> Where do we place Israel on that scale? Is there more attention on Israel vs. other similar world events?

I’d flip that around: why shouldn’t we expect Israel to be better than a terrorist group like Hamas or the deeply evil Iranian government? When some Americans complained that they were being held to a higher standard than Al-Qaeda or ISIL, they were rightly criticized for betraying our national aspiration to leading rather than trailing the world, and the same is happening here. Israel has rightly set its standards higher than its neighbors when it comes to democracy and civil rights, but that entails criticism where it fails to live up to that self-selected standard.