This week, my social media feeds have filled with satellite images, many reportedly from Google Earth, showing whole neighborhoods of Gaza reduced to gray rubble. The posts accompanying them tend to share a single conclusion: this is the evidence of genocide, and Israel is guilty of it.

The images are sobering. They should be. Behind every collapsed roof was a family, a kitchen table, children who went to sleep there. Anyone who can look at those pictures and feel nothing has lost something important. Grief over the suffering of Palestinian civilians is not a betrayal of Israel, and it is not weakness. It is simply what decent people feel.

But grief is not the same as understanding. A photograph taken from orbit can show you what happened to a place. It cannot tell you why. And if we are going to render judgments that history will record, we owe it to the dead on every side to get the why right.

Go back to October 6, 2023. On that day, there was a ceasefire in place between Israel and Gaza. Israel had withdrawn every soldier and every settler from Gaza nearly two decades earlier, in 2005. Hamas had seized full control of the territory in 2007. Whatever grievances........

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