It is a heavy one today, Herman. I was walking through the city earlier, and you can just feel the weight of these discussions in the air. We are now well into twenty twenty-six, and yet the shadows of the events that began in late twenty twenty-three still loom over every diplomatic summit and every university campus. We are dealing with words that carry the absolute maximum amount of historical and moral gravity.
Herman Poppleberry here, and you are right, Corn. We are talking about the "crime of crimes." That is how international lawyers often describe it. It is a term that was forged in the fires of the twentieth century specifically to describe the indescribable. It is a word that, once spoken, changes the entire chemistry of a conversation. It is not just a legal classification; it is a moral brand.
And today's prompt from Daniel really gets to the heart of this global friction. He wants us to look at the allegation of genocide against Israel in the context of the war in Gaza. It is an allegation that moved from the streets and social media into the highest legal chambers in the world, specifically the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Daniel specifically asked about the history of the term itself, the legal arguments being made by countries like South Africa, why this has become such a central narrative in progressive circles, and what Israel’s actual legal defense looks like.
It is a fascinating and deeply sobering intersection of history, law, and politics. To understand where we are in February twenty twenty-six, we have to understand the linguistic and legal architecture that was built nearly eighty years ago. We cannot talk about the current case without talking about the man who gave us the word.
I think we should start there. Because before nineteen forty-four, the word "genocide" did not even exist. People had other ways of describing mass slaughter—Winston Churchill famously called the Nazi atrocities "a crime without a name"—but they lacked a specific category for the intentional destruction of a people. How did we get this specific linguistic tool?
It is almost entirely the work of one man, Raphael Lemkin. He was a Polish-Jewish lawyer who became obsessed with the gaps in international law long before the Second World War. As a young student, he was haunted by the assassination of Talaat Pasha, one of the primary architects of the Armenian genocide. The assassin was a survivor, and Lemkin was struck by the paradox: why is it a crime for one man to kill another, but not a crime for a state leader to kill a million people?
He was looking for a way to make the world care about the destruction of groups, not just individuals. I remember reading that he lost forty-nine members of his own family in the Holocaust. This was not just an academic exercise for him; it was a personal mission to ensure that the law could name the horror he was witnessing.
Exactly. He coined the term in his nineteen forty-four book, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe." He combined the Greek "genos," meaning race or tribe, with the Latin "cide," meaning killing. But Lemkin’s original vision was actually broader than the legal definition we use today. He did not just mean immediate mass killing. He defined it as a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups. He included things like the destruction of culture, language, and national feelings.
So it was always about the "group-ness" of the victims. It is not just about the number of people killed, but the intent to destroy the group as a group.
That is the absolute pillar of the nineteen forty-eight Genocide Convention. Article Two of the convention defines it as acts committed with the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." That phrase "as such" is the hardest thing to prove in international law. It is what lawyers call "special intent" or "dolus specialis." It separates genocide from war crimes or crimes against humanity.
That is an important distinction that often gets lost in public discourse. You can have a war with a massive civilian death toll, you can have horrific war crimes, you can have ethnic cleansing, and none of them necessarily meet the legal threshold for genocide unless you can prove that specific, targeted intent to physically destroy the group.
Precisely. In a war crime, the intent might be to win a battle or clear a territory. In genocide, the "target" is the very existence of the people. And that brings us to the current legal battle. In late December twenty twenty-three, South Africa filed a case against Israel at the I-C-J. By the time we reached twenty twenty-five, several other nations, including Ireland, Spain, and Nicaragua, had filed interventions or separate related cases.
Let’s break down the South African argument. If the threshold is "intent," how are they trying to prove it? Because typically, a state does not put "we plan to commit genocide" in a formal policy document.
South Africa’s case, which was detailed in a massive memorial filed in October twenty twenty-four, relies on a "pattern of conduct." They argue that the sheer scale of the destruction in Gaza—the reported death toll exceeding thirty-five thousand by mid-twenty twenty-four, the destruction of over sixty percent of housing, and the collapse of the healthcare system—constitutes evidence of intent. They point to Article Two-C of the Convention: "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction."
And then there is the rhetoric. I know that has been a major point of contention in the legal filings.
It is the "intent" evidence. They cited hundreds of statements from Israeli officials. The most famous is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reference to "Amalek," a biblical enemy of the Israelites. South Africa argued this was a call for total destruction. They also cited Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s comment about "human animals" and "acting accordingly," and various members of the Knesset calling for Gaza to be "erased" or "flattened."
I remember those statements causing a firestorm. The defense, of course, argued that Netanyahu was referring to Hamas, not the Palestinian people, and that Gallant was specifically talking about the terrorists who committed the October seventh atrocities. But in a legal forum, the South African team argued that these statements, when heard by soldiers on the ground, create a "permissive environment" for genocidal acts.
They basically said, when the leadership uses this language, the military interprets it as a license to destroy the population. Now, it is important to update where the case stands now in February twenty twenty-six. The court issued "provisional measures" in early twenty twenty-four and expanded them in May twenty twenty-four regarding the Rafah offensive. But those were not final verdicts. We are currently in the "merits" phase, where the court is looking at the actual evidence. This process is expected to take several more years.
It is like a preliminary injunction in a civil case. The court found it "plausible" that the rights of Palestinians to be protected from genocide were at risk. But for the general public, the word "plausible" was often misinterpreted as a verdict of guilt.
And that leads into the third part of Daniel’s prompt: why has this become an "accepted truth" in the progressive world? Why did the word "genocide" become the primary lens for this conflict so quickly, even before the legal proceedings really began?
I think a lot of it has to do with the shift in the "oppressor versus oppressed" framework that has come to dominate modern progressive thought. In this worldview, power dynamics are the ultimate truth. Because Israel is the militarily superior power, any action it takes is viewed through the lens of colonial or imperialist aggression.
It is the "David versus Goliath" inversion. For decades, Israel was seen as the underdog. Now, in the eyes of many young activists in the West, Israel is the Goliath. And within the framework of intersectionality, the Palestinian cause has been linked to every other social justice movement, from Black Lives Matter to indigenous rights. If you view Israel as a "settler-colonial" state, then the logical conclusion of settler-colonialism is often framed as the elimination of the indigenous population.
Right. So, for people who already hold that view of Israel’s existence, the allegation of genocide feels like a natural extension of their existing ideology. It fits the narrative they already believe. It provides a moral clarity that "complex urban warfare" does not.
There is also the role of social media algorithms. We are seeing a war in a way we have never seen before. Constant, high-definition footage of suffering, often without context. When you see a video of a destroyed neighborhood every time you open your phone, the word "war" starts to feel insufficient to some people. They reach for the most powerful word available to describe the horror they are seeing.
But "genocide" is a technical legal term, not just a synonym for "horrible tragedy." When we use it as a rhetorical superlative, we actually risk devaluing the word. If every high-casualty urban conflict is a genocide, then what was the Holocaust? What was Rwanda, where eight hundred thousand people were killed with machetes in one hundred days? What was Srebrenica?
That is exactly the concern of many historians. If you broaden the definition to include any war with high civilian casualties in a densely populated area, the word loses its specific meaning of "intent to destroy a group." It becomes just another way of saying "I really hate this war." It turns a legal category into a political weapon.
Let’s pivot to Israel’s actual legal defense. They did not boycott the proceedings; they showed up with a massive legal team. What was the core of their argument in their counter-memorials?
Israel’s defense, led by legal scholars like Malcolm Shaw and Tal Becker, was built on the idea that this is a war of self-defense against a genocidal enemy—Hamas. They argued that the "intent" of the Israeli military is to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities, not the Palestinian people. They made a very strong point about the events of October seventh, twenty twenty-three.
Right, they argued that you cannot understand the "intent" of the response without looking at the "intent" of the attack that triggered it.
Exactly. They presented evidence that Hamas’s charter and its actions on October seventh—the systematic killing, the sexual violence, the kidnapping—met the definition of genocide much more clearly than Israel’s response. Their point was: "We are fighting to prevent our own genocide." They also argued that if Israel truly intended to commit genocide, with its military power, the death toll would be in the millions, not the tens of thousands.
How did they address the civilian casualties and the destruction of infrastructure? Because that is the visual evidence that the world sees every day.
They argued that the high casualty rate is a direct result of Hamas’s strategy of "human shielding." They presented thousands of pages of evidence: tunnels under hospitals, weapons stored in schools, and fighters operating in civilian clothing. Their argument is that under International Humanitarian Law, a civilian object loses its protection if it is used for military purposes. They argued that civilian deaths are an inevitable and tragic consequence of urban warfare against an enemy that intentionally embeds itself in the population, but they are not the goal.
And what about the measures they took to mitigate those deaths? I know they talked a lot about the phone calls, the leaflets, and the humanitarian corridors.
That was a huge part of the defense. They argued that a state committing genocide does not spend millions of dollars and countless man-hours warning the population to leave a target area. They pointed to the hundreds of thousands of phone calls, the millions of SMS messages, and the dropping of leaflets telling Gazans where to go for safety. In their view, these actions are the polar opposite of genocidal intent.
It is a strong point. If your goal is to destroy a group, you don’t tell them where to go to be safe. But the counter-argument from the South African side is that by forcing people into smaller and smaller areas—like the "safe zones" in Al-Mawasi—without adequate food, water, or medicine, you are still creating those "conditions of life" meant to destroy them.
And that is where the legal battle really sits. It is a fight over the interpretation of the same facts. One side sees the evacuation orders as a humanitarian effort; the other side sees them as forced displacement and a tool of ethnic cleansing. One side sees the restriction of supplies as a way to pressure Hamas to release hostages; the other side sees it as the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
One thing I think is important to touch on is the role of the "group" definition. In international law, to commit genocide, you have to be targeting the group "as such." Israel’s defense pointed out that there are over two million Arab citizens living within Israel with full rights, including members of the Knesset and judges on the Supreme Court.
That is a crucial point, Corn. It goes back to that "as such" requirement. If the state had an intent to destroy the Palestinian people based on their identity, it wouldn't make sense that they are integrated into the very fabric of the Israeli state. It suggests that the "intent" is tied to the conflict with the governing entity in Gaza, Hamas, not the identity of the Palestinian people as a whole.
But again, in the court of public opinion, these nuances are often lost. People see the suffering, they see the scale, and they want a word that matches their outrage. And "genocide" is the most powerful word we have.
There is also a psychological component here that we should address. For many people, labeling Israel’s actions as genocide feels like a form of "moral justice" or "historical irony." There is a subset of the progressive world that almost seems to lean into the idea of the victims of the Holocaust becoming the perpetrators of a genocide.
It is a very dark psychological trope. It is often called "Holocaust inversion." By labeling the Jewish state as genocidal, it somehow "evens the score" or absolves others of historical guilt. It is a way of saying, "See? They are no better than anyone else." It is a very potent and dangerous rhetorical move because it weaponizes the most painful part of Jewish history against the Jewish state.
And yet, we have to be careful. Just because the term is being weaponized doesn't mean we can ignore the legitimate questions about the conduct of the war. There are serious legal scholars who are deeply concerned about the proportionality of the response and the humanitarian situation. You can believe that the charge of genocide is legally incorrect and still believe that Israel may have committed war crimes.
Right. But "war crimes" doesn't have the same political "oomph" as "genocide." If you want to delegitimize a state’s very existence, "war crimes" isn't enough. Many states commit war crimes. But "genocide" is the ultimate deal-breaker. If a state is genocidal, it loses its moral right to exist in the eyes of many. That is why the word is being fought over so fiercely. It is not just about a legal verdict; it is about the right of the state of Israel to be part of the international community.
It is also worth noting the countries bringing the charges. South Africa has framed this case as a continuation of the global struggle against racial oppression and apartheid. For them, it is a matter of national identity and moral leadership in the "Global South." Ireland, too, has its own history of British colonialism, which colors its perception of any conflict that can be framed as "colonizer versus colonized."
It is fascinating how these countries' own historical traumas shape their involvement. It shows that international law isn't just a set of rules in a book; it is a stage where nations perform their own identities.
And we should mention the role of the International Criminal Court, the I-C-C, which is separate from the I-C-J. In May twenty twenty-four, the I-C-C prosecutor, Karim Khan, requested arrest warrants for both Israeli leaders and Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Notably, he did not include the charge of genocide. That distinction is very important. It shows that even a prosecutor who is being very aggressive against Israeli leadership didn't feel the evidence for "genocidal intent" met the legal standard.
So, where does this leave us in early twenty twenty-six? The I-C-J case will likely drag on for years. The war has evolved into a long-term security operation. The rhetoric is only getting more heated. What are the practical takeaways for someone trying to navigate this?
I think the first takeaway is to respect the specificity of the word "genocide." We should resist the urge to use it as a general term for "very bad things happening in a war." If we use it for everything, we have no words left for the truly unique horror of intentional group destruction. We risk a world where the word means nothing because it means everything.
I agree. Specificity is the enemy of propaganda. When we look at the facts, we should ask: "Is this an act intended to destroy a group, or is this a tragic consequence of a brutal urban war?" They are both horrific, but they are not the same thing legally or morally.
The second takeaway is to look at the "intent" evidence critically. When you hear a politician make a firebrand statement, ask yourself if that represents the actual operational policy of the military, or if it is just rhetoric for a domestic political audience. In a democracy, those two things are often very different. The Israeli military has a legal department that reviews every strike; a politician’s tweet doesn't necessarily translate to a commander’s order.
And conversely, we have to look at the results on the ground. Intent is hard to prove, but if the results consistently lead to the destruction of the foundations of life, the "intent" starts to become a secondary question in the eyes of the law. That is the needle the I-C-J is trying to thread. They are looking at whether the "omissions"—the failure to provide enough aid—constitute a form of intent.
There is also a takeaway about the "echo chambers" we live in. If you are in a progressive circle where "Israel is committing genocide" is an accepted truth, you are likely not hearing the legal arguments about human shielding, the complexity of the tunnels, or the millions of warning messages sent to civilians. And if you are in a pro-Israel circle, you might not be fully reckoning with the sheer scale of the humanitarian catastrophe that provides the fuel for these allegations.
It is about intellectual humility. We are living through a historical event in real-time. The "truth" is often much more complicated than a ten-second clip on TikTok or a headline in a partisan newspaper. We have to be able to hold two thoughts at once: that Israel has a right to defend itself against a genocidal enemy, and that the way it conducts that defense must be subject to the highest levels of international scrutiny.
I also think it is important to remember what Raphael Lemkin actually wanted. He wanted a world where groups were protected. He wanted a legal framework that would stop the next Holocaust. Whether you think the charge against Israel is preposterous or not, the fact that we have a court where these things can be argued is, in a very strange way, a tribute to his legacy. It means the "crime without a name" now has a name, a court, and a process.
That is a very thoughtful way to look at it, Herman. Even if the court is being used for political theater, the existence of the theater itself is a sign that the world at least pretends to care about the "crime of crimes." But we have to be careful that the theater doesn't become a circus. When international law is used as a purely political weapon, it loses its power to actually protect people.
If the I-C-J becomes just another place to score points in a geopolitical rivalry, then Lemkin’s dream is in trouble. We see this in the "selectivity" problem. Why is this conflict labeled a genocide while the mass killings in Sudan, the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, or the atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo get a fraction of the attention and almost no legal action in The Hague?
It is hard to argue with that. The level of global scrutiny on Israel is unique. Some would say it is because Israel claims to hold higher standards; others would say it is just old-fashioned bias in a new legal bottle. The reality is likely a mix of both.
One final point on the defense—Israel has pointed out that they have allowed hundreds of thousands of tons of aid into Gaza. Now, people argue about whether that is enough, but from a legal standpoint, a state that is trying to commit genocide generally doesn't facilitate the delivery of food and medicine to the population it is trying to destroy. In the nineteen forty-eight Convention, the focus is on the intent to destroy. Providing aid, even if insufficient, is a powerful legal counter-argument to that intent.
It is a war of attrition, not just on the ground, but in the realm of narrative and law. And because "genocide" is the most powerful word in our moral vocabulary, it has become the ultimate prize in that war.
I suspect that fifty years from now, historians will look at this case as the moment the Genocide Convention was truly put to the test. We are seeing the limits of international law in real-time. We are seeing that you can have all the rules in the world, but if there is no consensus on the facts, the rules can be used to support almost any conclusion.
We have covered a lot of ground here, Herman. From Raphael Lemkin’s obsession in the nineteen forties to the high-tech courtrooms of twenty twenty-six. It is a journey that shows just how much we rely on language to make sense of the world, and how dangerous that language can be when it is used loosely.
The word "genocide" was meant to be a shield for the vulnerable. We have to make sure it doesn't just become a weapon for the powerful or a slogan for the angry.
I think that is a good place to wrap up. It is a lot to chew on, and I hope it helps our listeners understand why this debate is so much more than just a disagreement over casualty numbers. It is a fight over the very meaning of justice and history.
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This has been My Weird Prompts. We are Corn and Herman, living here in Jerusalem, trying to make sense of it all.
Until next time, stay curious and keep asking those hard questions.
Goodbye, everyone.
Goodbye.
