Pairing these comments with her more recent remarks in support of Israel has allowed critics to argue that, as the pro-Palestinian media and lobbying group Middle East Monitor put it, “there is one rule for the EU’s allies and another rule for everyone else.”

Brazil is a case in point. The refusal of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government to take a clear stance on the war in Ukraine has caused considerable friction and disappointment in Western capitals, which had actively rooted for Lula’s return to power and helped “coup-proof” the 2022 Brazilian presidential election after the tumultuous years of Jair Bolsonaro’s administration. Both on the campaign trail and after his inauguration, Lula has made a number of controversial comments, saying that the United States was prolonging the war and that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia. More recently, Lula argued that there was “no reason” Putin would be detained if he decided to come to Brazil for next year’s G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Faced with a considerable public backlash—Brazil is a signatory to the Rome Statute and would be legally obliged to act upon the arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC)—Lula backtracked. Yet he did so by concurrently launching a broadside against the ICC, implying that the court puts developing countries at a disadvantage because the world’s most powerful states, such as the United States, have not ratified the Rome Statute, the court’s founding document. Lula’s rhetoric reflects broader misgivings about the West’s selective application of global rules and norms rather than disagreements with the specificities of the war in Ukraine. These sorts of reservations can be expected to grow if the West does not change its response to Israel’s war in Gaza—or if it fails to convince Netanyahu to change his current military strategy.

At the U.N., Brazil has played a constructive diplomatic role in response to the conflict—attempting to negotiate a resolution for humanitarian pauses, which the United States vetoed. The Brazilian government’s domestic rhetoric reveals a growing divergence from the Biden administration.

Though Lula described Hamas’s assault as terrorism, Brazil has not designated Hamas a terrorist organization. The president also decried “the insanity of the prime minister of Israel [in] wanting to destroy the Gaza Strip but forgetting that there aren’t just Hamas soldiers there but also women and children who are the big victims of this war.”

Such rhetoric produces domestic political gains at home, where Lula supporters tend to support Palestine and many Bolsonaro voters have sympathies with Israel. (Last year, then-first lady Michelle Bolsonaro wore an Israel T-shirt to the polls, and the former president has sought to portray Lula as pro-Hamas.)

It is a widely held concern in Brazil that Israel will get off more lightly with potential war crimes than Russia, which has been subject to broad Western sanctions since the early days of its invasion. Israel, by contrast, has not been sanctioned by Western countries for its response to Hamas’s attack or for its occupation of the Palestinian territories, despite calls from Palestinian civil society to do so. With the siege of Gaza likely to intensify in the coming weeks, continued U.S. support for Israel has the potential to severely limit the chances for rapport between Washington and Brasília on Ukraine.

My colleague Matias Spektor argues that developing countries’ accusations of U.S. hypocrisy are not necessarily a bad thing. “This is not the result of a flaw in the United States’ character,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “but because … [t]he United States has built its authority by delivering global public goods through universal institutions” and “couches its foreign policy in a language of moral virtue.” Yet he also warns that “many people consider hypocrisy to be worse than lying. Whereas liars mislead for gain, hypocrites go a step further by deceiving others while seeking praise for their moral virtue. They feign superiority in the process of violating the very principles they profess to uphold.”

Aware of the risks of being perceived as hypocrites, numerous Western leaders including von der Leyen now emphasize the need for Israel to respect humanitarian law in Gaza. After U.S. pressure, Israel reversed its decision to cut off Gaza’s water supply and restored the enclave’s telecommunications network.

Yet such gestures are unlikely to reverse the global south’s perceptions of Western hypocrisy, especially as civilian casualties in Gaza rise. Already, more children have died in Gaza over the past three weeks than in all armed conflicts over each of the past three years. An overwhelming majority of developing countries voted in favor of an Oct. 27 Jordanian U.N. resolution that called for an “immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.” The United States voted against the resolution, while many of its European allies followed suit or abstained.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who is known for his principled diplomatic positions—he is the only leftist Latin American leader who does not shy away from explicitly criticizing leftist dictators such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro—supported the measure and condemned Israel’s “unacceptable violations of international humanitarian law.” On Tuesday, Boric recalled Chile’s ambassador to Israel, and Colombia followed suit. Bolivia announced it was severing ties with Israel completely.

John Herbst, a former U.S. envoy to Ukraine and former U.S. diplomat in Israel, recently argued that while the United States’ global reputation will suffer somewhat due to its support of Israel, that posture would only make winning support for Ukraine “marginally more difficult.” Yet this assessment may underestimate the lasting damage that Washington’s unwillingness to put greater public pressure on Israel could cause to U.S. efforts to rally the global south to Kyiv’s side.

Policymakers in developing countries have long viewed the United States’ claims to moral high ground as unnecessarily grating. The longer the Israel-Hamas war goes on, the greater the risk to Western credibility in the global south becomes.