Of all the world’s countries, just one faces an endless public battle over its “right to exist”: Israel. Even countries that have committed genocides with victims numbering in the millions—Turkey, Germany, Russia, China—face no such challenge. And countries whose foundings caused the uprooting and exile of millions more—like Pakistan and modern India—also face no such challenge.

So why Israel, and only Israel? The true answer is a tsunami of false propaganda produced by Israel’s detractors and circulated by biased commentators. This includes a torrent of human rights activists and journalists publicly accusing Israel of ruthlessly occupying and oppressing people in Gaza and the West Bank and, now, of committing genocide in Gaza.

Such indictments ignore a mountain of confounding facts.

At least nine times in the past century, both Israel and its pre-state leaders sought or conducted negotiations with Arab leaders to establish “two states for two peoples”—in 1937, 1948, 1967, 1979, 1993, 2000, 2001, 2008, and 2019. At least six such overtures involved explicit offers for a state alongside Israel. Leaders in Gaza and the West Bank not only rejected all those statehood offers but each time commenced or resumed terror campaigns to destroy Israel.

Image: Hamas children’s television. YouTube screen grab.

When the U.N. recognized the nation Israel in 1948—and offered Arabs in the British mandate their own state alongside Israel—the Arab leaders instead launched a war to kill every last Jew in the region, as five Arab countries invaded Israel. Israel’s leaders urged the Arabs within its assigned borders to remain, with the guarantee that they would have equal rights. Instead, Arab leaders successfully urged the Arabs within the new nation’s borders to flee in order to clear the field for their intended mass slaughter of the Jews.

Since 1948, all Arab leaders—including both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas—have indoctrinated the people in their control to have genocidal hatred for Jews and Israel while glorifying mass killers of Jews as their greatest of heroes. The daily drumbeat of such propaganda throughout their schools, media, mosques, and civic ceremonies has created the world’s most powerful ideological ecosystem for the mass production of terrorists.

And despite not having had a single day of complete peace since 1948, when one of Britain’s top military leaders, Col. Richard Kempt, thoroughly scrutinized the Israel Defense Force, he concluded it was “the world’s most moral army.” Col. Kemp’s assessment emphasized Israel’s extraordinary efforts, unprecedented in the history of warfare, to protect civilians from harm. This has been manifested yet again in Israel’s response to Hamas’s genocidal attacks of October 7.

It is well documented that Israel has dropped over a million leaflets and made over 10 million calls and texts to Gazans, warning them when to evacuate ahead of Israeli military action; it has opened humanitarian corridors for such evacuees; and it has repeatedly sought to deliver fuel, incubators, respirators, and other supplies to Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Israel also gives its pilots and soldiers authority to call off strikes on military targets when civilians are spotted in the target area, something they’ve done during this war.

In stark contrast, Hamas deliberately targets Israeli civilians for murder, including women and children (especially women). The murders on October 7 were conducted with gruesome tortures. The slaughter was consistent with Hamas’s 1988 Charter, which declares its goal to “obliterate” Israel—that is, commit genocide. As urged by Hamas leaders, the terrorists recorded, broadcast, and celebrated their horrifying rapes and murders of Israeli women and children; and mobs of Gazan civilians cheered with bloodlust at the sights of mutilated Israelis paraded through their streets.

While Israel seeks to protect Gazan civilians amid war, Hamas has hoarded for its terror cadres the medical and humanitarian aid intended for its desperate citizens. As one Gaza City resident recently put it: “When Hamas distributes the aid, only Hamas members get the aid.”

The real reason for civilian losses in this current war is that Hamas forces its citizens to be human shields, dragged into the line of fire to score propaganda points against Israel. Per the Mideast Media Research Institute, “Hamas conducts military activity from within hospitals, mosques, churches and schools . . . in order to deliberately provoke Israel into attacking these sites.” Worse, when Gazans seek to utilize the Israeli escape corridors, multiple reports have documented Hamas terrorists blockading the routes and even shooting their fellow citizens to prevent their escape.

Yet despite all this, and despite Hamas having deliberately created the most civilian-embedded battlespace in the long history of war, the fact remains that “Israel’s military actions [have] produced far fewer deaths and a far lower ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths than in any comparable urban warfare.” By way of perspective, America’s war in Iraq yielded a civilian-to-combatant death rate more than double that of Israel in Gaza—a fact the Biden administration would do well to consider before scolding and threatening Israel over civilian casualties.

The core reality that Israel’s accusers neglect is this: If today Hamas laid down their arms, tomorrow there would be peace with Israel. But if today Israel laid down their arms, tomorrow there would be no Israel. It is Hamas that seeks genocide, and it is Israel that ethically acts to prevent it.

Henry Kopel is a retired federal prosecutor and the author of War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom (Lexington Books, 2021). He serves on the global advisory board for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.