It always starts with words. Genocide is largely remembered for its depraved acts, but it is incubated in language. Words can cast dark spells on a population, stirring hatred in those who otherwise see themselves as moderate, humane, normal.

This is why the genocide convention of 1948 criminalises “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”. Like Britain, Israel was a signatory nation and, two years later, it translated the convention into domestic law. There were four acts, it decreed, that leave the offender “treated like a person guilty of genocide”: one is “incitement to commit genocide”.

As the British lawyer Daniel Machover tells me, Israel has a legal obligation to prosecute those who incite genocide. But instead, since the grave war crimes committed against Israeli civilians by Hamas and other armed groups on 7 October, government ministers, parliamentarians, army officers and journalists have indulged in the language of extermination. This chilling phenomenon has few historical precedents, because usually instigators of genocide go to great lengths to cover up their crimes. As Raz Segal – an Israeli-American associate professor of genocide and Holocaust studies – tells me, Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is unique “in the sense of discussing it as what I think it is – that is, genocide – because the intent is so clearly articulated. And it’s articulated throughout Israeli media and society and politics.”

In South Africa’s document setting out its genocide case against Israel over the Gaza war, there are nine pages dedicated to genocidal incitement. It notes that Benjamin Netanyahu twice “invoked........

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