Jake Wallis Simons: Israel is being subjected to obscene double standards
In 2021, during the catastrophic allied withdrawal from Afghanistan, an errant US drone strike slaughtered an aid worker and nine members of his family in Kabul, including seven children.Biden Loses the Plot on Israel
Footage of the attack was later obtained by the New York Times. According to the paper, the footage showed how ‘the military made a life-or-death decision based on imagery that was fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias’. There were other mitigating circumstances, readers were told. ‘The military had been working that day under extreme pressure to head off another attack on troops and civilians in the middle of the chaotic withdrawal.’
Contrast this with how America’s newspaper of record reported the tragic Israeli airstrikes that claimed the lives of seven aid workers in Gaza on Monday. This, it alleged, was ‘the predictable result of a shoot-first style of engagement Israeli troops have used in their military campaign since the Hamas attacks of 7 October’. The report made no such allowances for ‘extreme pressure’ or ‘fuzzy, hard-to-interpret’ imagery.
The Gray Lady even contrasted the two incidents in a way that painted the American atrocity favourably while casting Israeli intentions in doubt. The Kabul attack, it said, ‘came after a suicide bombing killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops, during the frantic American withdrawal from the country. Under acute pressure to avert another attack, the US military believed it was tracking a terrorist who might imminently detonate another bomb. Instead, it killed an Afghan aid worker and nine members of his family.’
The Gaza strike, however, ‘adds fuel to accusations that Israel has bombed indiscriminately’, the New York Times said, pre-empting the results of the independent investigation with breathless speculation and a healthy dose of ‘confirmation bias’ of its own. The assumption could not be clearer: whereas the Americans were acting out of panic and confusion, the Israelis were either acting out of disregard for human life or straightforward bloodlust.
Civilian deaths, including those of aid workers, are a tragic reality of modern warfare. Sixty-two humanitarian workers lost their lives in combat zones last year. Although they were mostly killed at the hands of autocratic regimes and militias, during wartime they are also the casualties of democracies, including Britain.
During the Libyan civil war in 2011, when David Cameron had his hands on the joystick, 13 people were killed by a NATO airstrike, including an ambulance driver, three nurses and some friendly troops. (He did not, surprisingly, subject his own government to the type of rhetoric that he has recently been levelling at the Israelis over the mistaken Gaza strike.) That same week, NATO wiped out a family near Ajdabiya in the north of the country. This year, even the Danish military was forced to admit that its aerial assault had claimed the lives of 14 Libyan civilians.
The difference between attitudes towards most Western armed forces and the Israelis could not be sharper. According to the UN, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in war around the world is one to nine. When Britain, America and our allies battled Islamic State in Mosul in 2016-17, we achieved a much more respectable rate of about one to 2.5. In Gaza, Israel has done better still, reaching about one to 1.5, and possibly even less.
Yet, while there is a willingness to believe that the Americans, British, Danes and others carry out tragic errors while doing their best to avoid harm to innocents, there is an instant suspicion when Jewish hands are on the bomb toggles.
For six months, huge swaths of the press have painted Israel in the worst possible light. Netanyahu could say the sky is blue and a thousand fact-checkers would scrub his claim for signs of misinformation. Pro-Hamas falsehoods, meanwhile, are recycled without second thought. The casualty numbers from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, the bogus tale of the Israeli rocket "fired" at al-Shifa hospital, the blood libel that Israelis separated Palestinian babies from their mothers, the lie that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East was free of Hamas infiltration—these stories were peddled in bad faith before Israel had a chance to rebut them.Jonathan Tobin: Outrage over aid-worker deaths is about saving Hamas, not civilians
Which is why a sense of moral clarity in this conflict is so important. Hamas is evil. Hamas could end the war it started by surrendering its cadres and releasing its prisoners. Hamas refuses. Hamas would rather sacrifice the civilian population of Gaza on the altar of its genocidal ambition and suicidal desires. Hamas brutalizes children, abuses captives, steals food, fires its rockets indiscriminately, wears no uniforms, and hides behind schools, hospitals, and mosques. Hamas does not just commit war crimes. It is a war crime.
A global movement sympathetic to Hamas is fighting an information war with the objective of isolating Israel diplomatically and undermining its right to exist. We have learned that the United States, our universities, and our social media platforms are fronts in this campaign. And we have learned that anti-Semitism has returned with shocking power to demonize, harass, intimidate, and assault Jews throughout the diaspora. What Jewish immigrants to America in the beginning of the 20th century called the "Golden Land" is no exception.
The political heroes of this moment are the men and women who have retained the ability to make clear distinctions between Israel and Hamas, between freedom, equality, and the rule of law and violence, terror, and fear. Few have put the matter as plainly as Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who recently has been making more sense than most of his colleagues. "Hamas is confident we’re going to capitulate—but it's never going to be me," he posted Wednesday on X. "Hamas only deserves elimination."
Alluding to the World Central Kitchen deaths, Fetterman continued, "This war is the sum total of daily, raw tragedies. The vast majority of the harshest criticism & all responsibility for this war belongs to Hamas. Stand with Israel."
Fetterman's message deserves a million retweets. And his story contains a lesson. Last December, Fetterman dropped his identification as a "Progressive" because he understood that the label has become entangled with the poisonous vines of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. And he, unlike Biden, refuses to play the anti-Israel lobby's game. He, unlike Biden, has drawn the correct lessons from the war in Gaza. John Fetterman knows that good friends come from unlikely places. That the truth is the most effective weapon in the war of ideas. And that the fate of our society, our nation, and our civilization depends on Israeli victory.
His willingness to heed these calls to halt the Israeli effort to defeat Hamas goes beyond a desire for domestic peace in the White House. The entire left wing of the Democratic Party, including many so-called “progressives” in Congress, has been clamoring that he use the threat of aid cutoffs to end the war prior to the release of the more than 100 hostages still being held by Hamas, including five Americans. Isolated in the White House, Biden and his advisers truly believe that the reason he’s currently trailing former President Donald Trump in his battle for re-election is because he’s considered insufficiently hostile to Israel by the intersectional activist wing of his party that is ever more hostile to Zionism and the Jewish state.
When measured against the yawns and shrugged shoulders from the White House under Obama and Biden when civilians died as a result of their orders, it’s easy to see that the outrage about the aid workers has little to do with humanitarian concerns. Instead, it is about hatred for Israel that has taken root in left-wingers who have come to believe that Israel must not be allowed to defeat Hamas and that any civilian casualties that occur as a result of the terrorists’ actions are too many.
If Biden really wants to end the fighting in Gaza, then he should be directing all of his anger and threats against Hamas and its backers, not the Israelis. If Hamas surrendered and released the hostages—ranging from a baby to an 86-year-old man—the war would be over immediately. Instead, by threatening to trash the alliance with Israel and the mandate that it must live with Hamas terrorism, including the threat of more Oct. 7 massacres in the future, he has only strengthened the resolve of the Islamist murderers to stand their ground, secure in the belief that the United States will save them from the justice they so richly deserve for their crimes.
As much as we may all mourn what happened to the aid workers, the willingness of Israel’s foes and false friends like Biden to use this incident to end the war against Hamas should not be considered a manifestation of humanitarian sentiment. If their tragic fate provides the leverage that Washington uses to end the war, then the blood of the Israelis—and those in other nations who will fall victim to a revitalized international terror movement funded by Iran—will be on the heads of those who cynically exploited their deaths.