Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.
Do you remember reading about this incident, or the dozens of others that were uncovered in that story using Pentagon records? No, the story disappeared from the news media radar in no time.
Now, imagine the tsunami of coverage from multiple news outlets, the UN resolutions and condemnations from every nation on the planet, that would result if Israel killed 120 civilians in an air strike and claimed it was a successful strike on dozens of fighters.
That is not just a double standard. That is treating Israel as uniquely evil and ignoring far, far worse things done by "the good guys."
And that is the entire point. Israel's critics do not want you to know this context when they accuse Israel of war crimes. They do not want you to see how Israel compares to other armies. They never make 3D models of US bombing of wedding parties.
There is only one possible explanation for putting Israel under an electron microscope for doing an amazing job targeting terrorists while virtually ignoring the horrible mistakes that every other professional western army does. It isn't "concern over taxpayer dollars" or "humanitarian concerns" or any of the dozens of other excuses used to justify this obsession with how Israel fights terror. None of the Western armies who wantonly bombed dozens of innocents had to worry about an immediate threat of someone slipping through a porous border and attacking their own citizens who live only a few kilometers away.
The only explanation is antisemitism.
Maybe not the explicit, neo-Nazi kind, but this crazed obsession with finding everything wrong with Israel defending itself from real, imminent threats while ignoring everyday Palestinian terror cannot be logically explained any other way except to say that a Jewish state is assumed to be automatically criminal the way Jews have lived under that assumption for thousands of years.
The truly remarkable thing is that the IDF, like the Jews throughout history, don't respond by saying that they might as well act the way they are being accused of acting. Instead, they continue to improve their methods and work towards a 100% record of only killing those who are actively trying to kill them first. (In attacks on Iranian targets in Syria, they are very close to that 100%.)
The IDF is truly the most moral army in the world. It isn't even close.
