Alan Dershowitz takes to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to make an important point. Throughout history, Jewish blood has been cheap. Mass murders went mostly unaccounted for. But Israeli action since the October 7 attacks have proven, rightly and forcefully, that that is no longer the case: those who kill Jews will pay a heavy price. It has been a powerful display of deterrence to the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people, and a historic, clarion call that Jewish life is no longer disposable:

For centuries, Jews have been the victims of pogroms and racist violence, culminating in but not ending with the Holocaust. The murderers rarely paid for their actions. Jewish blood was cheap. Even most perpetrators of the Holocaust were never brought to justice. For decades, the Palestinian Authority gave so-called welfare payments to terrorists who had killed Jews—the “pay for slay” policy. Those who died killing Jews were considered martyrs and their families compensated. The murderers and rapists who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre seemed to think they’d get away with it. They took videos of the atrocities they committed and bragged about killing Jews wherever they could find them.

But this time was different. Israel fought back and made the perpetrators and their supporters pay a heavy price. Many believe the price has been too heavy, especially for innocent civilians in Gaza. We don’t know the precise number of completely innocent victims. Gaza’s Health Ministry, run by Hamas, doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants when it claims that more than 60,000 Gazans have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023. There are good reasons to doubt the figure and even better reasons to doubt the claim that fewer than 10,000 of them were combatants. The criteria for categorizing someone as a combatant aren’t black and white, especially in a war waged by terrorist groups. There is a continuum from combatant to civilian.

Read the whole thing in The Wall Street Journal.