In an op-ed published Saturday in the Washington Post, Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel argued that bringing international law to bear against Israel for defending its citizens in the absence of accepted international standards is a “double standard” not a “higher standard.”

Sharansky, a former refusenik in the Soviet Union and former Israeli cabinet minister, recalled from personal experience:

For example, 12 years ago, during the Second Intifada, I was a member of the Israeli security cabinet when the army first decided to use aviation to target terrorist leaders. In nearly every cabinet meeting, Israel’s attorney general insisted that our targets must be chosen not on the basis of crimes already committed, but solely in light of proof that they were planning new terrorist acts. In other words, no matter how much death and destruction someone had caused, a targeted killing could be justified only by documented intentions to carry out another attack. A serious case had to be prepared for each assassination attempt, and therefore the number of such operations could be counted on one hand. Now that targeted killings are practically the norm — when the United States uses drones for this purpose all over the world — I would hope others are as scrupulous as Israel has been.

Sharansky notes that now “Israel goes even further. Before the IDF bombs an area in Gaza, residents are alerted by radio, e-mail, phone and text message telling them to leave.” He asks if other countries fighting terror do the same.

In 1999, when NATO launched its offensive against the criminal Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia, hundreds of civilians were killed in the bombings. Many more civilians were killed when U.S. warplanes hunted down Saddam Hussein’s family and supporters, and later al-Qaeda terrorists. They were killed in cafes, cinemas and even a wedding procession.

Sharansky agrees that these wars were justified but states “the obligation of the IDF to protect Israeli citizens from thousands of missiles and from underground terrorist infiltrations is just as sacred,” as the West’s determination to fight the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Al Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

In this article from 2006, Laura Blumenfeld reported on how Israel’s counter-terrorism policy evolved to minimize the risks of collateral damage.

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