In the aftermath of World War II and the murder by Nazi Germany of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, the world united around a now-familiar pledge: Never again.
A key part of that lofty aspiration was the drafting of a convention that codified and committed nations to prevent and punish a new crime, sometimes called the crime of crimes: genocide.
The convention was drawn up in 1948, the year of Israel's creation as a Jewish state.
The reason the genocide convention exists “is related directly to what Nazi Third Reich attempted to do in eliminating a people, the Jewish people, not only of Germany, but of Eastern Europe, of Russia.