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Conveying Israel's Truths to American Audiences

(Times of Israel) Amb. Michael Oren - Over the past six months, I've spoken before dozens of Jewish communities in North America. I talked about the broken covenant of "never again," and Israel's need to restore it, about the irreconcilable goals of destroying Hamas and freeing all the hostages, about the loneliness. Nobody understands us in the world. Everyone is condemning us for killing 30,000 Palestinians. That figure was libelous. It was formulated by Hamas, infamous for inflating its statistics, and included the 12,000 terrorists killed by the IDF, the Palestinians killed by short-falling Hamas rockets, and the people who had naturally died. Equally insidious was the charge that Israel "indiscriminately" bombed Gaza. Each air force operation must first be approved by military and legal experts. The U.S. administration's mantra of "too many Palestinians have been killed" was misleading, suggesting that some lower number would have been acceptable. Though every collateral Palestinian death is a tragedy, the ratio of combatant-to-civilian fatalities in Gaza is the lowest in modern urban warfare. Washington's tendency to downplay this reality and condemn our conduct of war was especially painful. The remainder of my speech was devoted to optimism - born of an Israeli society that had proven itself to be the world's strongest and most resilient, of a country that, from the moment of its birth, had overcome serial challenges. Our newfound Jewish unity was also a source of hope. The writer is a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.
2024-04-11 00:00:00
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