*I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”: Prof. Omer Bartov on the
Growing Consensus on Gaza*
*My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide
against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived
the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and
officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes
and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I
resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide
for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one*
A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there
was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and
potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But
contrary to the cries of Israel’s fiercest critics, the evidence did not
seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide.
By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million
Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining
relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of
the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded
to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August
.
At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of
I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal
intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a “huge
price
”
for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas
was operating, “into rubble
,” and he
called on
“the residents of Gaza” to “leave now because we will operate forcefully
everywhere.”
Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember “what Amalek did to you,
” a
quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage
calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women, infants and
sucklings” of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said
they were fighting “human animals”
and,
later, called for “total annihilation
.”
Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X
that Israel’s task must
be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israel’s actions
could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to
make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe
the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the
Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate
the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water,
sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for
Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
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My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide
against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived
the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and
officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes
and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I
resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide
for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide
studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza
can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese
,
the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty
International.
South
Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International
Court of Justice.
Image
[image: People inspecting a huge pile of rubble.]
Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
The continued denial of this designation by states, international
organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage
not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of
international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust,
designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a
threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.
***
The crime of genocide was defined
in 1948 by the
United Nations as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” In determining what
constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show
that it is being carried out. In Israel’s case, that intent has been
publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also
be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern
became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the
I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip.
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Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to
contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined
by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any
case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization
should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express
outrage than to identify a particular crime.
Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is
crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group
of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and
crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail
indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide
denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably
destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute
itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international
community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all
signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it
while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in
this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a
sovereign state.
The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications.
Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a
charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of
humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the
international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice
that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by
the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions.
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Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide
or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International
Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that
condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual
citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of
hatred and violence are put out.
***
Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity
and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although
it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or
protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to
its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe
the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian
populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for
using civilians as human shields.
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In fact, the systematic
destruction
in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government
buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage
sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a
policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory
highly unlikely.
According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated
174,000
buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent
of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people
have
been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including
more
than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality
count. More than 870 of
those children were less than a year old.
More than 2,000 families
have
been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families
now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed
to still be buried under the
ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed.
Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number
of
amputee children per capita
in
the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military
attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe
physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold
additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to
hospital care
.
The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most
observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has
not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that
planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though
the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control
over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army.
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Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and
ethnic cleansing. That’s how Mr. Netanyahu’s own former chief of staff and
minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described
on
Israel’s Democrat TV and in subsequent articles
and interviews
the
attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population.
Image
[image: A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home.]
Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters
On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from
resuming the presidency, a cease-fire went into effect, facilitating the
exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But after
Israel’s breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the I.D.F. has been
executing a well-publicized plan to concentrate
the
entire Gazan population in a quarter
of
the territory in three zones
:
Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the
Strip’s southwestern edge.
Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the
United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every
remaining structure and establish control over the other three-quarters
of
the territory.
This is also being facilitated by a plan
that provides —
intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded
by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed
in
a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens
. On July 7, Defense Minister
Israel Katz said
the
I.D.F. would build a “humanitarian city” over the ruins of Rafah to
initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would
be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave.
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***
Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But
there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go
and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another,
relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide.
This was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century, such
as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia,
that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the
Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended
up with their murder.
To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust
—
and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have
issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes,
crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has
made a mockery of the slogan “Never again,” transforming its meaning from
an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an
excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by
invoking one’s own past victimhood.
This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe.
As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and
is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank,
the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until
now is running out.
Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi
genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security
must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides
Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis —
a term used
repeatedly
by Israeli media figures to depict
Hamas
and, by extension, all
Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are “uninvolved,”
not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants.
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This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in
1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered
down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the
analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and
removing the entire population of Gaza.
The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is
shielded by its own media’s self-censorship, expose the lies of Israeli
propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi-like enemy. One
shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of
the I.D.F. being the “most moral army in the world.”
Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as
Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached
the cease-fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor
taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps
that
might deter Mr. Netanyahu’s government.
For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in
Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing
in
February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it
into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” and then letting Israel get on with
the Strip’s destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment,
one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr.
Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the
relentless killing.
***
How will Israel’s future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its
incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the
Holocaust?
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Israel’s political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There
seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of
paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other
than an Israeli-Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever
parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a
confederation. Robust external pressure from the country’s allies also
appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its
disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown
authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do
not last.
Another question arises: What consequences will Israel’s moral reversal
have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of
memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and
administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their
responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur?
Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance
built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The
wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of
comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have
marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over
describing events in Gaza as a genocide.
In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide
scholar Shmuel Lederman joined
the growing chorus of
opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian
international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year
and has recently described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as
“absolutely” a genocide.
Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O’Brien
,
president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the
British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was
genocidal),
have
reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses
of the City
University of New York described
these
events in the Dutch publication NRC as a “mix of genocidal and military
logic.” In the same article, Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the
Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies,
said there are probably scholars who still do not think it’s genocide, but
“I don’t know them.”
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Most Holocaust scholars I know don’t hold, or at least publicly express,
this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal
, program director
of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel
Blatman,
the
majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the
Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel’s
crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary
speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism.
In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined
that
“genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader
challenges to Israel’s legitimacy,” expressing his worry that “they have
cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself.” This “genocide libel,”
as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay
,
“deploys a range of antisemitic tropes,” including “the coupling of the
genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are
ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel
with genocide.”
In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by
U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic
act.
Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf,
wrote
in
The Washington Post that “the genocide accusation hurled against Israel
draws on deep wells of fear and hatred” found in “radical interpretations
of both Christianity and Islam.” It “has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a
religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as
inherently evil.”
***
What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and
Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The
memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses
much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role
in politics, education and identity.
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Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for
representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the
lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity,
antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human
rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of
the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western
civilization at the peak of modernity.
Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza as
antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the
ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of
genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign
interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and
prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally
scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity
as well.
By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching
and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel’s
genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that
Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several
decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of
law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of
people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national
interest and sheer vengeance.
Image
[image: People at a beach and in the water as the sun sets.]
Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no
longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in
the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so
relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up
for the crimes of the I.D.F., the study and remembrance of the Holocaust
could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat
into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World
War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized
people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later,
to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a
whole.
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Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole
will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the
crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the
breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and
authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these
scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the 20th century.
Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the
possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future
without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have
to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel
will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as
justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we
are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help
Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and
violent manner.
This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and
suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming
burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need
for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven
million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace,
equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning.
Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown
University.
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On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 11:27 AM Martin Wasserman
wrote:
> The bill introduced by anti-Israel legislators has no chance of passing.
> Nevertheless, US support for Israel cannot be taken for granted. It will
> continue only as long as the US feels that such support is in its own
> national interest. The truth is, the US gets a very good return from its
> investment in Israel. Despite the massive international campaign of
> slander, defamation and baseless accusations (genocide, apartheid, etc.)
> designed to undermine the Jewish state, the fact remains that Israel is
> Americas strongest and most reliable ally in the Middle East, and a
> powerful first line of defense against our common civilizational enemies.
>
> Martin Wasserman
>
>
> On Jul 17, 2025, at 9:28 PM, Aram James wrote:
>
> Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks
> to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli
> military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza,
> with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel’s
> genocide Iin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30
> billion in taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities,
> indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws.
>
> Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the
> Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are
> cosponsoring.
>
> This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of
> the worst-offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide
> against Palestinians in Gaza
>
> Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act!
>
> Jvpaction.org/tell-congress-support-the-block-the-bombs-act
>
> For local info: southbay@jewishvoiceforpeace.org
>
>
>
> Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks
> to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli
> military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza,
> with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel’s
> genocide Iin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30
> billion in taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities,
> indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws.
>
> Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the
> Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are
> cosponsoring.
>
> This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of
> the worst-offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide
> against Palestinians in Gaza
>
> Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act!
>
> Jvpaction.org/tell-congress-support-the-block-the-bombs-act
>
> For local info: southbay@jewishvoiceforpeace.org
>
>
>