In the wake of the Holocaust in the 1940s and earlier in the century the genocidal attacks against the Armenians by Turkey and the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua peoples in SW Africa, the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide. In 1948 the UN adopted the Genocide Convention. On December 29, 2023, South Africa filed a case with the UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague accusing Israel of the crime of genocide in its ongoing assault on Gaza. The Convention defines genocide as “the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Israel has dismissed the South African charge calling it “meritless.”