If Gaza is ‘genocide,’ what was Tokyo?

In November 1944, American B-29s began bombing Japan by the book: in daylight, from high altitude, aiming at specific factories with the Norden bombsight, the most advanced precision targeting system of its day.

It failed. At 30,000 feet, jet-stream winds blew bombs miles off target, and clouds hid the objectives. The Nakajima aircraft engine plant outside Tokyo was hit repeatedly with little to show for it. By early 1945, Gen. Haywood Hansell had been relieved, and his replacement, Gen. Curtis LeMay, faced a problem precision could not solve.

Japan had dispersed much of its war production into its cities. Parts for aircraft, engines and weapons were made in small workshops and family homes woven through residential neighborhoods. In practice, the neighborhoods were the military factories.

LeMay’s answer was fire. On the night of March 9, 1945, close to 300 B-29s came in low under cover of darkness and dropped some 1,665 tons of napalm incendiaries on Tokyo. About 16 square miles of the city burned, and between 80,000 and 100,000 people died in a single night. More than 60 Japanese cities followed.

Judged by today’s Geneva Conventions standards, “Operation Meetinghouse” would at the very least be considered a possible war crime. The 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions bars attacks that treat an entire city as one military target. Any serious defense would rest on Japan’s rulers deliberately turning those cities into military assets.

Yet almost nobody calls the firebombing of Japan “genocide,” and for good reason. Genocide requires intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group “as such.” America aimed to completely defeat a regime that murdered millions of civilians across Asia, massacred Nanjing, ran the “comfort women” system of sexual slavery on an industrial scale and performed human experiments under Unit 731—a regime whose cruelty rivaled that of the Nazis.

After Pearl Harbor, plenty of Americans said racist things about the Japanese. Adm. William Halsey’s “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs” went up on a billboard. But the clearest proof of intent came after the surrender. America occupied Japan, gave it a democratic constitution, fed its people and poured money into rebuilding it. A country bent on destroying the Japanese people, as such, does not spend seven years rebuilding them.

Now consider Gaza.

For 16 years after seizing the Strip in 2007, Hamas did by design what Japan did under the pressure of a losing war. It built its military into and under the civilian landscape. It dug some 600 kilometers of tunnels beneath homes, schools, mosques and hospitals. It put rocket launchers beside playgrounds and U.N. schools, ran command centers under Shifa Hospital and sank tunnel shafts inside children’s bedrooms. Cement and pipes meant for homes went into fortifications. Then, with a contempt for its own people few regimes have matched, Hamas denied Gaza’s civilians the shelter it had built for itself. When the IDF told Gazans to leave combat zones, Hamas told them to stay.

If LeMay’s dilemma was that the factories were the neighborhoods, Israel’s was worse. In Gaza, Hamas’s military and its infrastructure were under the neighborhoods and inside them, while its terrorists dressed like the people who lived there.

Israel’s answer was the opposite of LeMay’s. Instead of fire, it used precision munitions. Instead of surprise, it warned civilians by leaflet, text message and phone call before strikes, and opened evacuation corridors. It paused the fighting to vaccinate Gaza’s children against polio. It moved food and medicine into the territory it was fighting in. It sent its soldiers into the tunnels and alleys on foot, accepting losses no army in 1945 would have accepted to spare enemy civilians.

The results show it. After two years of war, Gaza’s total death toll, by Hamas’s own count, fighters included, is around 70,000, less than a single night in Tokyo. The Gaza Health Ministry’s own data now shows fighting-age men heavily overrepresented among the dead, which is the opposite of what indiscriminate bombing produces.

Gaza’s suffering is real. But the law is clear about who bears responsibility when one side hides its war machine among civilians. Additional Protocol I forbids using civilians to shield military targets and requires each side to keep military objectives away from populated areas as much as possible. Hamas spent 16 years doing the reverse. Under the same treaty, the presence of civilians does not make a military target immune. If it did, then every terrorist group and tyranny would win every war simply by hiding among its people.

Which brings us to the double standard.

America burned dozens of Japanese cities to the ground and is remembered, correctly, as the nation that defeated a monstrous regime and helped rebuild its people into a free and prosperous ally. Israel faced a more entrenched version of the same problem, chose far greater restraint and stands accused of “genocide” on campus quads, in New York’s City Hall and in U.N. reports. One of those reports came from the commission chaired by Navi Pillay, whom the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize this week for her supposed devotion to international law. That devotion apparently stops short of the law’s requirement of intent.

The “genocide” charge against Israel fails the same test that clears America. Israel’s stated war aims were destroying Hamas and bringing its hostages home, not destroying Palestinians “as such.” Hamas could have ended the war on any day after Oct. 7 by freeing the hostages and laying down its arms. Israel’s statehood offers in 2000, 2001 and 2008 demonstrate its willingness to compromise when it believes Palestinian leaders are ready to accept a deal.

There is one more lesson from 1945: Japan became a free and peaceful nation only after its militarist regime was totally defeated, disarmed and replaced, and its schools stopped teaching children to die for the emperor. Nobody suggested leaving Japan’s rulers in place to rearm. Gaza deserves the same chance, and it can only begin the way Japan’s did.

Destroyed buildings have never equaled genocide. The regime that turns its cities into military infrastructure owns the ruins. That was true in Tokyo, and it is true in Gaza.