Let This Sink in: Ukrainian President Zelensky Supports Israel's Extermination of Palestinians

Zelensky upholds the unwritten European rule of human rights being 'white-human rights' — Self-determination is for his people, not for Arabs.

In the theater of the absurd that is the international stage, where the script is often written in the ink of hypocrisy, the latest act is as tragic as it is farcical. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a man resisting the crushing wheels of a Russian invasion, has thrown his weight behind another invader, Israel, in its relentless drive against the Palestinian people.

Zelensky's words before the Israeli Knesset, where he, as a mockery of reality, drew parallels between the Ukrainian and Israeli struggles, stand in stark contrast to the blood-soaked reality experienced by Palestinians. The war in Ukraine, a spectacle of horror broadcast on every screen, every day, has garnered global sympathy and support. Yet, when the cameras turn to the decades-long plight of the Palestinians, that same international community, with Zelensky among its ranks, is struck by a sudden, selective blindness.

This duplicity is not new. It is entrenched in the colonial roots of Europe and the West, which have long deemed the rights of white, European bodies more sacred than those of the 'others'. These others, whether they be Palestinians under the boot of Israeli policy or Yemenis caught in the crossfire of Western-backed interventions, are relegated to the footnotes of history, their struggles sanitized or ignored.

In his public statements, Zelensky has inadvertently embraced an age-old prejudice: that the right to self-determination, to resist annihilation, is a privilege afforded only to certain peoples—those that look and think more like him. His alignment with Israel, and his abandonment of the UN committee dedicated to Palestinian rights, is a testament to this twisted norm.

As the Ukrainian president seeks mediators for his own nation's existential fight, turning even to Israel's right-wing extremist leaders, he must be reminded that the Palestinians, too, are engaged in an existential fight. Their lands are shrinking beneath their feet, their children face the daily terror of annihilation and occupation, and their narrative is etched with the same desperate yearning for freedom that echoes through the streets of Kyiv.

The silence and complicity of Zelensky and his Western allies in the face of Israeli policies— ethnic cleansing, settlement expansion, systemic discrimination, and the disproportionate use of force—betray a deeper malaise. It is the malaise of a world where the concept of 'human rights' comes with an asterisk, where the value of freedom is measured not by its universality, but by the color of skin, the lineage of birth, and the strategic interests of the powerful.

This cannot stand. It is a moral failure of the highest order, a stain upon the conscience of the world, and a betrayal of all who believe in the principles of justice and equity. Zelensky's failure to extend that same principled stance to the Palestinians is indefensible.

Until leaders like Zelensky and the nations of the West confront this hypocrisy, the international rallying cry for human rights will remain a hollow echo, a selective call to arms that discriminates and divides. It is time to dismantle the hierarchy of human value that has been built into the world's political foundations. Only then can we truly say that we stand for freedom.