Crucial to reducing the death toll of Syria’s bloody civil war have been the White Helmets, who provide medical care, food, and other forms of aid to civilians caught in the crossfire—and have been repeatedly maligned by pro-Assad propagandists and targeted by Assad’s bombs. Recently, Israel evacuated some 400 White Helmets from southern Syria, an area the regime is poised to seize. Rafael Medoff comments:

[H]ere’s how the operation was reported in a July 25 news article in the New York Times: “Israel, in a move that may have created more friction with Syria, also helped move rescue workers belonging to the group known as the White Helmets.”

Syria has been at war with Israel since the day the Jewish state was established 70 years ago. Syria was developing nuclear weapons to use against Israel until the Israeli Air Force intervened, and Syria has long sponsored and sheltered anti-Israel terrorist groups. But the rescue of 400 Syrian civilians is what’s “creating friction”? . . .

Israel . . . has a record of intervention rather than abandonment. It was Israel that, in 1977, rescued Vietnamese refugees who were drifting on the high seas, when no other country would take them. And when other countries were doing little more than paying lip service to the suffering of famine victims in Africa in the 1980s, it was Israel that sent its planes to rescue tens of thousands of starving Ethiopian Jews.

Maybe Israelis by now have become accustomed to the fact that their humanitarian efforts around the world often receive little or no attention. Perhaps they were not overly exercised by the fact that the French government, which played a very minor role in last week’s operation, did not even mention Israel in its official statement about the rescue.

But there’s a world of difference between not acknowledging Israel’s action—which is petty and ungrateful—and blaming Israel for “creating friction” with Syria—which is simply unconscionable.

There is little doubt that if Hizballah had participated more intensively in Saturday’s attack, Israeli air defenses would have been pushed past their limits, and far more damage would have been done. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, trying to look at things from Tehran’s perspective, see this as an important sign of caution—but caution that shouldn’t be exaggerated:

Iran is well aware of the extent and capability of Israel’s air defenses. The scale of the strike was almost certainly designed to enable at least some of the attacking munitions to penetrate those defenses and cause some degree of damage. Their inability to do so was doubtless a disappointment to Tehran, but the Iranians can probably still console themselves that the attack was frightening for the Israeli people and alarming to their government. Iran probably hopes that it was unpleasant enough to give Israeli leaders pause the next time they consider an operation like the embassy strike.

Hizballah is Iran’s ace in the hole. With more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, the Lebanese militant group could overwhelm Israeli air defenses. . . . All of this reinforces the strategic assessment that Iran is not looking to escalate with Israel and is, in fact, working very hard to avoid escalation. . . . Still, Iran has crossed a Rubicon, although it may not recognize it. Iran had never struck Israel directly from its own territory before Saturday.

Byman and Pollack see here an important lesson for America:

What Saturday’s fireworks hopefully also illustrated is the danger of U.S. disengagement from the Middle East. . . . The latest round of violence shows why it is important for the United States to take the lead on pushing back on Iran and its proxies and bolstering U.S. allies.