Earlier this month, the Biden administration joined governments around the world in marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948. At the very same time, US government officials were trying to fend off a legal action accusing them of complicity with Israel’s “unfolding genocide” of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Now the South African government has filed a case with the International Court of Justice, invoking the Genocide Convention and accusing Israel of “genocidal acts.”

Some commentators have contemptuously dismissed the idea that Israel’s war on Gaza should be considered genocidal as an absurdity. But academic experts have presented the question in a very different light and insisted on the need for urgent, morally serious debate.

The dismissive attitude to the charge of genocide betrays two forms of ignorance. The first concerns the definition of genocide in the convention itself. Although that definition was greatly influenced by the crimes of Nazism, its understanding of genocide also applies to a wider set of cases.