Enemies and critics of Israel — they’re not the same thing — may take momentary heart from Pope Francis’ reported comments that the Gaza conflict might constitute genocide.

They might want to pause and consider exactly what the Holy Father said. In context, his words can be read as much for a potential historic exoneration of the Jewish State as any form of j’accuse.

They are much more nuanced than his ill-timed and dizzying assertion at the end of his 2022 Canadian pilgrimage. At the time, Francis called what happened in this country’s Indian Residential Schools “certainly” a genocide. It was a most unfortunate remark, and remains lacking any legal or historical foundation. To be fair, he was being badgered for such a response by a plane load of headline-seeking journalists. Apparently not even St. Michael the Archangel (“be our protection from the snares of the Devil”) could shoo them away fast enough.

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They would be the sort who headlined a Washington Post story this week: “Pope calls for investigation on whether genocide is taking place in Gaza.” The Post’s report was tied to an interview Francis did after release of his latest book Hope Never Disappoints. 

The hope expressed in the headline (as opposed to the hope of the Pontiff’s book) was pure money-making click-bait. It was made all the more disappointing by a fourth paragraph quote that exposed it as a bald-faced lie.

“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Francis is quoted.

Nowhere a call. Not even the hint of a suggestion. A plain statement of facts pointing toward truth, which used to be the stock in trade of journalism and is still clearly at the heart of the head of Holy Mother Church. Some experts do see the Gaza conflict that way. Accordingly, they see the characteristics — not the irrefutable proof — of genocide in Gaza’s horrific death toll since Oct. 8, 2023.

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But Francis added this: “We should investigate carefully to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.” 

Again, not a call. Not a demand. A carefully articulated prompt from a global leader for careful investigation to see whether the label even “fits” in its accepted “technical definition.”

Those last words are the genuine import of what the Holy Father said. They express the urgency of restoring to the word “genocide” a shared qualitative understanding. They would rescue it from being emptied of meaning by being bandied about everywhere from street protests to the lips of big-wigged solons at the UN, International Court of Justice or Canada’s Parliament.

Genocide means something, contrary to our current situation where it can mean anything. Its specificity must be defended precisely because of the historical circumstances in which the word was coined. We all know, or need to be informed, that genocide is a neologism for the characteristics of the Holocaust. They go beyond the horrifying murder of thousands or even millions to the planned, mechanized, State-sponsored, intention and action to eliminate a people from the Earth. In short, the Nazi Final Solution, which was not only to be final but also the solution to the “problem” of our planet having Jews on its soil. 

The 1948 Convention setting out the “Crime of Genocide” speaks of acts with “intent to destroy” a specific population based on carefully codified criteria. It did not mean, and has never meant, random acts of collateral violence, however tragic, in which a stupefying number of civilians are killed because their leaders fecklessly save their own skins by hiding in tunnels underneath them. 

It does not even mean policies of odiously malevolent neglect such as those inflicted by the British government on the Irish in the mid-19th century. No credible historian says Ireland’s Great Famine, which killed a million people, was genocide. Just so, based on the currently available evidence, and for all their undisputed evils, neither were the Indian Residential Schools. 

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Careful investigation might bring evidence the residential schools were, in fact, part of a genocidal plan. Likewise, what the Holy Father has prompted might shed light on Israeli actions as meeting the “technical definition” of genocide. But friends of Israel have every reason to believe the opposite will be true: its actions will exonerate it from the libel caused by the abuse of “genocide” itself. 

The Holy Father’s words open the door to just such hope, which even enemies and critics of Israel might take to heart.