During an interview on Bloomberg’s The Mishal Husain Show last week, Wendy Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of state in the Joe Biden administration, accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “creating a genocide” in Gaza.

It’s a strange phrase. Not “committing” a genocide, but creating one.

That phrasing matters. It suggests an awareness that the standard accusation—genocide in the factual sense—cannot be sustained. So instead of making that claim directly, the language shifts. “Genocide” becomes less a defined action and more a label for an outcome one deems untenable.

Sherman herself all but confirmed this difference: “I can’t make the legal analysis about whether it is literally a genocide. But there is no doubt that Gaza was demolished.”

If Gaza being demolished is functionally equivalent to genocide, then outcome replaces action as the basis for moral judgment. It follows that if the scale of a certain outcome passes a certain threshold, the genocide label applies, even if that scale aligns with a legitimate military objective.

That shift is not a small semantic move. It’s a collapse of moral reasoning. 

Any serious moral framework centers, above all, on intention and circumstance. Once outcome becomes the determining factor, the category of “genocide” can expand to include any war that produces destruction judged after the fact to be excessive. At that point, the word stops clarifying anything. It simply signals disapproval. 

The fact that Sherman reaches for this kind of language—even while partially retracting it—suggests that what was long seen as a stable, moderate core of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment is not anchored in a coherent moral framework. It is therefore willing to align itself with political pressures once confined to the margins.

Sherman said: “Israel absolutely deserves security and peace… but I am not a supporter of destroying any civilization, or any people.” 

That sentiment collides with reality very quickly. What if an adversary makes your security conditional on dismantling the infrastructure from which that adversary operates? What if that infrastructure is systematically embedded within civilian areas? What if avoiding large-scale destruction means accepting ongoing attacks against your own population? This is precisely the dilemma that Hamas and the broader ‘axis of resistance’ have constructed.

A moral framework that judges according to outcomes, such as how much destruction occurred or how many civilians suffered, has no way to process that dilemma. It simply condemns the result and, by implication, the actor.

This makes for an unsustainable system. If the standard becomes: “If your self-defense produces a certain level of civilian harm, it is illegitimate,” then any actor willing to fight from within its own civilian population gains a decisive advantage. The more indifferent such actors are toward their own civilians, the more constrained their opponent becomes.

This logic would be disastrous for any Western military confronting an adversary that embeds itself among civilians. It becomes, in effect, a standing invitation to illiberal actors: structure your warfare this way, and you neutralize your opponent’s moral legitimacy. 

The result is not a more humane world. It’s a more brutal one.

The moral answer is not to dismiss civilian suffering. It is to take it seriously while refusing to let it become a weapon against the very concept of legitimate self-defense. That means holding combatants to rigorous standards of conduct—and holding observers to rigorous standards of language. 

“Creating a genocide” fails both tests. It is imprecise where precision is required, and consequential where imprecision carries real costs.

Untethering the language of moral judgment from the criteria that give it meaning does not protect civilians. If anything, it protects the strategies that place them in harm’s way.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)