Just war is not the same as ‘genocide’

For every war, there is a legitimate debate about whether it is fought justly. But there is no legitimate debate about what constitutes genocide.

The two are fundamentally different concepts. Yet critics routinely blur that distinction only when Israel is involved. The selective application of the “genocide” label to Israel is not a serious legal argument. It is an effort to delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state.

Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah is, by any reasonable standard, a war of self-defense. Like every war, it is open to scrutiny and debate. Military tactics, proportionality and individual decisions may all be examined through the principles of just war theory.

But even if someone concludes that Israel has fallen short of those principles, that still does not make its war a genocide. One concept does not become the other simply because Israel is the nation under attack.

The distinction is neither academic nor new. For more than a thousand years, just war theory has recognized that even necessary wars can produce tragic civilian casualties. Those realities may raise difficult moral questions, but they do not establish an intent to destroy an entire people. That is what genocide means.

History makes the distinction obvious. During the Normandy campaign before and after the D-Day landings, Allied bombing killed approximately 50,000 French civilians. Some........

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