For the second time in six weeks, Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail’s staff film editor and deputy arts editor, spread the unfounded slur that Israel has “murdered” Palestinian civilians.

First, in his August 13 review of the movie ‘American Doctor,’ Hertz wrote that the film “depicted Palestinian children murdered in a strike by the Israel Defense Forces,” making no distinction between the allegation that civilians died in war, and the scandalous claim that Israel deliberately murdered them.

And again on October 1, Hertz reviewed the film Naza in his column, “Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary decodes Israel’s war machine,” a film that purports to show how Israel has permitted collateral damage in Gaza.

In his column, Hertz referred to an alleged Israeli intelligence officer who is anonymously shown on screen and writes that he “will divulge how his country has systematically murdered thousands upon thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

Notably, Hertz did not actually demonstrate that this subject ever actually accused Israel of murdering anyone, but of accepting collateral damage, a significant distinction that he fails to explain. Nor did Hertz ever explain anything about the level of Hamas’ infiltration of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, Israel’s extraordinary measures to protect civilians in Gaza and its historically-low proportion of civilian casualties. These, it seems, are utterly irrelevant.

Hertz’s column was replete with what we regard as drive-by attacks on Israel’s military, referring to its “brutal methods” and referring to calls by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to strip the filmmakers of their citizenship, writing that he was “daring his fellow democratic world leaders to wonder to themselves if they’d ever be able to get away with issuing such a fascistic decree.”

Apparently unbeknownst to Hertz, other world leaders get away with a lot worse, and with little consequence: in Turkey, a comedian was recently arrested for the crime of insulting Turkish President Ergodan, though this has not stopped Prime Minister Carney from planning a visit there.

Perhaps the most enormous elephant in the room missed by Hertz in what we regard as his sympathetic review of NAZA is how the film actually – and quite likely inadvertently – ends up dismantling the “genocide” slur that has been repeatedly leveled against Israel.

The crime of genocide requires an intent to systematically kill as many people in a targeted group as possible. Permitting civilian casualties as part of collateral damage proves neither, and in fact proves, very much the opposite.

If Israel sought to carry out widespread murders in Gaza (or genocide), it would not have developed complex rules of engagement, including permitted amounts of collateral damage. It would have simply killed all Gazans. In reality, some 98 percent of Gazan civilians survived two years of intense urban combat.

By spreading the dangerous slur that Israel has murdered Palestinians, in our view Barry Hertz uncritically repeated unfounded anti-Israel vitriol from activist filmmakers, and left readers in the dark as a result.