The US State Department Is Amplifying the Smear Campaign Against Israel

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 and again, and has a record of breaking ceasefires to do just that.

It is especially important to be fair observers of what's happening in Gaza given the absurd accusations Israel routinely faces for its conduct in war and how those accusations are then used to keep it from defending itself by pressuring it to pull back.

The ludicrous claim that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians has become a common talking point. It is based on redefining the word "genocide" to mean something other than an attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic, religious or national group, and it relies on dubious civilian casualty numbers provided by Hamas and willful ignorance of the terrorist group's strategic reliance on human shields, including its extensive use of hospitals, schools and United Nations facilities, as cover for its actions, which include holding Israeli hostages: a war crime.

Israel is frequently held responsible for the various forms of humanitarian crises in Gaza, such as famine and lack of clean water, even as there are credible reports of Hamas stealing aid at gunpoint, while the organization is known to repurpose water pipes as rockets to fire at Israeli civilians: a war crime. All this while Hamas continues to hold Israeli civilians hostage amid evidence it sexually assaults them: a war crime.

The lie that Israel is gratuitously killing Gaza civilians is debunked with one remarkable basic statistic: The civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in the Gaza War is, at its worst, 2:1. (The true number of civilian deaths is currently impossible to verify independently, but even triangulating between the IDF's and Hamas' claimed tally shows, at worst, this historically low number.) Modern urban warfare usually results in something closer to a 9:1 ratio, according to United Nations' experts. This is not to minimize the tragedy of those innocents killed but to understand those deaths in the context of war. As Spencer noted, in the US-supervised Battle of Mosul in 2016-2017, 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists.

In fact, Israel routinely handicaps itself by warning of attacks so that civilians can flee—and so can Hamas. Michael Schmitt, a West Point distinguished scholar, detailed this fall how "the IDF regularly uses a wide variety of warnings, almost certainly more than any other military," and noted that some other countries "worry that the Israeli Defense Forces [have] created an unrealistically high bar on when and how to provide warnings."

In addition, the Israeli government regularly faces criticism from Israeli citizens for taking risks with its own soldiers' lives by sending in ground troops instead of simply leveling legitimate military targets from the air. Israeli officials point out that lawyers must sign off on every significant strike to ensure that, in accordance with the just-war principle of "proportionality," any human and infrastructural damage is commensurate with legitimate military aims.

As such, Israel is structurally and philosophically committed to minimizing civilian casualties, knowing that—despite the Biden administration's skepticism—not only is each civilian death a tragedy but also a strategic victory for its adversaries.

Meanwhile, Hamas's strategy is to dehumanize Gazan civilians by using them as pawns in a lethal game, counting on people around the world to blame Israel and pressure it to stop before Hamas is defeated. While NGOs and Western progressives cite death tolls as the reason for Israel to stop its campaign, leaving Hamas to continue its fight, Hamas itself repeats that it loves and lionizes martyrdom, especially of Gaza's children. What an irony: Between Hamas and Israel, Hamas clearly cares nothing about Gazans' well-being.

Concerns about Israel's conduct in war are, by any objective measure, outrageously unwarranted. It is prosecuting a legitimate conflict according to high moral standards and with tactical precision. If Israel's fight to save Gaza and itself from Hamas draws the ire of establishment experts and anti-Israel activists, that says little about Israel—but a lot about its critics.

Jason D. Greenblatt was the White House special envoy to the Middle East from 2017-2019. He is the author of "In the Path of Abraham." Follow him on X: @GreenblattJD and Instagram: @Jason.Greenblatt.