Rafael Lemkin gave the 20th century a word it desperately needed: genocide. Jewish memory learned to ask with extraordinary precision what happens when a Jew becomes available to violence because he is a Jew. The harder question begins when the Jew is no longer only a possible victim, but possesses a state, an army, borders, weapons and institutions capable of deciding who represents a threat, whose life receives protection and whose death requires explanation. This is not a demand for a special moral standard for Jews; it is a refusal of a special exemption.

Israel does not exist in a vacuum. For decades, there have been political actors and movements that have not merely criticized Israeli governments or policies, but denied Israel’s right to exist and, at times, denied Jews the right to durable political existence as a collective. After October 7, 2023, this problem became impossible to dismiss as abstraction. For many Israelis, the massacre was proof that mass violence against Jews still belongs to the present. That fear is real and should not be mocked, but precisely because it is real, the moral problem becomes harder rather than easier.

A community that experiences itself as existentially threatened begins to interpret more and more actions through the question of survival. Military criticism can be heard as an attempt to deny self-defense, diplomatic pressure as preparation for isolation, and anti-Zionism as denial of Jewish political existence. Sometimes these interpretations are justified. Not every hostility toward Israel is merely criticism of policy. But one real threat does not make every criticism a threat. Just as the existence of Hamas does not turn every Palestinian into Hamas, the existence of actors who deny Israel’s right to exist does not turn every attempt to restrain Israeli power into an attempt to destroy Israel.

This is where Lemkin becomes difficult. We usually begin the discussion of genocide too late: we count bodies, search for orders and ask whether specific intent to destroy a protected group can be proved. These are indispensable legal questions, yet before they can be answered, a more elementary transformation may already have taken place. A human being may have ceased to appear primarily as a human being and become operationally a member of a category: a Jew, an Armenian, a Tutsi, a Yazidi, a Palestinian.

The danger does not lie in belonging to a community. It begins when belonging starts to determine the human being. Biography, conduct, beliefs and individuality become........

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