Ukraine is the focus of the NATO summit, Gaza is the central topic

The urgency of the situation was underscored after renewed Russian missile strikes hit civilian areas in Ukraine on Monday, killing dozens of people and in one case destroying a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Ukrainian politicians have been begging their Western allies for months to supply more air defense systems and munitions to fend off the Russian attacks and have now stepped up their demands in Washington.

“We expect serious and decisive decisions on concrete air defense systems from the summit in Washington, because this is one of the most critical moments,” Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told reporters in Washington ahead of the summit.

On Tuesday, President Biden unveiled plans to equip Ukraine with additional air defense systems. The summit’s final communiqué, which is expected to be signed by all delegations, calls Ukraine’s path to NATO accession “irreversible,” but does not set a timeframe for the process. Biden is reportedly hesitant about Kyiv’s admission to the alliance and has instructed his advisers to include language in the final document emphasizing the progress Ukraine still needs to make on political and anti-corruption reforms.

“What they’re getting is things that are more than just a facade, namely improvements in the way we’re going to help Ukraine in the years to come,” Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official for Europe, told my colleagues. “So it’s either the glass half empty or the glass half full.”

But behind NATO’s urgent discussions on Ukraine, another conflict looms. Since October 7, Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza has diverted world attention from the Russian invasion and stoked outrage over alleged Western hypocrisy. Many critics have pointed to the gap between US and European anger over Russian attacks on Ukrainian hospitals while remaining relatively quiet as Israel continues to raze medical facilities and schools in its war against militant Hamas.

Gaza is unlikely to receive much attention at this week’s summit – but at least one member state is keen to make it a topic of discussion. Before arriving in Washington, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been a fierce critic of Israel since the war began, said he wanted to “bring the Gaza disaster into the spotlight at the summit.” In a statement, he lamented that “the international community has failed to stop Israel in this terrible situation,” adding that “without the establishment of a just, lasting peace in Palestine, it is impossible to appease the global conscience.”

Such peace appears to be in sight neither in the Middle East nor in Ukraine, whose embattled leadership is grimly hoping to turn the tide against the Russian war machine. But the lack of significant Western pressure on Netanyahu or condemnation of some Israeli attacks on civilians, argued a leading Turkish delegate, makes NATO’s passionate embrace of Ukraine all the more stark.

“It’s clearly hypocrisy, a double standard,” Numan Kurtulmus, speaker of the Turkish parliament and a longtime ally of Erdogan, told me in an interview in Washington on Monday. “It’s a kind of racism, because if you don’t recognize Palestinian victims as equal to Ukrainian victims, it means you want to create some kind of hierarchy within humanity. That’s unacceptable.”

Within just a few months, the Israeli bombings produced more debris in Gaza than in the multi-year war in UkraineThe densely populated area has been pulverized. Reconstruction, whenever it begins, will take decades. Most Gaza residents have been displaced from their homes and there are a number of humanitarian crises, including, according to UN experts, full-blown famine.

Local authorities and the UN estimate that nearly 40,000 people have died as a result of the war. The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, calculated that the true death toll, including those missing in the ruins of Gaza and “indirect” deaths from malnutrition, disease and other circumstances caused by the conflict, could be around 186,000 people – about 8 percent of Gaza’s population.

Faced with such an attack, leaders of the countries of the so-called global South have already expressed their concern. “When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West led a global campaign of condemnation, calling on the world to denounce Russia in the name of human rights and international law,” wrote Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto earlier this year. “Today, however, those same countries are allowing another bloody conflict to take place, this time in Gaza.”

Last November, outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg rejected the accusation of “double standards.”“Ukraine has never posed a threat to Russia, Ukraine has never attacked Russia,” he told reporters. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an unprovoked invasion, a large-scale invasion of another country. Therefore, Ukraine, of course, has the right to self-defense against an unprovoked attack and to preserve its territorial integrity.”

Stoltenberg’s successor, Mark Rutte, until recently the long-serving prime minister of the Netherlands, has taken a difficult line on the issue of the war in the Middle East. He has criticized Israel’s stance in the Gaza war, but critics accuse him and his allies of suppressing the Dutch government’s internal criticism of Israel, perhaps to secure his own rise to the highest NATO post. Rutte has rejected these accusations.

Yet just weeks after the war began, a leaked memo from the military attaché at the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv effectively accused Israel of planning war crimes. It implied that the Israeli military was “intentionally planning to cause massive destruction to infrastructure and civilian centers.” The Dutch defense minister at the time said the leaked memo did not represent official policy and called some reports of the memo’s contents selective and “unfair.” But the leak itself was an expression of growing Western dissatisfaction with Israel’s conduct of the war – a dissatisfaction that threatens to become more pronounced as time goes on. Just don’t expect to hear anything about it in Washington this week.