-By Warner Todd Huston
The last decade or so we’ve assigned a euphemism to the deaths of civilians in military operations; we’ve called it “collateral damage.” The fact is, though, that deaths of bystanders — purportedly innocent — are almost unavoidable in war operations. After all, war usually entails the indiscriminate firing of automatic weapons or the dropping of large bombs and this simply cannot be done in a surgical manner. But one nation has succeeded in a near total elimination of the deaths of innocents. That country is Israel.
Commendably, Israel has gone far out of its way to minimize civilian causalities over the last five years or so. Does this bust well-worn Palestinian propaganda? It should. In general the facts make the lie to nearly everything the Palestinians and their supporters say, but this particular point demolishes the propaganda.
Propagandists against Israel love to throw around claims that Israel is a violent, war-like nation and that she loves to invade her neighbors. But, once again, facts devastate this blather. In its short life Israel has been engaged in many military actions, to be sure, but few of them began with the Israelis as the aggressors. Most of Israel’s actions have been defensive in nature. The idea of defense as opposed to conquest is so inculcated in Israel that they’ve even put the word “defense” in the name of their military forces. Hence we have the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).
In 2006 after the Israeli disengagement in Gaza, the number of rockets fired into Israel by Muslims in Palestine increased a shocking 436 percent. Israel allowed this outrage to continue for a long time before finally replying and they did this for fear of causalities of non-combatant Palestinians.
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Israel Killed Fewer Civilians in Military Operations Than Others, Including the US”