Israeli-American Scholar: I Know a Genocide When I See One

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American genocide scholar, says he has reached the "painful conclusion" that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza—and the silence of most other Holocaust scholars "has made a mockery of the slogan 'Never again.'" Bartov says that more than a year ago, when the Israeli military ordered a million Palestinians to leave Rafah and proceeded to destroy much of the city, it became impossible to deny that the military's actions were "consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack."

• "My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people," Bartov writes in an op-ed at the New York Times. "Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF 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," he writes. "But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one." He notes that other experts in genocide and international law have reached the same conclusion.

• Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, says 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." He says the systematic destruction "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."
• "Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide," Bartov says of plans to concentrate Gaza's entire population in a few zones. "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."
• "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," he writes. "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."
• Bartov warns that "the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out." In the future, he says, Israel "will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity."

Click here for the full piece, and here for a rebuttal from the Times of Israel.