The Justice of Israel’s War in Gaza Will Depend on How It Ends

When the United States and its Middle Eastern allies went to war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, there was nothing clean or surgical about the campaign.

Retaking Mosul from the Islamic State’s fighters, a struggle that ran from the fall of 2016 through the following summer, left between 9,000 and 11,000 inhabitants of the city dead, according to an Associated Press report, with about a third killed by the U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi air bombardments. Many of those victims were simply described as “crushed” in the subsequent medical reports.

In 2021, my colleagues at this newspaper reported on a U.S. strike cell that “launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State in Syria,” but also “sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians,” at a rate 10 times that of similar air warfare in Afghanistan.

When Western journalists reached Raqqa in Syria, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, in the fall of 2018, they found a “wasteland of war-warped buildings and shattered concrete” (to quote an NPR report), in which as many as 80 percent of the city’s structures were destroyed or uninhabitable.

These features of the war were widely reported, and the military strategies involved were subsequently criticized. But there was no mass movement against an American-led “genocide” in the region, no equivalent of the current rage against the Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza, no self-immolations in front of the White House on behalf of the innocents dead in Raqqa or Mosul.

This difference informs one understandable response from Israelis and friends of Israel to any sweeping criticism of the Jewish state’s military campaign in Gaza. It’s not just that, from their perspective, the world and the Western media generally ignore all manner of crises, aggressions and actual campaigns of ethnic cleansing in order to make Israel a special enemy and scapegoat. It’s that the world is fine with a clear equivalent of its current campaign — with American arms supporting a grinding war against a fanatical Islamist movement, leaving cities leveled and thousands dead — so long as the fanatical Islamic movement killed Christians, Yazidis and Muslims.