At the heart of the global clamour of voices criticising Israel in its war against Hamas lies the curious claim that the Jewish state is "guilty of genocide" in Gaza.

That's about as viscerally shocking an accusation as it's possible to level against Israel – if you know anything about Holocaust history, in which 6-million Jews, including 1-million children, were slaughtered in a genuine instance of genocide.

And if you know anything about Iran-backed terror group Hamas, you'll know that its founding Charter in 1988 is explicitly genocidal in intent against Jews and Israel. That's based on bloodcurdling "hadiths" (sayings attributed to the prophet, Mohammed).

Among hadiths is one that has rocks and stones crying out to the faithful: "There is a Jew behind me. Kill him" Another says that “Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews" and calls for the "obliteration of Israel".

Hamas leaders brag publicly about genocidal intent towards Jews and Israel. They did so after the terror group's surprise attack on Southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad vowed in a TV interview that it was "just the beginning", with more attacks planned until Israel was "annihilated".

October 7 is notable for an unprecedented scale of medieval sadism, savagery, barbarism and explicit genocidal intent by Hamas, terrorists from other factions and "innocent" Palestinian civilians.

Details bear repeating because so many who make the genocide claim now claim that there's little evidence of atrocities, that what happened on the day "wasn't so bad", even that Israel (and Jews) "had it coming". (Holocaust denial spawned strangely hybridised October 7 denial in a speedy, painless labour on social media within hours of the attack.)

On October 7, Hamas death squads infiltrated Israel, slaughtered, gang-raped, tortured, mutilated, beheaded, burnt alive and desecrated more than 1200 people, injured around 6000, and took more than 240 hostage to Gaza. Victims were mostly civilians and included pregnant women, children, babies, disabled people and the elderly.

Overwhelming evidence of the attack is freely available on public record, including courtesy of the terrorists themselves.

This leaves the genocide claim looking suspiciously like another example of the insidious accusation that Jews are "weaponising" the Holocaust.

That claim precedes October 7 and is not just an antisemitic trope. It's a classic case of the psychological phenomenon of projection. Israel's enemies like to accuse Jews of precisely what they are doing.

October 7 has cemented “genocide” in anti-Israel rhetoric as a constant companion to "ethnic cleansing" and "justified resistance". It is coupled with ubiquitous chant now mandatory in anti-Israel protests, "from the river to the sea" that is widely accepted as code for genocide of Jews.

Accomplishing this has required radical linguistic revisionism, massaging and panel-beating meanings of the meaning of genocide to align more closely with anti-Israel agendas.

The UN (United Nations) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in Geneva in 1948, defines genocide as specific acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.

The Oxford Dictionary defines it as "deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group”.

Johannesburg attorney Phillip Vallet, an executive consultant and former senior partner and CEO at Fluxmans law firm, says both "deliberate" and "destroying" are critical words to genocide's meaning.

The concept of genocide emerged in the Second World War, Vallet says, after a need arose to distinguish Germany’s racial killings of Jews, gypsies and other groups from other acts of war, such as indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese cities by Allied Forces.

"Those actions were deliberate but lacked intent to destroy either the German or the Japanese people," he says. "It became necessary to distinguish between killing of civilians as collateral damage of war and deliberate intent to destroy a nation, racial group, etc."

Vallet acknowledges problems with the Oxford definition of genocide. For example, the "war against terrorism" – the aim of destroying ISIS – is not regarded as genocide, whereas the actions of the Hutu against the Tutsi minority ethnic group in Rwanda are "best described as genocide", he says.

Yet unlike Hamas – and a few extremist Jewish voices – Israel has not expressed intent to destroy any national, ethnic, racial or religious group, nor has the IDF(Israel Defense Forces). Army leaders regularly remind Gazans that their war is with Hamas, not the Palestinians. The IDF has not embarked on the destruction of any group or acted on anywhere near the industrial, systemised scale required to meet the genocide definition.

And while the rising civilian death toll in Gaza is horrific, and Israel's military response to October 7 has been bloody and brutal, brutality is not the same thing as genocide.

So, is there really merit to the claim that Israel is committing genocide?

President Cyril Ramaphosa believes so.

In late October, he filed a referral with the International Criminal Court (ICC) demanding urgent investigation into Israel’s alleged "war crimes and genocide". Ramaphosa claimed that Gaza had "turned into a concentration camp where genocide is taking place”.

US-based human lawyer and human-rights law specialist Craig Mokhiber thinks likewise.

On October 31, he resigned in protest as director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, citing the organisation's "timidity" over Palestinian human rights.

Mokhiber doesn't mention October 7 but calls IDF actions in Gaza a "text-book case of genocide". In his resignation letter, Mokhiber mirrors Hamas's stated genocidal ambitions by effectively calling for an end to Israel.

US-based South African lawyer Trevor Norwitz has a very different view of the genocide claim.

He is a partner at one of the top law firms in New York, teaches teaches at Columbia Law School and is on the advisory board of the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at New York University School of Law.

Norwitz calls the genocide claim "ludicrous, a modern-day, medieval-style blood libel". Although powered by ignorance and misinformation, it "feeds on and in turn fuels antisemitism”, he says. It "perfectly manifests" the "Big Lie" propaganda strategy straight out of the playbook of Hitler and his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels.

"It tries to forgive and justify the barbaric atrocities Hamas committed on October 7."

For two decades, Norwitz chaired the Board of the University of Cape Town Fund, UCT's American alumni and fundraising arm. On December 12, he resigned in protest over the UCT Council’s statement on Gaza.

"While varnished with a thin veneer of impartiality, (the statement) reflects an institution which has lost its moral bearings, even its regard for the truth, which should be sacred to any institution of higher learning," Norwitz writes in his resignation letter.

"The suffering of innocents in Gaza is terrible and tragic, but the terrorist organisation Hamas and not Israel is overwhelmingly to blame."

That blame, as Norwitz has long written, is shared by those, including UCT's Council, who "irresponsibly, even if unwittingly, give Hamas so much support and encouragement, rather than insisting that they be held accountable for their heinous crimes".

The real question, he says, is why those claiming genocide are not merely content to criticise Israel in "normal, even scathing terms".

He has a ready answer: "They don't seek a peaceful resolution to a decades-long, intractable dispute. They are part of a global effort to isolate and delegitimise the state of Israel."

And they are explicitly genocidal in intent against the Jewish people.

Vallet agrees.

He dismisses the inference that Israel’s aim is the destruction of the Palestinian people as "frankly absurd". The fact that Gaza's population has "multiplied many times over the years belies it", he says.

Vallet says that genocide is "one of the least understood words in the English language". Activists, politicians and others misuse it loosely and colloquially, he says. "They either don't understand the meaning of the word or do understand but use it to stir up emotions."

Many who use the word, genocide" are also partly motivated by particular prejudices, Vallet says. This probably accounts for Ramaphosa proclaiming Israel’s actions against Hamas and its bombing of targets where civilians are present as “genocide”, but not when Russia bombs Ukraine civilian targets, he says.

Eitay Mack, a human rights lawyer in Jerusalem, also dismisses the genocide claim. He calls it "a dangerous distraction that will more likely lead to more civilian deaths in Gaza, Israel and far beyond".

This raises the question of why the claim won't die.

After all, genociders don't warn the enemy of their intentions. They don't reduce civilian casualties by dropping leaflets on civilian populations or through texts to civilians’ mobile phones. They don't make maps available online alerting civilians to active war zones and safe evacuation areas. Nor do they create humanitarian "pauses" and zones in fighting and abort missions midstream when they spot civilians clearly in their lines of fire.

All of which the IDF does routinely.

Such actions terminally undermine genocidal intent.

What genocide claims against Israel do make clear is the yawning chasm between cultures that revere life and those that worship death.

In his writings, US neuroscientist, philosopher and atheist Sam Harris notes the existence of people and cultures "who revel in war crimes and do not hide these crimes or their celebration of them". Conversely, there are people and cultures "who have given us the concept of a war crime as a sacred prohibition, a safeguard in the ongoing project of maintaining civilization's moral progress".

If the genocide claim against Israel were just a numbers game, it would be tempting to view the tally of global voices making it and growing tolls of civilian casualties in Gaza as proof positive of its merit.

But this is not just a number game. And while much criticism can rightly be levelled against Israel and its current government, committing genocide in Gaza – or anywhere else – is currently not one of them.

As the old saying goes: if 50 million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.

*Marika Sboros is a freelance journalist, editor and published author.