It came as a surprise to none of us in Israel that international sympathy and support (even from America) evaporated within just weeks of the savage Oct. 7 terrorist invasion. The world is uncomfortable with Israel as the victim, so it eagerly leapt at the opportunity to flip the narrative the moment images were broadcast of Palestinian civilians harmed by Israel’s war effort in Gaza.

That Israel goes to extraordinary effort to avoid harming civilians in war doesn’t seem to interest most. Emotion trumps fact in our era of quick-hit media.

Even so, for those with a genuine interest in truth, not a few experts have been pointing it out. One is American military expert John Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at the US Military Academy at West Point. He explained in a recent article that in Gaza, Israel had effectively set a new, positive standard for urban warfare.

That doesn’t sound like what we are hearing from the International Court of Justice in The Hague, or from the mainstream media and the hordes of anti-Israel demonstrators.

But, as Spencer points out, “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history.”

The question is, why bother? What is Israel’s motivation for doing this?

As Spencer notes, protecting enemy non-combatants comes at a major cost to Israel’s war effort. Israel could have destroyed Hamas more quickly, and with less risk to its own soldiers. But doing so would have meant a far higher Palestinian civilian death toll.

Given the high price Israel is paying to keep as many Palestinians as possible alive, and the fact that it gets absolutely no credit for doing so, many Israelis are left asking “why?”

If the motivation is to avoid international condemnation, it’s not working.

Even going to unprecedented lengths to prevent civilian harm isn’t stopping Israel from facing unprecedented condemnation on the international stage.

So why bother?

Why hamstring the war effort by taking measures that are anyway not delivering the desired results?

The world is going to condemn Israel anyway, so why not just win the war as quickly and as decisively as possible?

If the motivation is a genuine concern for Palestinian life in line with Judaism’s reverence for life in general, then the international community has a problem, because it is condemning the most moral and sacrificial military in the history of the world.

By doing what Spencer says the IDF is doing, it is greatly increasing its own casualty rate in order to reduce the risk to enemy non-combatants.

It is also risking the war coming to an end without the Hamas threat being fully defeated. In other words, it is risking “defeat.”

No other nation would or ever has done this when facing such an existential situation.

In wild contradiction to the equally wild blood libels hurled by global antisemites, we in Israel often lament that the Jewish state is the only one that actually cares about the Palestinians, to the point of putting our own sons and daughters at greater risk to avoid as much as possible harming those Arabs who hate us most.

Everyone else is just using the Palestinians as pawns.