Last week, Zack Polanski stood in front of a crowd of several hundred British sixth-form students and declared to much applause, ‘End the genocide [in Gaza]… We have to stand up for the Palestinians.’ This was to be the defining message of the conference.

Later that day, Zarah Sultana, the Your Party MP for Coventry South, dedicated five of her fifteen minutes addressing the crowd to the plight of the Gazans under IDF occupation and the ‘genocide’ currently unfolding there. (You may recall her party: that is because its leader, the infamous antisemite Jeremy Corbyn, recently shared the centuries-old blood libel, albeit in new clothes, that the Israelis, by which he means the Jews, were harvesting organs from dead Palestinian Arab women’s bodies in Gaza.) This charge has become increasingly common in certain political circles since the outbreak of the war following Hamas’ October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

This word, we must understand, carries extraordinary legal and moral weight: under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide requires a specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets that threshold is disputed, and Israel rejects the accusation categorically. The proceedings brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice are ongoing.

During the Q&A following her speech, Sultana answered a question on the war in Iran. Let us take into account that, even by the most........

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