A Genocide Scholar on the Case Against Israel
“Israeli historian Omer Bartov, who served in the Israeli Defense Forces, argues that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. He defines genocide as the intent to destroy a group as a group, not just individual killings. Bartov believes Israel’s actions, including statements from political and military leaders, demonstrate this intent, and that the only thing preventing complete destruction of Gaza is the presence of Israeli hostages.
An Israeli historian answers his critics, and explains why his home country’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide.
Omer Bartov grew up in Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces. He went on to study the Holocaust and genocide as a historian. In this conversation, he tells the Opinion editor Daniel J. Wakin why he believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and what that means for the future of the Middle East and the next generation of Jews in Israel and the United States.
A Genocide Scholar on the Case Against Israel
An Israeli historian answers his critics, and explains why his home country’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide.Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Daniel J. Wakin: I’m Dan Wakin, an international editor for New York Times Opinion.
The historian Omer Bartov grew up in Israel in a Zionist home. He spent his career researching and writing about the Holocaust and genocide, and last week he published an essay in Times Opinion, describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as just that: a genocide.
We received a huge response to the piece — both positive and negative — because this issue is deeply fraught for many. So I wanted to talk to Bartov about what moved him to write this essay now, and to ask him to respond to some of the criticism we’ve received. And because Bartov is a historian, I wanted to know what using this word means for how we talk about the past and for the way we think about and study the Holocaust.
Omer, thanks for joining me today.
Omer Bartov: Thanks for having me, Dan.
Wakin: I think it’s important to start by saying that you reached this conclusion over time. In fact, about a month after Oct. 7, you published a Times Opinion essay that said, “as a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza.”
A lot has happened since you wrote that first essay. Can you please talk about the process of how you changed your mind?
Bartov: The point of that earlier op-ed was not simply to say that no genocide is happening. What I was trying to say in it was that I could see that there were war crimes being carried out by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and to warn that if this were not stopped, then what the I.D.F. was doing may deteriorate into genocide. So it was written as a warning, and I was, of course, hoping that somebody would pay attention, either in Israel or, more likely, in the United States.
So at the time, my view was this: If the Biden administration had told Netanyahu in November or December 2023, you have two weeks to wrap it up, and after that, you’re on your own, Israel would’ve stopped. And possibly, we wouldn’t be talking about a genocide in Gaza at all.
In the November op-ed, I cited various political and military leaders in Israel making statements that appeared to be genocidal. At the time, one could argue these were said in the heat of the moment, in response to the massacre of 800 Israeli civilians by Hamas. But it turned out that when you looked at the pattern of operations by the I.D.F., it was implementing precisely those statements: We need to flatten Gaza. There are no uninvolved people there. They’re human animals. They should get no water, no food. All of these statements had a genocidal tone, and they also served as incitement to the troops on the ground, coming directly from their own political and military leaders.
By May of 2024, I concluded that what the I.D.F. was involved in was not simply trying to destroy Hamas and to release the hostages, but instead was engaged in an operation that is ongoing to demolish Gaza altogether — to make the Gaza Strip into a completely uninhabitable territory to the extent not only that people would not be able to live there, not even on the ruins of their own homes, but also that they would never be able to reconstitute their identity as a group even if the fighting were to stop — and one hopes that it will finally stop.
Wakin: I think this is a good point to jump in and ask: How do you define a genocide?
Bartov: So genocide is a different type of crime to all others. And it was conceived and articulated by a Jewish Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who began thinking about this issue in the 1930s when he was considering what happened to the Armenians in World War I. He was trying to understand what it meant when you’re not simply massacring people as a regime, as an organization, but you’re trying to destroy the group as a group.
During World War II, Lemkin had to flee from Poland because he was Jewish. His family was murdered. He ended up in the United States. He published a book in 1944 in which there’s a chapter that defines genocide, and his definition, with all kind of changes, was eventually voted on by the United Nations in 1948 and came into force in 1951. That definition of genocide says that you’re killing people or making life impossible for people, or creating conditions that make their existence increasingly difficult, not as individuals, but as an ethnic, national or religious group. Your goal is to eradicate the group as a group.
So what you have to show if you want to indict a country or any individual for genocide is that they have the intent to do that and that they’re trying to implement that intent. So, of course, numbers matter. They have to be significant numbers. And I’ve seen responses saying, “If Israel killed a million Gazans, then it would be a genocide, but 50, 60, maybe 100,000 — not good enough.” It is good enough if the intent is to destroy the group as a group by violent means, destruction, deprivation of food and chances of life from children, from the next generation and destruction of all the cultural, educational and health institutions. That is clearly an indication of an intent to carry out genocide against that group. That is to eradicate it in whole, in part, as such.
Wakin: The same critics, I think, would also raise the idea that in World War II, the Nazis were killing Jews because they were Jewish, because of their Jewishness. And these critics would say, Israel is not inflicting casualties on Palestinian civilians because they are Palestinian, it’s because Israel is fighting an enemy embedded among the Palestinians: Hamas. That Palestinians may be dying even though Israel is trying to do everything it can to protect them. Is there a distinction there?
Bartov: No. If you really wanted to make an analogy with the Nazis, I would say that the distinction would be between a particular Nazi racial, biological, scientific, racist ideology, which was quite unique for a regime. And in Israel, although there are members of the cabinet who are Jewish supremacists, the Israeli government as such does not speak in those racial terms. However, what Israel is doing is fighting a war against Palestinians. And the goal of this government is to make it impossible for Palestinians to have any right of self-determination or any ability to resist oppression and occupation by the State of Israel.
Wakin: One of the objections raised to your piece was that you’re blaming Israel for carrying out genocide in Gaza, when all that has to happen to stop this situation is for Hamas, which started the war, to surrender and let the hostages go. They could end this there, and they could have ended it at any time. So it’s somehow false to accuse Israel of a genocide when its actions are the result of Hamas’s failure to surrender.
Bartov: Yeah, that unfortunately is merely an indication of the success of Israeli propaganda. If Hamas were to surrender, to hand over the hostages, what do you think Israel and the I.D.F. on the ground would do? They would just wrap up their tents and put their tanks in reverse and leave Gaza? No. The only thing that is preventing the I.D.F. from completely demolishing Gaza, whatever is left of it, from taking over everything, is the presence of Israeli hostages there.
So the only limit on movements by the I.D.F. to completely destroy Gaza is the fact that there’s still hostages there. And Netanyahu himself has said that; his goal is absolute victory. Of course, it’s not really defined what he means by absolute victory, but it means complete control over the Gaza Strip.
Wakin: And finally, critics of the piece have pointed out that in World War II, hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians were killed — the atomic bombings in Japan, the fire bombing of Dresden. Why was that not considered a genocide, and why is this case considered a genocide?
Bartov: That’s a question that’s often asked in World War II. Especially British and American bombers killed and firebombed in Germany alone about 600,000 civilians intentionally. Now, you could have said that was a war crime, why is it not genocide? Well, think about what happened when the Americans occupied Germany. Did they kill all the Germans? Did they say that Germany’s going to never exist again? Did they flatten Germany? No. They decided on the Marshall Plan. Now, they had reasons for that because they were worried, of course, about communist influence. So they wanted to make Germany a viable society. And the German economic miracle was in large part because it began with a Marshall Plan.
And even with Japan — once America came to occupy Japan, it didn’t destroy Japan. Complaints were by the winners that the losers were doing so well economically that they lost the war, but won in the economic competition. Now, had Israel said: Look, we are fighting Hamas. We’re not fighting Palestinians. We’re not fighting the Palestinian people. We are on your side. Inhabitants, help us destroy Hamas and we will help you build a new society together with us. You won’t find such statements in Israel.
Wakin: So let’s move away from the politics and the issue of morality and talk a bit about you personally. You served in the I.D.F. in the 1970s as a young man. You were on patrol in Gaza. And you’ve written that your military service there made you understand what it meant to occupy other people. Did you think about your experiences in Gaza as you wrote this essay? And, if so, how did you think about them?
Bartov: Yes. Look, I was a young officer at the time. My battalion headquarters was in the city of Gaza. It was highly congested. There had been a lot of violence there. People were living in derelict quarters — it was not a great place. I served also in the West Bank as a soldier, and you have to understand, I was raised in Israel, I was raised in a Zionist home. I wanted to be a combat soldier. I was your usual Israeli male.
And it began dawning on me that when you occupy people, there is something about that situation — how would I say it? It was not a profound sort of intellectual consideration. It was a sensation of being an occupier, of being unwanted by the population and asking yourself, Why am I here? There was a sense of mutual threat. When you patrol in a city and you are walking 30 men with guns in a city, you are obviously there to threaten people. That’s what you’re doing. But you see them behind their windows, and there are many of them, and you don’t know who they are and what they might do to you. You feel constantly threatened. That’s a situation of occupation that creates this kind of mutual dehumanization. And for me, this was the beginning. It was a process of several years of realizing what occupation does.
More than 50 years later, I think occupation corrupts and it corrupts completely and it seeps into society. The society that I was a member of in the early 1970s and Israeli society today are completely different. The army is completely different, and much of that is a result of precisely that occupation, of the dehumanizing aspect of occupation.
I always think about sitting in a nice cafe in Tel Aviv, having a coffee or a drink with a young man, and they’re nice people. They’re friendly, they’re open, they have a sense of humor, they look great. They’re like anybody else that you would meet in New York or London or Berlin. But the day before, they were in uniform. And what were they doing? They were controlling the occupation. And how do you do that? You show that you are the boss. And how do you do that? You break into people’s homes at 4 in the morning. You drag old people out of their beds. You break children’s toys. That’s how you enforce an occupation.
What does it do to you? What does it do to your society? And that’s without talking about the effect that Gaza will have on a whole generation of young Israelis who have been fighting there and destroying that place.
Wakin: Is that kind of dehumanization a prerequisite to genocidal action?
Bartov: Yes, it is. One of the signs of genocide is that you start talking about a particular group as not human — as different, and somehow not deserving the same rights or not having the same qualities. You can say: They’re all thieves, they’re all rapists. Or you can say they’re cockroaches. You can say they’re human animals. All this terminology is a prerequisite. It doesn’t mean that necessarily genocide will ensue, but you have to think of the other group as not having rights and not having rights to have rights. And that is something that developed in Israel over time. That for most Israelis — and I’m not talking about the right wing — for most Israelis, the idea that Palestinians should have the same rights as us and the same dignity and the same equality, doesn’t at all rise to people’s consciousness.
People got used to the occupation. That’s one reason I would say why they were so appalled by Oct. 7, because suddenly those people broke out of their cage and attacked us. And we were used to them being on the other side of the fence and being patrolled by our troops, who then the next day could sit with us in a cafe and be completely normal people.
Wakin: You’ve spent your career studying the Holocaust, and many Jews around the world believe that education about the Holocaust is paramount, encapsulated by the slogan “never again.” What do you think that Israel’s conduct in Gaza now will mean for the future of how we think about “never again” and how we think about the Holocaust?
Bartov: So I spent the early part of my career actually studying the crimes of the German Army on the Eastern Front and the brutalization of soldiers, which for obvious reasons I was interested in. Then I started increasingly studying genocide and the Holocaust. And actually, I wrote about what I thought about the notion of the lessons of the Holocaust, and I was always a bit skeptical about that, in the sense that I was always worried about the idea that the lesson of the Holocaust is that what we need is more tolerance, more humanity. If we teach the Holocaust, then we will understand that. And I was never sure why, when you teach brutality, dehumanization, that that should somehow make you more humane. Make you understand that we are all the same as human beings.
So I was always a little wary about that. That was very much the American interpretation of the Holocaust as it grew because it was not always there. It took a long time. It really came in the 1980s and ’90s. In Israel, of course, the understanding of the Holocaust was always completely different. The understanding of the Holocaust was that the Holocaust meant that the Jews should stick to themselves, and if anyone threatens them, they should eradicate them.
I think, again, on two levels, in the case of Israel, what Gaza has done, it will become increasingly difficult for Israel to be able to argue that because of the Holocaust, because of what was done to the Jews, it can do whatever it takes, and it does not have to pay attention to international law or criticism by other states because it is fighting for its bare existence. See what happened to us in Auschwitz. That because Israel was engaged in such extraordinary destruction of human lives, such callous treatment of other people, it won’t be able to draw on that moral capital anymore.
In terms of the whole culture of memory, commemoration, teaching, pedagogy that use the Holocaust with very good intentions to teach tolerance and humanity — that is becoming increasingly difficult now because those institutions and many of the individuals in those institutions who were charged or appointed themselves to disseminate that culture of commemoration, of memory with the humanistic message of “never again” — never again what? Never again in humanity. Never again genocide. Never again indifference to human lives. They have been silent over what is happening in Gaza. They have not spoken out now for two years. And that, I think, has greatly diminished their authority. And I’m afraid the result of that may be that this culture of commemorating the Holocaust may recede back to where it began, which is a kind of ethnic enclave of Jews talking about their suffering with other Jews.
Wakin: I don’t know how to put this. It’s hard to say can anything good come of this. As a historian, maybe 50 years from now — casting yourself in the future, if you look back could you see some kind of positive or some sort of cathartic effect of what is happening? Is that at all possible? Can you even speak of this in those terms?
Bartov: Yes, of course you can, because we’ve seen this happen with other countries, countries that had violent regimes that were engaged in a great deal of violence. And at some point, whether you talk about Germany or South Africa, these countries have shook themselves free of it and rebuilt themselves as completely different societies. But in order to do that, it doesn’t happen simply because people changed their minds. In Germany it happened because Germany was defeated in World War II. In South Africa, it happened because South Africa was under a huge sanctions regime and just could no longer maintain apartheid.
So I think that it can happen, but I have to say that right now, Israel has enjoyed such incredible impunity in the international community — and especially in that community that matters to it, which is the United States and Western Europe, who are its main supporters — that I’m afraid the more likely prediction for now is that Israel will become increasingly authoritarian and may end up being a full-blown apartheid authoritarian state. And such states don’t last very long.
So, yes, after that there may be a reckoning. If that reckoning comes, it would have to come with a process of truth and reconciliation because Israel will not be able to shake itself free just by erasing what happened — the memory of what it did in Gaza. It will have to confront that. It will have to go back all the way to 1948, and it will have to begin a process of truth and reconciliation that could lead to some kind of settlement between the Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants of that land. But right now it’s heading in the opposite direction.
Wakin: The implications for Israel in the immediate future, particularly when it comes to American support, there’s a big growing divide in this country. A generational divide over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Younger Jews are much more likely than their parents to see Israel as a committer of crimes, as an occupying force. What will that mean for the future of American support for Israel, and what does that mean for Israel’s future?
Bartov: So it took a long time for Israel to build up the kind of support — in many ways, love — for Israel that exists in the United States. In Europe, things are a bit different because there’s also a sense of guilt about the Holocaust, but also a kind of admiration for Israel. It took many, many years to build that — decades — and that is now being eroded. And I can’t say that I’m happy about that.
If Israel loses support and it becomes increasingly violent, erodes any of what is left there of liberal democracy — as is happening right now — then this will not bode well for the state of Israel itself. And, unfortunately, it will also have, I would say, a harmful effect on Jewish communities around the world because Israel presents itself as the representative of the Jews around the world. And so it makes them responsible, willy-nilly, for its own actions. And so that process will not only erode support for Israel, but I’m afraid it can also give license to more prejudice against Jews wherever they are.
Wakin: You’re hinting at this slightly in your last response, but I’m just curious, how do you feel about Israel inside yourself, emotionally? What is your feeling now as a human being, as an individual — not as a scholar about this but as the country of your birth and your origin?
Bartov: Look, I mean, it’s actually heartbreaking. I grew up there. My best friends are there. I have family there. And there are many things I love, and certainly loved, about that country. To see it change so dramatically, both through a long-term process and then in this kind of accelerated, on-steroids transformation since Oct. 7, is heartbreaking.
What I can say is that I’m a big supporter of the state of Israel. I’m an Israeli citizen. I believe the Jewish people, like every other people, have the right to self-determine. I’m not against Zionism at all. I think Zionism was a movement that called for the emancipation and liberation of Jews, for human rights. But the kind of Zionism that exists in Israel now, the kind of state it has become, I can’t support it.
Wakin: Omer, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation. I really appreciate it.
Bartov: Thanks very much, Dan.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Daniel J. Wakin has been a reporter and editor at The Times for more than two decades. He is the author of “The Man With the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a New York City Block.” @danwakin”
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