ISRAEL DECLARED its independence in 1948. That same year, the United Nations adopted the convention that defined genocide as a crime. The tension between these two “never agains” was there from the start.
The word “genocide” was coined in 1941 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from a Polish family, who combined the Greek word for a people () and the Latin translation for killing (). At its most basic, genocide meant systematically destroying another group. Lemkin laid it out as a two-phase, often colonial process in his 1944 book, : First, the oppressor erases the “national pattern” of the victim. Then, it imposes its own. Genocide stretched from antiquity (Carthage) to modern times (Ireland).
