Palestinian-American legal scholar Noura Erakat showed that the goal of the so-called Genocide Convention of 1948 was not the “punishment for genocide that has already occurred,” but the “prevention of future genocide.” The argument that the ICJ would first have to establish that genocide had actually taken place before measures could be imposed against Germany therefore does not hold water.

Furthermore, Erakat continued, the debate as to whether it is genocide in the legal sense distracts from the […] war against the civilian population in the Gaza Strip. Instead, the key point is that the warfare is “unacceptable” in light of the more than 15,000 children killed and “must be stopped immediately.”

Erakat also described it as “racist” that “30,000 Palestinian victims” had not been enough for governments in the Global North to express words of criticism towards [Zionism], but that they had only protested loudly after the seven aid workers from an international humanitarian organization were killed.