There’s a good bit of disgust around town, we gather, over the decision of The New York Times to issue, in the wake of the bombing at Hebrew University, an editorial castigating Israel for its attack on Salah Shehada. The Times insists its point is “not that the deaths of innocents caused by Israel’s attack and Hamas’s blatant act of terror are morally equivalent.” But it goes on to draw precisely an equivalence, saying its point is “that they are both terribly wrong.” In fact, Israel’s decision to go after Salah Shehada even while he was hiding amidst civilians and children was — though harrowing — well in line with the laws of war.

Many in this town understand this, as was illuminated last week by John Podhoretz in the New York Post. He quotes the Fourth Geneva Convention, Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, which, Mr. Podhoretz reminds, goes into detail about how to assign fault when military activities take place in civilian areas. He notes that the convention says that those who are actually fighting the war are not considered “protected persons” and that only civilians are granted the status of “protected persons” whose rights cannot be violated with impunity. He quotes the convention as warning that “The presence of a protected person may not be used to ren der certain points or areas immune from military activity.”

The New York Times is not interested in the Geneva Convention. It quotes a Jewish parent who lost a son in a Hamas terror attack as saying that if Israel’s soldiers had his son’s killers in their sights but knew that innocent Palestinians would die as well, he would demand they hold their fire. This is precisely why the prosecution of war, like that of crime, is carried by states. It is not a feud among individuals. Israel was seeking neither to mete out retribution nor to bring justice for the killing of past victims of Hamas terror. It was trying to defeat new enemy operations in a war in progress. The raid in Gaza undoubtedly saved more lives than it took.

When it finally does come time to lay all this upon the scales of justice, it’s not likely that the Times will be any more supportive of a forceful assertion of Israel’s standing. It has never been. Not even when it was time, after one of the most careful trials in history, to put Eichmann on the gallows. It reacted with a painfully conflicted editorial that actually dwelt on the crimes America had been striving to end in the Jim Crow South and concluded by referring the Jewish people to the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus talks of turning the other cheek. The thing for those feeling the sting of the Times editorials to bear in mind is that in a just war, the low road of neutrality — which the Times has taken in the war between Israel and her enemies — almost never leads to the moral high ground.