While Hamas engages in its losing battle to destroy the Jewish state through bloodshed against Israelis, inflicting much suffering on Palestinians as part of its strategy, others across the globe are attacking Israel through a smear campaign accusing the country of doing what Hamas does: targeting civilians and attempting to perpetrate a genocide.
Now the U.S. State Department is amplifying that campaign by using it to pressure Israel to call off a ground operation in Rafah before Hamas is eradicated from the southern Gaza city—Hamas’ last stronghold and a major access point for Hamas’ weapons smuggling. But Israel assesses that without a ground campaign in Rafah, Hamas will be able to regroup and survive the war, directly undermining the stated US commitment to seeing Hamas destroyed.
Assistant Secretary of State Bill Russo wrote in a recent memo that Israelis are blind to the “major, possibly generational damage to their reputation” over the “unpopular” Gaza offensive, to the extent that this blindness constitutes “a major strategic error.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that an Israel Defense Forces’ ground offensive in Rafah “risks further isolating Israel around the world,” and thereby “jeopardizing its long-term security.”
Leave alone the nonsensical implication that Israelis can’t read the international press well enough to identify the global antipathy directed at them. Set aside also the very reasonable possibility that Israel has made a calculated decision to place safeguarding Israeli lives above safeguarding Israel’s image.
Instead, observe how these statements accept as logical, and perhaps even correct, that Israel is behaving beyond the pale in Gaza. But that assertion is inaccurate—grossly so. Repeating it constantly doesn’t make it more accurate, just more normalized. The truth is that Israel’s Gaza operation will go down as one of the most—if not the single most—precise urban warfare campaigns in history; in other words, minimizing civilian deaths in its attacks on the enemy.
The leading U.S. expert on modern urban warfare, West Point’s John Spencer, wrote last week that, by his analysis, “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the US did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
When American public officials are discussing plain facts, rather that engaging in State Department posturing, they confirm Israel’s strong record. Despite President Joe Biden saying that Israel has engaged in “indiscriminate bombing,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander last week testified before Congress that the IDF upholds the same “high standard” as the United States and avoids civilian casualties wherever possible. She affirmed under oath that there is no evidence that Israel deliberately targets civilians.
None of this is meant to downplay Gaza’s civilian casualty toll or the immense suffering in the coastal strip. Just the opposite. War is a tragedy because the deaths of innocents and widespread devastation are inevitable. There is no doubt that Israel occasionally makes mistakes while it battles an entrenched terrorist group, as it did Tuesday in accidentally killing aid workers from the World Central Kitchen. What country has not made tragic mistakes in war?
That is why diplomatic solutions must always be the first choice in settling our geopolitical differences if such solutions are possible. But sometimes a war is necessary, as when your enemy has vowed to invade, kill, rape and torture again…
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