“Before you say the word, you should know what it means, what it requires”
Someone I’ve known for twenty years lives a couple of blocks away. I like him and run into him regularly in the neighborhood. He is not a partisan, he does not post about the Middle East, and he is not the sort of person who chants anything. The other day, he told me he respected my article in The Free Press, in which I said I’d leave my longtime publisher, Simon & Schuster, if it stood behind a virulently antisemitic Palestinian novelist. Then, out of the blue, he asked me a question in the tone people use when they already assume the answer.
“Do you think there’s a genocide in Gaza?”
No, I told him. By every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical — there is not.
He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just told you the earth is flat. Then he explained why I was wrong. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the Palestinian people. Everybody knows that.
That was the whole of it. He did not cite a study or a court ruling, not even a casualty figure. Just a thing everybody knows. I have spent forty years as a reporter learning that “everybody knows” is where investigations begin, not where they end. I am also a lawyer by training, which means that when I look at the Genocide Convention, the tribunal judgments, and the legal threshold the word actually requires, I am not reading them as a journalist translating a foreign language. I know what the standard is, I know where it comes from, and I know how rarely — and how carefully — international courts have applied it.
