Daily Alert Archives

Why Is the Gaza War Different?

(JNS) Jonathan Spyer - The closest recent parallel to the current Gaza war, both in terms of the actions that triggered it and the way it is being conducted, is the U.S.-led Coalition's war against Islamic State in 2014-19. I am one of the small group of journalists who covered the ISIS war from close up and who are currently reporting on the Gaza war. Both the similarities in the wars and the enormous difference in Western perception of them are striking. In each case, an Arab movement of Sunni political Islam set out on a campaign of wholesale slaughter against a non-Arab and non-Muslim population: Kurdish-speaking Yazidis in the case of ISIS, Israeli Jews in that of Hamas. The current Israeli campaign in Gaza particularly resembles the Coalition's battle against ISIS in the Iraqi city of Mosul, the largest urban center that the ISIS jihadis controlled. Getting them out of there took nine months of fighting. The Mosul fighting involved the slow enveloping by conventional infantry and armored forces of a well-dug-in jihadi enemy, closely resembling the Israeli ground incursion in Gaza. Estimates suggest that there were between one and four civilians killed in Mosul for each ISIS fighter slain. Insofar as can be currently ascertained, the ratio of civilian to military dead in Gaza appears to broadly resemble that of Mosul. Yet no one demonstrated for the civilians killed by Coalition bombing during the ISIS war. There were no furious crowds in Western cities denouncing "genocide." Most in the West understood that the deeds of Islamic State and its ideology made it necessary that it be removed from power, in spite of the deaths of innocents that this would involve. It is difficult not to conclude that the reason for the furious demonstrations today is because Jews are involved. The writer is director of research at the Middle East Forum and director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis.
2024-01-02 00:00:00
Full Article