Israel has enough enemies, it doesn't need Ben-Gvir making more

Israel's interception of the Gaza flotilla was legally defensible. What followed was not.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir chose to release a video showing detained activists kneeling with their hands bound, a gratuitous display that handed Israel's critics exactly the imagery they were looking for, and achieved nothing beyond inflaming an already hostile international environment.

The backlash was swift, and on this occasion, it came from within. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Ben-Gvir's conduct was "not in line with Israel's values and norms." Foreign Minister Gideon Saar went further, calling it a "disgraceful display" that undermined the work of Israeli soldiers and diplomats alike.

They were right. Ben-Gvir is a minister who has never produced a security achievement worth the name. In the cities where crime and delinquency run rampant, he has been conspicuously unable to improve the situation. His tenure has been defined by provocations rather than results. His days in government, one suspects, are numbered.

Before the international outrage is taken entirely at face value, a word about the activists themselves. The members of the Gaza flotilla are not neutral humanitarian workers who stumbled into a conflict zone.

They are pro-Palestinian activists with documented ties to Hamas, an organisation that massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. That context does not justify Ben-Gvir's theatrics. But it deserves to be part of the conversation that too many governments are conspicuously avoiding.

The double standard no one wants to name

The reactions from France, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and others were, to put it plainly, excessive, and selective in a way that has become numbingly predictable.

Had an identical scene unfolded in Peru, Nigeria or China, detainees kneeling, hands bound, after a maritime interception, the international response would have been muted at best, non-existent at worst. There would have been no emergency statements, no summoned ambassadors, no cascade of condemnation across European capitals.

But this involved Israel. And Israel, for reasons that defy rational explanation, attracts a quality and quantity of international scrutiny that no other nation on earth receives for comparable or far worse conduct.

That is not a defence of Ben-Gvir's video. It is an observation about the standards applied, and the consistency, or lack thereof, with which the international community chooses to be outraged.

Israel deserves criticism when it earns it. It also deserves to be held to the same standard as everyone else. Right now, it is held to neither.