It was a Polish lawyer, Rafael Lemkin (1900-1959), who coined the term ‘genocide.” It’s a manufactured word from the Greek meaning the killing (cide) of a clan or a tribe (geno). Lemkin, a student of history, was moved by the wholesale acts of terror committed against people with intent to wipe them off the face of the earth, and above all by the Shoah itself, in which he lost some 49 members of his own family. He eventually escaped Europe, settling in the United States, joined the law faculty of Duke University in North Carolina, and ended his career as a professor at Rutger’s School of Law in Newark, NJ.  His work contributed richly to The Convention of Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide now used to prosecute the bad actors who continue to commit acts of genocide. We are forever indebted to the work of Professor Lemkin.

People think that the International Court of Justice convicted Israel of genocide. It did not. It decided that it is “plausible” that Israel has committed genocide, which was enough for an eagerly anti-Israel global community to convict Israel of the crime. Complicating the matter was the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel’s former Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. These warrants were further impetus for the international community to condemn Israel for its prosecution of the Israel-Gaza........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)