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Why the West's Astounding Mobilization for Ukraine Won't Happen Against Israel
(Times of Israel) Haviv Rettig Gur - While Palestinians compare themselves to Ukrainians and question why the West's newfound militancy seems to overlook them, it wasn't moral outrage or passionate devotion to international law that drove the West's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was self-interest - the fact that Russia had suddenly become an immediate hard-power threat to Europe. No moral indignation is driving three dozen NATO and EU states to suddenly spend hundreds of billions of previously unbudgeted dollars and euros on growing their militaries in the coming years, or to risk the loss of hundreds of billions more by cutting Russia out of the global economy. Russia is now under an international sanctions regime with more actual restrictions than those imposed on either North Korea or Iran because it is a close and more immediate threat - the sort of threat that Israel cannot pose. Funds sent to the Ukrainian government are very likely to be used to defend the country or alleviate the war's humanitarian fallout. But as the EU has discovered countless times over the past three decades, money sent to Gaza or the West Bank often bolsters terrorist infrastructures or disappears altogether. Democratic Ukraine's advocates in the West are demanding something simple: an end to the military invasion. Pro-Palestinian activists demand something much more complex: the dismantling of Jewish statehood.