In the late 1920s, a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin began developing the idea that international law ought to criminalize attempts to slaughter en masse members of a particular people. He formulated the term “genocide” in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, and his tireless postwar efforts led to the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. While Lemkin has been the subject of numerous biographies and studies—and was made into something of a hero by Washington’s former UN ambassador Samantha Power—these have uniformly failed to note Lemkin’s enthusiastic involvement in the Zionist movement, depicting him instead either as a cosmopolitan without national loyalties or as having been influenced by such non-Zionist Jewish movements as the Bund. Now James Loeffler explains how Lemkin’s Zionism contributed to his ideas about genocide—and how Lemkin himself participated in covering up this part of his past:

Because their political horizon extended beyond Europe into the global sphere, [many pre-World War II] Zionists turned to international law in search of a middle way that combined [advocating for Jewish rights in both] Palestine and Eastern Europe, nationalism and internationalism, Jewish particularity and cultural pluralism into a vision of international law. . . . [B]y recognizing the Jewish people as a rights-bearing collective, [these] Zionist internationalists argued, international law could help tie together the global Jewish Diaspora into a coherent, legally recognized nation. . . .

[But why] would the man who invented the concept of genocide [based on] his Jewish past deliberately hide the political sources of his legal imagination? The answer is that Lemkin well understood that Zionist advocacy for international law risked accusations of politicization. He had already encountered Polish anti-Semitism, with its ideological fixation on Zionism as an anti-Polish conspiracy. . . .

It was not only Jewish-Polish relations in Eastern Europe but also Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine that followed Lemkin into the UN. . . . Desperate for Arab and Muslim votes, Lemkin evidently feared the politicization that would come if he or his law were publicly identified with Zionism. The disavowal of his past politics formed part of a larger attempt to dodge charges of Jewish nationalist politics that might imperil his project. . . .

Yet there were limits to his distancing from his prewar Zionist career. He freely acknowledged his past to Jewish journalists writing in Hebrew and Yiddish at the time. They, in turn, continued to identify his legal project as both a Jewish self-defense campaign and a contribution to global justice. More strikingly, he apparently maintained a warm friendship with one of the most controversial Jewish political figures of the day. In New York, Lemkin fraternized with Peter Bergson, otherwise known as Hillel Kook, the controversial militant right-wing Zionist activist who had staged a number of dramatic public spectacles during World War II to try to galvanize American Jews and their government to intervene to stop the Holocaust.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.