Fact. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the whole of the Middle East.

This despite, or because of, the mass murder of Jews (and now Christians) in Muslim and Islamic lands.

Barry Shaw | The View from Israel | May 20, 2026

This may have escaped your attention because your anti-Israel biased media certainly did not cover the story with any degree of accuracy.

This week, a Hezbollah terrorist opened fire on Israeli forces from inside a church in the southern Lebanese village of Qouza.

In the gunfire Itamar Sapir, a 27-year-old IDF deputy company commander, was killed.

Sapir is the 10th IDF soldier to fall in southern Lebanon since the start of this so-called ceasefire.

He leaves behind a wife and a one-year-old son.

This tragic event is the direct result of a moral asymmetry:

Israel’s respect for Christian holy sites and Hezbollah’s calculated exploitation of them.

The church in question had been personally visited by the IDF chief of staff and deliberately fenced off to ensure its protection during ground operations.

For Hezbollah, Israel had just provided additional protection for an ideal sniper’s nest.

Following the gunfire, the IDF struck targets in the immediate vicinity to neutralize the operative, intentionally avoiding the church itself.

This cynical exploitation of holy sites is a deliberate Hezbollah strategy—highlighted last month when the IDF uncovered terror tunnels beneath a local church.

Israel is not immune to criticism, and the recent destruction of a Jesus statue in southern Lebanon remains a black mark that demanded an internal reckoning with the offending soldier being sentenced, punished, and expelled from any further IDF service – a mark of shame here in Israel.

But truth is hijacked when the international press routinely ignores the other party’s routine militarization of religious sites.

On a much larger scale, the persecution of Christians is an 80-year trend across the Arabic Middle East.

There are whole nations both in north Africa and increasingly in central Africa in which Islamists have wrought genocides against indigenous Christian populations in their millions.

Most of these same countires are empty, devoid of their Jews, killed or driven out by jihadists and other Jew-hating regimes.

Yet Israel is the one constantly branded as a genocidal perpetrator. This despite the fact that Israel is the most multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic country in the region.

Fact. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the whole of the Middle East.