The Oxford Dictionary describes a double standard as “a rule or moral principle that is unjust because it is used in one situation but not in another, or because it treats one group of people differently from another.”
The tradition of the double standard is expressed in a Roman proverb:
Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.
What is allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to the bull.
This proverb describes the principle of inequality between people. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Genealogy of Morality (1887):
A double morality of course leads to the negation of morality in general.
Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev in his book Justification of the Good (1897) describes the “Hottentot or egocentric morality” of double standards as follows:
In the same way, the famous Hottentot, who claimed that good is when he steals many cows, and evil is when they steal from him, appropriated such an ethical principle, of course, not to himself alone, but understood that for every man good consists in successfully stealing someone else’s property, and evil – in losing his own.
The politics of double standards was vividly and succinctly described by British writer Gerald Seymour in Harry’s Game:
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Antisemitism is so well-studied that it is only very rare to discover something new in its unfolding.
However, surprises do occur. Antisemitism is the application of a double standard to Israel: the Jewish state is required to behave in a way that is not expected of any other democratic state.
No democratic country has been as careful during hostilities toward enemy civilians as Israel has been. No democratic country has been accused of killing other people’s civilians as much as Israel has been accused. The U.S. has been many orders of magnitude less careful in its military actions to protect civilians than Israel. Unlike Israel, which continues to struggle to exist, the U.S. has never faced a threat to its existence in its wars, but it has killed far more civilians than Israel.
The eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno contains liars and hypocrites. This circle is the penultimate. There is a circle lower and worse. My goal, though, is not the Italian poet’s Divine Comedy, but the human comedy of hypocrisy.
In Dante’s eighth circle is the double standard.
In politics, the application of double standards is the rule, not the exception. Politicians push their contradiction of the moral principles they are supposed to follow out of their consciousness. President Biden’s administration forces itself to forget that it is demanding superhuman efforts from ally Israel that are incompatible with the goals of its defensive war against terrorists.
When the leadership of this ally does not agree to fulfill the demands of its “patron,” this administration demands a change of power in Israel, as if it were a vassal obliged to respect the suzerain’s interests more than its own.
They forget that Israel is a democratic state, and the only democratic state among dozens of countries in the zone of U.S. oil interests. The U.S. demands that Israel abide by rules of war that it itself has never abided by and will never abide by. They demand from Israel superhuman care for the civilian population of Gaza, which they themselves could not honor. They blithely forget that they make all these highly moral demands not out of any moral concern, but out of a desire to come to power in the November 2024 elections.
The definition of antisemitism provided by the European Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA, formerly EUMC), a body affiliated with the European Union, also recognizes the important role of double standards in discriminating against Israel. T
he document containing this definition mentions that manifestations of antisemitism “may also be directed against the State of Israel, perceived as a Jewish collective.” This does not only apply to manifestations such as calling for or justifying the murder of Jews, dehumanizing and demonizing them, accusing them of imaginary crimes Holocaust denial. It manifests itself in the assertion that the nation-state of the Jews is illegitimate, while all other nation-states are legitimate. It is manifested in the fact that the moral imperative for Israel is higher than for any other democratic state. Every military conflict in which Israel finds itself embroiled is presented as a crisis of international importance that must be solved for “world peace” and for the failure of which Israel alone is blamed. In the long history of the Jewish people, Jews have been subjected to the highest demands that could not be met by non-Jews, who demand that the Israeli “troublemakers” fulfill their imperatives.
“Israel is a Jew among states,” Leon Poliakoff, a French historian and scholar of antisemitism, observed decades ago. Israel is the only country in the world whose right to exist continues to be debated. Even those people who support the Jewish state’s right to exist, including President Biden’s administration, are virtually oblivious to this paradox.
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