Recently, I exchanged a series of emails with a fellow Brookline Town Meeting member who is convinced that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Neither of us changed the other’s mind. But as the discussion unfolded, I realized that our disagreement was not primarily about casualty figures, humanitarian aid, inflammatory statements by Israeli politicians, or even international law. We were looking at the same war through fundamentally different moral lenses.

My correspondent focused on the scale of Palestinian suffering and the conclusions of organizations such as Human Rights Watch and historians such as Omer Bartov who see evidence of genocidal intent. He also pointed to inflammatory statements by Israeli politicians such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as evidence of Israel’s true aims.

I found myself asking a different set of questions. What obligations does a government have to protect its citizens after the October 7 massacre? How should we judge military actions against an enemy that deliberately embeds itself among civilians? Why are the assessments of military professionals who study urban warfare often dismissed as inherently biased, while the conclusions of NGOs and academics are frequently treated as authoritative? And is it fair to infer the intentions of an entire country and military from the rhetoric of a few particularly extreme politicians while giving less weight to the views of other elected officials, military leaders, legal advisers, and the actual conduct of military operations?

The exchange helped me understand that the genocide debate is not simply a dispute over facts. It reflects two profoundly different frameworks for understanding war, morality, state responsibility, and self-defense.

Many NGOs, activists, academics, and commentators focus primarily on the scale of Palestinian suffering: civilian deaths, displacement, destruction, hunger,........

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