White House spokesman Ned Price last week made what might’ve initially sounded like a pretty canned American response to media efforts to smear Israel.

Price was giving a briefing on the Biden administration’s rejection of yet another UN report condemning Israel for “illegal occupation.” When a reporter used the wording of that report to compare Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria to the Russian invasion and annexation of eastern Ukraine, Price responded:

“We categorically reject the blanket comparison between this the actions of the Kremlin – Russia in this case – that has launched and waged a brutal war of aggression against another sovereign state, a sovereign state that posed and poses no threat whatsoever to the Kremlin, a military campaign… whose toll can be measured in thousands upon thousands of lives lost.”

A categorical rejection means the Biden administration views as false every aspect of the comparison.

• Russia invaded a sovereign country. Israel did not.
• Russia is occupying the sovereign territory of another state. Israel is not.
• Ukraine posed no military threat to Russia. Palestinian terror groups, and the Jordanian army before it, do pose a military threat to Israel.
• Untold numbers of Ukrainians have been indiscriminately killed by Russia. The same is not true of the Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces.

Implicitly, these remarks signal there is no “occupation” from a legal standpoint. Israel entered disputed territory, and in the absence of a guaranteed final status agreement between the parties involved, it remains there, justified in doing so by the violence that emanated from that territory prior to entry of Israeli forces.

Of course, what Price did not address is Israel’s historical connection to this territory, let alone its biblical mandate to settle there. Nor did he go into the fact that the original basis for the League of Nations-endorsed British Mandate earmarked this territory for “close Jewish settlement.”

See: From Balfour to State

In short, any way you slice it, it wasn’t good day for the Palestinian narrative. Comparisons with Russia’s actions in Ukraine were expected, but they simply don’t hold water.

And then there’s the irony of the situation given that the Palestinians are among the few international players to lean toward support for Russia in its war on Ukraine.

Surveys conducted in recent months showed that at least half of Palestinian respondents blame Ukraine for the war, and are supportive of Russia’s military operation.

In August, a senior Palestinian general met with Russia’s deputy minister of defense to discuss possible military and intelligence cooperation.

And just last week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas lavished praise on Vladimir Putin when the two met in Moscow.