"Do Israel’s actions in Gaza—the bombing of hospitals, apartments, and entire towns; policies of forced starvation and orders for people to flee their homes—constitute genocide? Last week South Africa made that claim in the International Court of Justice. In response, Israel’s government spokesman Eylon Levy dismissed the genocide charge as a “blood libel”—historically, the false claim by European Christians that Jews used the blood of Christian babies to bake Matzoh, which resulted in mob violence against defenseless Jewish communities. (Incidentally, if you want to see how an actual blood libel functions, read about the response to what should, by all rights, have been a local story about tunnels discovered beneath Chabad’s headquarters in Brooklyn.) "