57 Winter 2026 1. Raphael Lemkin, AXIS RULE IN OCCUPIED EUROPE: LAWS OF OCCUPATION, ANALYSIS OF GOVERNMENT, PROPOSALS FOR REDRESS (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1944; Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. reprint 2008), scan of the original publication is available at https:// www.legal-tools.org/doc/b989dd/pdf 2. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Dec. 9, 1948, 78 U.N.T.S. 277, available at https://www.ohchr.org/en/instrumentsmechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-andpunishment-crime-genocide 3. Adam Jones, GENOCIDE. A COMPREHENSIVE INTRODUCTION 24-29 (Routledge, 4th ed. 2024). 4. Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter is openly genocidal. A sanitized version, which did not replace the original charter, was published in 2017 and led many commentators to assume a certain moderation in Hamas’s ideology. However, Hamas’s leaders continued to cling to the original version in their public rhetoric. See also Robbie Sabel, “Appendix: Hamas and Genocide,” JUSTICE 71, Spring 2024, at 25-28. Yet since shortly after October 7, 2023, journalists, politicians and even knowledgeable scholars have constantly omitted the term “genocidal” from the attack (and refrained from mentioning the accompanying barrage of missiles fired on large areas of Israel), describing the event only as a “massacre” and even more often as an “attack” or an “act of resistance to the occupation.” he term “genocide” was coined and defined by the Polish-born American-Jewish legal expert Raphael (Rafal) Lemkin in light of the Nazis’ campaign to exterminate the Jews and murder other minorities. It appeared in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,1 and was later used in the Nuremberg Trial in 1945-1946. The Genocide Convention,2 which used a definition that differed from Lemkin’s, was adopted by the United Nations in December 1948. Since the end of the 1970s, and more so since the 1990s, genocide research has expanded enormously. Amidst this increase in academic work, various scholars have been displeased with both Lemkin’s and the Convention’s definitions and introduced variations of the concept. Since the late 1990s, there has been an increase in international institutions and tribunals handling legal proceedings concerning alleged genocide — especially regarding Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia — resulting in the noun becoming a common term in the vocabulary of international discourse. In a recent introductory book on genocide, Adam Jones presents 25 definitions used by scholars.3 As often happens with semantically loaded terms (such as Fascism, Nazism, racism etc.), “genocide” has become a tool in political battles where adherence to a definition remains loose. This development is apparent in the atmosphere that has developed since Hamas’s genocidal massacre on October 7, 2023,4 where accusations of genocide are leveled against Israel in popular discourse (often joined by some politically engaged genocide and even Holocaust scholars).5 In this popular discourse, the term genocide is reconstituted to mean “killing or murdering many thousands of people.” Leora Bilsky’s 170-page, richly informative book is an interesting interpretive attempt to return to Lemkin’s original goal when coining the term, which was pushed aside when forming the Convention due to political considerations by the major political powers at the time, and has since been kept on the sidelines: viewing the Reviewed by Dan Michman T BOOK REVIEWS Culture as the Crux of “Genocide”: From Lemkin via the Eichmann Trial to Today Ech Omrim Genocide be’Ivrit? Shalosh Keri’ot beMishpat Eichmann [The Struggle over Cultural Genocide in the Eichmann Trial] By Leora Bilsky (Bnei Brak: Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 2024, Hebrew, 170 pp.)
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