The accusation that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza has become commonplace in protests, social media, university activism, and international legal filings. Yet the more often the term is used, the further it drifts from its actual meaning.

Genocide is not simply a synonym for devastating war, overwhelming force, or high civilian casualties. It is a specific legal and historical concept created in the aftermath of the Holocaust to describe the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.

That requirement of specific intent is the key distinction. Under the Genocide Convention, genocide requires proof that a state seeks to destroy a protected group itself, not merely defeat an enemy militarily or pursue strategic objectives despite foreseeable civilian suffering.

This distinction matters because war has always produced catastrophic civilian casualties. Allied bombing campaigns during World War II killed enormous numbers of civilians in Germany and Japan. Some operations remain morally controversial. But neither Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, nor the drafters of the Genocide Convention regarded those actions as genocide.

What separated genocide from even brutal warfare was purpose. Genocide kills people because of who they are.

That is why international courts have imposed an extremely demanding legal standard for proving genocidal intent. In Bosnia v. Serbia and Croatia v. Serbia, the International Court of Justice held that genocidal intent must be “the only reasonable inference” that can be drawn from the evidence. If military conduct can plausibly be explained by ordinary military........

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