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History As It Happens
Is It Genocide?
00:53:57
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for individual Israeli and Hamas leaders, charging them with crimes against humanity. The accusations against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant...
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- [00:01]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens. December 3, 2024. Is it genocide? Fury in Israel after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Prime.
- [00:11]
Omer Bartov
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former defense called to trial by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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Karim Khan
Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, willfully causing great suffering, serious injury to body or health or cruel treatment.
- [00:29]
Benjamin Netanyahu
We issue millions of text messages, phone call leaflets to the citizens of Gaza to get them out of harm's way, while the Hamas terrorists do everything in their power to keep them in harm's way.
- [00:41]
Martin DeCaro
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Hamas military chief and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief. The charges concern crimes against humanity. Israel's critics say this is genocide, a deliberate effort to make Gaza uninhabitable while starving Palestinians. Genocide, the crime of crimes. Is it happening in Gaza? That's next as we report History as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
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Karim Khan
This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin, was what one senior leader told me, according the Hague.
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Benjamin Netanyahu
Accuses us of a deliberate policy of starvation. This one. We've supplied Gaza with 700,000 tons of food.
- [01:24]
Omer Bartov
And Clausewitz himself at the time warned there is another kind of war. He called it absolute war. It's a war when there is no longer a goal. The war is its own thing. You are just in a kind of struggle, in an eternal struggle without any particular goal. You never know whether you win or you lose. In Israel today, most of the discussion is about everything but politics. It's all about war.
- [02:00]
Martin DeCaro
Success was achieved by Israel's tough, well disciplined troops, led in person by General Moshe Dayan, the CNC, who lost his eye fighting. On October 29, 1956, Israel, backed by Great Britain and France, attacked Egypt. The Suez crisis, many of whom were captured and taken off to prison camps. The Israeli forces routed the Egyptians, capturing virtually the entire Sinai Peninsula in less than a week.
- [02:26]
Moshe Dayan
Led by General Marshad Day, the Israelis strike, they say, to end once and for all bloody border raids by Egyptian suicide commando.
- [02:34]
Martin DeCaro
In April of that year, Israeli war hero Moishe Dayan, the IDF chief of staff, had given a speech, and it concerned one of the reasons why Israel would go to war. Several months later. Attacks by Palestinian guerrillas, or Fedayeen, from territory controlled by Egypt, including Gaza, 30,000 Egyptians. Diane spoke at the funeral for an Israeli Jew murdered in an ambush by Fedayeen. He said, let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza's refugee camps as before their eyes, we have transformed the land and villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property. Diane's remarks appear in a searching, sobering essay by historian Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, and I'll share a link to the essay in my weekly newsletter. You can sign up at History as it Happen Bartov was born in Israel and fought for the IDF in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He visited his native land this summer and came away disturbed by the dehumanizing views held by Israelis toward Palestinians driven by the Hamas atrocities the Hamas crimes against humanity perpetrated on October 7th. But the brown University scholar is also making a historical connection. The notion that Palestinians are not people to coexist with, but rather an enemy to be defeated is not new. It goes back to 1948, if not earlier. And of course, many Palestinians see Israelis in the same hostile manner. Dateline the Hague, November 21, 2024 the Associated Press reports the world's top war crimes court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military chief, who is believed to be dead, accusing them of crimes against humanity. The warrant said there was reason to believe Netanyahu and Gallant have used starvation as a method of warfare by restricting humanitarian aid and that they intentionally targeted civilians in Israel's campaign against Hamas in Gaza, charges Israeli officials deny. Here is the chief ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan.
- [04:50]
Karim Khan
Israel, like all states, has the right to defend its population. It has every right to ensure the return of hostages that have been criminally and callously taken. Those rights, however, do not absolve Israel of its obligations to comply with international humanitarian law.
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Martin DeCaro
And here is Netanyahu.
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Benjamin Netanyahu
The antisemitic decision of the International Court in the Hague is a modern Dreyfus trial, and it will end the same way. 130 years ago, the French Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason by a biased French court. In response to these false accusations, the great French writer Emile Zola wrote his monumental essay j'accuse. He accused the French court of anti Semitic lies against an innocent officer who was later exonerated of all guilt.
- [05:45]
Martin DeCaro
A word that does not appear in the ICC's charges. Is genocide a crime synonymous with the Nazi extermination of Jews during the Second World War? Since the UN Convention on Genocide was codified in 1948, prosecutions and convictions have been rare. There were UN tribunals dealing with the civil wars in Yugoslavia and rwanda in the 1990s. They took decades to proceed. Genocide was proven in both cases, but these were ad hoc international criminal tribunals. Since the ICC began operating about 20 years ago, it's indicted more than 50 individuals, mostly from African countries. 21 have been detained in the Hague. 10 have been convicted of crimes. 4 have been acquitted. These cases usually did not involve genocide charges, but rather war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. So is genocide happening in Gaza? Is Israel a nation founded by people fleeing murderous antisemitism in Europe, committing the crime of crimes against Palestinians? Omer Bartov, welcome back to the podcast.
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Omer Bartov
Thanks for having me.
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Martin DeCaro
It's an honor to have you here to discuss the important work you're doing on this subject and your searching, sobering essay in the Guardian. We'll get to that in a moment. But first I'd like to ask you about your general thoughts on the ICC arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu and the dismissed Minister of Defense. Novgont, what did you think of these charges? They seem to focus more on the denial of food rather than, say, the indiscriminate bombing of entire neighborhoods.
- [07:22]
Omer Bartov
Right. We were waiting for this decision since May, which is when the prosecutor actually requested these arrest warrants, and it's not entirely clear why we waited so long. I suspect there was all kind of politics behind it. I would say first of all, that the ICC took a pretty big risk in issuing these arrest warrants, knowing now that there's going to be a new American administration, that generally American administrations have been opposed to the icc, although not consistently. They were quite happy with the ICC taking out arrest warrants against Putin, but not against their own allies and against Israel, which is the first time the leader of a democratic, liberal country, at least the way it presents itself associated and allied with Europe and the United States, is issued an arrest Warrant from the ICC. The ICC has issued, I think, 10 altogether, and all of them were for other types of leaders, not from Western countries, democratic industrial countries. So it was a risk that they took. They probably were facing a risk also not to issue them because their reputation would have become increasingly discredited, especially in the rest of the world. Now, as for the arrest warrants itself, I think that they followed more or less the logic of the prosecutor. The prosecutor charged Gallant and Netanyahu with what could most easily be proven, that is that there's a pretty good trail to show the IDF has deprived Palestinians and has spoken about doing that of food and medicine. And that has caused tremendous hardship as well as death as well as torture to large numbers of Palestinians. Instead of delving into issues that could be somewhat more controversial, I think that they went for the most easy to prove, and it is a very serious indictment because they're indicted of both war crimes and crimes against humanity. And within crimes against humanity, they're indicted for persecution and for murder.
- [09:53]
Karim Khan
My office submits that these individuals, through a common plan, have systematically deprived the civilian population of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival. We have reached that conclusion based upon interviews with survivors, many eyewitnesses, experts from satellite imagery, statements from Israeli officials, including the two individuals subject to the present application.
- [10:26]
Omer Bartov
What the court did not charge them of is extermination because they looked only at two cases in which there was, in their view, sufficient proof or those they looked at for not just indiscriminate killing of civilians, but deliberate killing of civilians. And it's interesting to say that the one Hamas leader was actually probably dead, or almost certainly dead, but Hamas is not admitted that he said Mohammed was charged also with extermination because of the large numbers of civilians that Hamas killed on October 7th.
- [11:03]
Martin DeCaro
You're right. I said indiscriminate bombing in the lead in to my question. It was, as the language says here, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population of Gaza. In this regard, the chamber of the ICC found that the material provided by the prosecution only allowed it to make findings on two incidents, as you said, that qualified as attacks that were intentionally directed against civilians. But the term genocide does not appear here. Is that a problem in your view?
- [11:38]
Omer Bartov
There's a question here. First of all, generally speaking, they could have charged anyone individuals of genocide. But this is being deliberated right now by the ICJ in terms of the State of Israel. The icj, the International Court of Justice, deals with states, whereas the icc, the International Criminal Court, deals with individuals. That's correct. And genocide is a very difficult crime to prove. And I think that had they chosen that, they would have been under much greater criticism in order to show a direct line from orders, expressions of intent for genocides to implementation of genocide. In the case of these two individuals, I think that it is possible to prove that. And I've stated this much, but I think it's a higher bar and they chose not to go there at that point. But I would add the fact that they issued these arrest warrants now may be Useful for the ICJ in deliberating the case of genocide for the state of Israel?
- [12:47]
Martin DeCaro
Yes. The ICJ is dealing with two cases, one brought by South Africa against Israel and another brought by a different state against Germany for allegedly assisting Israel in the alleged genocide of Palestinians by providing Israel with weapons such as anti tank missiles. Hamas does not have tanks, so the argument goes, why would Germany give Israel anti tank missiles? And the answer to that question, according to people making this charge, is Israel uses them to fire them into buildings and incinerate everybody who is in there. When it comes to genocide, however, Omer, you were getting to it there in your answer. There is a gap between what people believe should be genocide and this very narrow legal definition. And that gap is putting pressure on institutions like the ICC to widen the definition of genocide. Do you agree with that?
- [13:43]
Omer Bartov
Just let me say one thing about anti tank missiles, because it is true in the case of Germany, but of course now, for since October, Hezbollah has been using anti tank missiles against Israeli settlements across the border. So anti tank missiles can be used, of course, not only against tanks, they can be used against structures and they are very deadly. And they're more difficult to stop, to defend against because of their trajectory rather than rockets, you know, that fly high enough for you to be able to intercept them. So that's just a technical issue. The Germans provide Israel mostly, most importantly with their navy. The Israeli navy is largely built in Germany and the navy has been used also in the war against Gaza to a large extent, actually. Now, on the definition of genocide, look, I mean, I find this argument a bit beside the point. It was very, very difficult to have a UN Convention on genocide. It took a long time, much deliberation, many compromises, and it was reached in 1948 largely because of the impact of Nazi crimes, not least the genocide of the Jews. And so that's the definition that we have now. And it's not a bad definition. We can tinker with it, of course, it can certainly be interpreted in various ways, but I don't see it being changed. And I think it's better to have it than not to have it. Now, as scholars or as political scientists or as politicians, people can propose all kinds of other understandings of genocide. But under international law, the only definition that matters is the one of the UN Convention. And I would stick with that one. It is good enough, as I've written already, in order to find now Israel guilty of genocide. Whether the ICJ will reach that conclusion is a different question. But I think there's sufficient Evidence to show that Israeli leaders had shown intent, had implemented that intent, and have systematically used policies and used military actions to implement the genocide or campaign in Gaza.
- [16:06]
Martin DeCaro
Israeli leaders have spoken openly about destroying all of Gaza. The UN definition of genocide, according to the Convention, means means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, meaning you are killing them because of who they are killing. Members of the group causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. But Lemkin's vision was broader than this. For instance, he thought cultural destruction counted as genocide and the widespread leveling of neighborhoods and hospitals and schools and museums, etc. Etc. But in your view, this definition is adequate right now, even though there have been so few genocide cases brought in, genocide convictions achieved.
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Omer Bartov
So, first of all, of the five sections that you read, the first four apply. Only the last one does not, but all the others apply to what Israel has done. Even if you include and implied in that, certainly in the fourth one, implied in that is also cultural genocide. Because transferring children or killing children means that you are destroying the future generations of a particular group. But if you look at Israeli actions and you look back and that's what I started doing as of May, more or less trying to see the logic of what was happening on the ground. The IDF has systematically not only killed large numbers of people intentionally or with total indifference, but has also systematically destroyed universities, schools, mosques, museums, other places of collective memory, public buildings, as well as housing infrastructure, water plants. It has made, first of all, Gaza uninhabitable. So the group which, according to the definition, that there would be an intent to destroy in whole or in part, has been destroyed to the extent that it cannot return to the places where it lived, but also all the institutions that make for a population to keep its culture, its identity, its education, its health, or the hospitals that have been destroyed. All of this means that there is an intention to destroy the group as a group. It's not the numbers of people you kill. Obviously you are talking about significant numbers, but it's not the numbers as such. It is that you are killing people as members of a group so as to make it impossible for that group to survive. And that is precisely what is happening. And I'll add one thing, that since early October, this October, so A year after the war began, the IDF has been involved in an operation in northern Gaza, the northern third of Gaza, north of the so called Netzarim Corridor, which is no longer a Corridor, it's about 5 miles wide by now, intended to empty it entirely of its population and to destroy everything there is there, all the structures there. And there are now aerial photographs that show the extent of destruction happening there. And the vast majority of the population has been removed from there. And there's no intent whatsoever to let the population return there. And that appears to be only phase one of the gradual takeover and destruction of the entire Strip.
- [19:54]
Martin DeCaro
And there's now talk of settling Israeli settlers moving into northern Gaza.
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Omer Bartov
The settlers are waiting right there across the fence. There is open talk about that in Israel. If they move in, there's nobody to stop them. The army won't stop them, the government won't stop them, the United States will not stop them. And once they're there, they're there to stay.
- [20:15]
Martin DeCaro
And you refer to historic settlement of Palestinian lands by Israelis in your Guardian essay and the problems that has caused. I do want to get to that essay, but just a couple of more questions about the current situation. The definition of genocide, you said before that the current definition or the current convention, I should say, is adequate to charge leaders of Israel. You know, Dirk Moses, a fine scholar of genocide, has said the problem with the current definition or convention is that if something doesn't reach that level, which it rarely does in the legal realm. I mentioned before how few convictions there have been since the ICC has started operating. And even before that, the Serbian war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the ICJ's ruling in that case was very narrow, dealt with one massacre that was considered genocidal amid all of the killing in which 100,000 people died. Dirk Moses says when people hear that it's not genocide and it's just, quote, unquote, just crimes against humanity or something else, it doesn't move them like it should. Do you agree with him?
- [21:20]
Omer Bartov
I partly agree. It is true that once the term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin and it came to be thought as the crime of crimes, that is the destruction of entire groups, that it appeared that the other crimes were not so bad. So if it's not genocide, then it's fine. It's only crimes against humanity. At the same time, there were two competing definitions. One was genocide by Raphael Lemkin, and the other was by Herr Schlauterbacht, which was crimes against humanity. Crimes against humanity does not necessitate identifying the intention to destroy a group, but it's simply destruction of large numbers of human beings. And it doesn't have to happen in war. It could happen at any time. You know, these two definitions exist. There is no reason to think that crimes against humanity is any better or worse than genocide. They're just two different ways of destroying large numbers of people. And their intentions can be somewhat different. So there is a problem with the fact that genocide is seen in people's eyes. When they see something terrible, they say it must be genocide. And if you say, no, it isn't, then they say it's not so terrible. But I think that the advantage of having that definition is at least as important, because there are many instances, as you indicated, where the intent is not simply to kill a lot of people. The intent is to destroy a particular group. And Raphael Lemkin was quite obsessed with them, really, because he was thinking initially about the Armenian genocide, the idea that you destroy a group and all its culture and everything that it stood for, and you destroy the group, you destroy its memory, you destroy its culture, you erase it entirely. And that is a crime as such that has to be recognized. And to my mind, it's important to keep that separately, but to stress that crimes against humanity and war crimes are not something that is not as bad. They're simply different kinds of crimes.
- [23:31]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I agree 100%. I'm not sure where that idea is coming from. So you visited Israel earlier this year, the land of your birth. You say in this essay that you served in the IDF, the 1973 war, and that you have a deep connection to the Jewish state. But that connection is fraying or is being unsettled by what you experienced during this trip, the attitudes of ordinary Israelis and also IDF veterans who have served in Gaza. And you draw a historical connection between present day attitudes of Israelis toward Palestinians to the way Israelis felt in the first years of Israel's independence. And you point to a speech delivered by Moshe Dayan. He was the chief of the IDF in 1956, had a funeral for an Israeli who had been murdered by Palestinians in Gaza. Talk about the significance of this 1956 eulogy, the way it's being used by people on both sides of the conflict today, and what it has to do with the attitudes you discovered on your trip to Israel.
- [24:36]
Omer Bartov
Right. So most Israelis, at least more or less educated Israelis, know of this famous speech made by moshe Dayan in 1956. As chief of Staff at the time, he was already an important officer in the war. Of 1948, and was already quite a legendary figure at the time. He happened to have been visiting at Kibbutz that day for another event. And he met one of the young men there who was a security officer there. And the next morning, that security officer went to check out what was going on and was ambushed and killed by Fadain, by Palestinian resistance fighters who then dragged his body into Gaza and mutilated it. And his speech is a very interesting speech, Moshe Dayan's, because what he says in the speech, he says, and you have to remember, Moshe Dayan knew that area before 1948, and that area before 1948 had scores of villages and towns that were Palestinian. And by 1956, all those villages are gone. The towns have been taken over by Jews, The Arabs are gone from them, and the Palestinians who live there are now living in the Gaza Strip as refugees. And this is only a few years later, right? That happened in 48, and this is 56. And he says, I understand those multitudes of Palestinians who are looking across the fence at us, cultivating their own land. And because I understand their rage at us having taken over, we have to remember that we are the generation that must keep fighting, that must always keep a sword in our hands. If the. If the sword falls from our hand, that will be our end. So what is interesting in the speech is that he actually expresses an understanding for the fact that the people living across the fence had been robbed of their land because of the need that he perceives as an important need. He talks, we came from the Diaspora, where we ourselves were persecuted, that the Jews took over their land. He justifies the Jews for taking over the land because of their own faith. But he understands he has a particular kind of empathy for those people who are looking. They can see their own lands being cultivated by others. Now, there's a strange twist there because he made the speech which he wrote, hand wrote, just before the funeral, and then he recorded it for Israeli radio. And that passage of expression, of understanding for the Palestinian refugees was taken out by him. So we have two versions of that speech, one which says, we see these teeming multitudes that are sworn to kill us. And one says that, but says, but we understand why. And so that speech has been understood differently by those who say, well, we have to resolve this issue. We have to find a way. We can't give back everything we took, but we have to resolve this issue. We began the state with an injustice, and that injustice is somehow to be addressed. And others who say, there are all These Arabs around us, and we just have to live on our swords forever because they will always want to destroy us, and there's nothing we can do about it. That's the tragedy of it. Now, Dayan himself, as I write, eventually chose a different path. Dayan was instrumental in the peace between Israel and Egypt in which Israel gave back the Sinai Peninsula that he took over in 1967, which in 72, Dayan said, better to keep the Sinai than to have peace. After the war, he changed his mind, partly because thousands of my own people who were then soldiers with me died. And he said, no, we can give it back in return for peace. So that kind of balance is still there, but it's tilted increasingly in the direction of never thinking of the faith of the Palestinians. And that is what I encountered when I was now in Israel. The inability of the Israeli public, including people who identified with the liberal part of society, to sympathize, to empathize, to understand why Palestinians have so much rage against Israel.
- [29:21]
Martin DeCaro
Inured to the suffering of Palestinians, it seems.
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Omer Bartov
Inured. And there are two. I'd say there are two layers to this. One is the immediate one, and that's October 7th. October 7th was a ghastly massacre of 900 civilians by Hamas fighters and others, killing children, old people, cases of rape and so forth, and kidnapping, taking hostage, 250 people. And that, of course, makes it very difficult for Israelis to this day, think in any other way but of Palestinians as murderers. But there's a much deeper layer to this. It didn't start on October 7th. And the deeper layer is that Israel's been occupying millions of Palestinians for most of its existence, and that has created this sort of process of dehumanization of Palestinians. People don't think of them as having any right to have rights. They think of them as an occupied population, very much in the way that any colonial power thinks of the people it colonizes. You dehumanize them and thereby you dehumanize yourself.
- [30:32]
Martin DeCaro
Colonialism, torture, whatever it might be, it brutalizes the victim and the perpetrator. This is what Diane said in that speech. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years, they have been dwelling in Gaza's refugee camps as before their eyes. We have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property. You know what's interesting here is Diane, even going back earlier, Yabotinsky, David Ben Gurion, they all recognized this problem, that there would not be a sustainable peace as Long as this issue was unresolved. Yet as you say, at the same time, they say, well, this is why we can't ever let go of the sword, as you say in your essay, you say the sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. And this is maybe the most provocative sentence of your entire essay. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self annihilation. Self annihilation? What do you mean?
- [31:40]
Omer Bartov
There are two kinds of wars, really. That's already what Clausewitz taught us, you know, in the 1840s whenever he wrote his own war. One is a war that is the extension of politics by other means. So you have a war goal. You go to fight war whether it's legitimate or not, to capture a certain territory or to destroy a particular group. And once you've done that, you stop, you have accomplished your political goal. And Clausewitz himself at the time warned there is another kind of war. He called it absolute war. It's a war when there is no longer a goal. The war is its own thing. You are just in a kind of struggle, in an eternal struggle without any particular goal. You never know whether you win or you lose. You are caught up in a nihilistic undertaking that is its own goal. In Israel today, particularly today, and I find it striking because I follow the Israeli media more closely than is good for me. Israel now, most of the discussion is about everything but politics. It's all about war. Should we strike there? Will they strike here? Will we get these weapons? How many people have we killed? How many have died on our side? There is no ability anymore to think, how do we resolve this conflict, which, by the way, in Gaza, people don't speak enough about it. In Gaza, there is no war anymore. The war in Gaza is over. There are scattered guerrilla forces coming out of the tunnels every once in a while. But Hamas as a fighting organization actually doesn't exist anymore. What the Israeli army is doing there is not a war. What the Israeli army is doing there is destroying the place meter by meter. And so in that sense, it's not about resolving anything. It's not about accomplishing any political goal. It's simply about destruction. And that is a nihilistic view of life and of politics. And it cannot end but by self destruction. And we've seen that with other regimes in the past. This is my fear, that there's no voices in Israel today able to think about what is the political horizon of this, what do we ultimately want to accomplish?
- [34:07]
Martin DeCaro
And you found those attitudes among young people who had served in Gaza, in the idf. They confronted you, not violently, but they confronted you at an event where you were supposed to speak, basically saying, hey, you're here. You're criticizing what we've done. We haven't been committing war crimes. Hamas hides among the population, and everything we've done has been justified. Is that basically what they told you?
- [34:29]
Omer Bartov
Yes. I mean, they were not physically violent to me, but they were very loud and banging on walls and so forth. They said, we are not murderers. Now, because at the time I hadn't yet come out saying that I thought what Israel was carrying out was genocide. I was on the way to reaching that conclusion. But for them, since I used the G word, it meant that I already meant it. And they were saying, we are not murderers. You know, to me, it's interesting to hear that, because of course, many soldiers, very few soldiers would ever want to say that they are murderers. Right? Soldiers do what they do because they're ordered to do it. And they have to believe that they're doing something that is just, that is legal, that is needed by the state. And so they were saying, we are not murderers. But when you spoke with them, they were saying two contradictory things. On the one hand, they were saying, we have to fight these people. Look what they did to us. Look how they attacked us. Many of these soldiers were. Their students, were reserve soldiers. They come from the areas that had been attacked by Hamas. Right? They were from a university in the south, and they come from communities close, bordering the Gaza Strip. And they were saying, look what they did to us. There's nothing we can do about it but destroy them. We have to wipe them out. And at the same time, they were saying, but we are not being barbarians. We care about the people there. It's not true that the children there are hungry. Look, we have photos on our phones how we are feeding children there, meaning, of course, that the children were hungry, but we don't want to destroy anything. And at the same time, we have to. So they were in a kind of state of rage, vengeance and denial. And they were right there. Unlike me, I was on the other side. I had not been to Gaza. They were there, they saw the destruction, they were participating in it. And they were denying the fact that what they were doing was anything but the more just thing to do.
- [36:34]
Martin DeCaro
What you're saying here reminds me that analogies between Israel post October 7th and the United States after 9, 11 can only go so far because while many Americans were angry and wanted revenge, myself included, all those years ago against the people who took down the Twin Towers, Americans didn't know anything about Afghanistan, were mostly ignorant of Al Qaeda, maybe had heard of Osama bin Laden's name before because he had been involved in other terrorist attacks. But the relationship between Jews and Arabs in this tiny sliver of land is so much different than the distant relationship between the United States and Afghanistan.
- [37:12]
Omer Bartov
It's a very intimate relationship. And intimate relationships, as we've seen in other genocides, of course. I mean, you mentioned Bosnia, Rwanda. That is a place where people were killing their own neighbors. The town that I wrote about in my book Anatomy of Genocide, my mother's hometown of Buchach, the Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. I mean, neighbors were killing neighbors. People had known each other. And there's a lot of that in Israel. There's a lot of similarity between Palestinians and Israelis. And there are many, many communities in Israel which are so called mixed communities where there are Arabs and Jews living side by side. And that can either lead to good intimate relations or to outbursts of real violence. But what I was saying about these soldiers is that the one other thing that troubles me as a historian of the 20th century and of fascism and Nazism, is that these soldiers were so enraged and felt misunderstood, not just by me. In fact, I appear to have been the only person who talked with them, who was actually sitting and having a conversation with them about their feelings, about. They seem not to have been treated for ptsd, and many of them appear to have had it because they were in heavy fighting. And they also were involved obviously in killings and destruction. And that is hard for any young person, man or woman, and there were men and women there to somehow come to terms with. They felt so misunderstood and they felt so misled. They had no trust in their authorities, not even in their commanders. That they appear to me to be potentially the future political soldiers of another kind of regime in Israel that is right now potentially in the making. And those kind of political soldiers that we saw in the 1920s and 1930s and in Europe that carried the fascist regimes that came to power are the biggest danger to any democracy. These are people who really believe in what they do. They are not just hired goons. They really are determined to create a better world. And as they're doing it, they're destroying their own country.
- [39:27]
Martin DeCaro
You raise the question, age old question historians have grappled with. Why do soldiers fight? There's one school of thought, depending on which Conflict we're talking about that men fight because, well, that's their duty. They don't really have an ideological impulse. They're just trying to survive, and they don't want to let down their fellow soldier in the trenches, what have you. Whereas here you found that the Israeli soldiers were ideological. That they did believe in the cause doesn't mean they necessarily want to be there. They'd maybe, probably rather be home, but still, yes.
- [39:59]
Omer Bartov
I mean, as one of them was saying to me, you think I want to be called up on reserve again? Of course I don't. But this is an issue that I actually started thinking and writing about when I was a young PhD student. I was interested in what motivated German soldiers to fight on the Eastern Front in World War II. The going interpretation of soldiers motivation at the time by two American sociologists, Shields and Janowitz, was primary group loyalty. That soldiers fought because they were loyal to their own bodies. You have to be loyal to the people in your team, in your unit, to protect yourself, because then they will fight for you. And I had already been in one war, and I didn't think it was. Of course, it's also true, but it's not the whole story. The soldiers I was with in 1973 didn't just fight for their buddies. They believed that they were fighting for the state of Israel. And they believed if they didn't fight, then the state would be destroyed. And I think these soldiers now, they believe in this higher cause, but they're being misled into believing that the only way to make their country safe is to act in the most brutal, destructive way against Palestinians.
- [41:14]
Martin DeCaro
You want to talk about your research into Nazi Germany, because during the first intifada, Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, you wrote to Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin, who was the defense minister at the time. You wrote him letters about your research into the way ordinary Germans, ordinary Germans in the Wehrmacht, how they had undergone years of conditioning, if you will, to see Slavs and Jews as less than human. And that is one reason why they were able to act with such cruelty and barbarity on the Eastern Front. You did groundbreaking research into the ways the Wehrmacht was not just complicit, but active in the Holocaust by bullets. And you wrote to Rabin saying, and I think most people can understand why this would have been a touchy subject for him or any Israeli, any Jewish person. Comparisons between the IDF and the Wehrmacht. Tell us a little bit about the relevance of this.
- [42:10]
Omer Bartov
Yeah, you know, I mean, I was in my 20s then, and this was 1987. And the first intifada had just broken out in December, maybe it was 88 already, early 1988. And there was a postcard going around which was about the fact that a Palestinian kid had been arrested by the border guards. And they put him on a jeep, and then they threw him out of the jeep and he was killed. And so it was a protest to the Minister of Defense, which was Rabin at the time. And I was so outraged by that that I wrote on the margins of that postcard in very small letters, trying to fit it all in, that I had just come back from doing my PhD on the crimes of the Wehrmacht, and that I was afraid that under his leadership, the IDF was beginning to go down that very same slippery slope of brutalization. And I just wrote it because I was enraged. I didn't expect any response. And two weeks later, I received the letter from the Ministry of Defense. And I opened the letter and there was one line there. How dare you compare the Wehrmacht to the idf? Signed Yitzhak Rabin. And so then I wrote him another letter explaining the whole thing, and I got the same response from him. But I think, to his credit, Rabin was already an officer when he was 26 years old in the War of 90. To his credit, I think that during that time he was gradually coming to the conclusion that this state of things could not go on, that Israel could not forever oppress and suppress millions of Palestinians, that you could not resolve this issue just with firing at boys, throwing rocks at you. It's not that I persuaded him, but I think that something. The reason that he responded to me was, yes, he was angry by the comparison, but, yes, he also thought that this was the wrong way to go. And think about it. That by the early 1990s, he becomes involved in the Oslo Accords, and he's eventually shot by a Jewish extremist who represents the kind of people who have now taken power in Israel. His assassination was the most successful assassination in the 20th century. It's killed the entire peace process for two generations now. So that was a moment at which people could still think that there would be some way for Jews and Palestinians to share that space.
- [44:49]
Moshe Dayan
This signing of the Israeli Palestinian Declaration of principle here today, it's not so easy, neither for myself as a soldier in Israel's war, nor for the people of Israel, nor to the Jewish people in the Diaspora who are watching us now with great hope, mixed with apprehension.
- [45:17]
Martin DeCaro
That was the success of the first intifada. The uprising itself was crushed violently. But it did lead to a moment where people on both sides were willing to recognize each other. When I say recognize the legitimacy of the plo, because it had been against the law right for Israelis to even speak to the plo. So they had to change their laws to make negotiations with the PLO possible. And in the 1980s, the PLO finally recognized Israel's right to exist. So, yeah, you had this moment where a better future was possible. And then, as you say, it did not work out. One more question. I'll just cite a few lines from your essay in the Guardian. Yov Gallant, defense minister, declared two days after the Hamas attack on October 7, we are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly, later adding that Israel would break apart one neighborhood after another. Father in Gaza, former Prime Minister Bennett confirmed we are fighting Nazis. Netanyahu exhorted Israelis to remember what Amalek has done to you, alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek's men and women, children and infants. In a radio interview, he said about Hamas, I don't call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals. And you cite more and more of these quotes from not TV commentators, Israeli government officials talking about murder and killing and destruction. And what I'm getting at is if I did not know these were Israeli statements, and you were to say, guess which people in history said such terrible things about the people they were destroying? Well, you know what I'm getting at.
- [46:49]
Omer Bartov
So look, first of all, these statements, including a statement made by the president of the state, who is not even from the Likud Party, from the right wing, he was once a leader of the Labour Party Party, Herzog saying, in Gaza, there are no uninvolved people, that is that these human animals, these people have to be killed. And not just Hamas, it's everyone there. These statements were made by people who have executive authority. There were many statements made just by all kind of pundits. But these people are people with executive authority. They're also people with a particular reputation. So first of all, these were statements which are incitement to soldiers. When you hear your prime minister, when you hear your minister of defense saying such things, you, as a soldier, you may be 18 years old, you hear that and you take it seriously, you act upon it, you don't need any more orders. And this is incitement to genocide, which is a crime according to international law. Now, I'm not a big fan of comparisons with the Nazis because I think the Nazis always win out.
- [47:58]
Martin DeCaro
I agree, and I'm not saying that Israel today is the equivalent of Nazi.
- [48:02]
Omer Bartov
Germany, but it's enough to say that these were genocidal statements. At the time, there were enough people and even I said, well, okay, they made these statements. These statements are incitement, but they were made at the heat of the moment. And the question is, are they followed then by particular orders? When Garland said, we won't give them any water, we won't give them any electricity, we won't give them any food, was that just because he was enraged and wanted to sound strong? Because after all, the IDF was terribly humiliated on October 7. So it came out with all these statements of bravado, or was this actually, was there something behind it? And with time you could see that there was. They actually used these tactics and they actually thought of the population as a population that could and should be, if not entirely killed, then treated as human animals. The use of this term, human animals is the best indication of genocidal intent. When you speak of a group of people as not being human, whether the Nazis calling the Jews vermin or the Hutu calling the Tutsi cockroaches and so forth, once you use that kind of language within this kind of context, then you're giving license to your own people to treat them that way. So in that sense, yes, this was the beginning of a process that could have been stopped. It could have been stopped by the Israeli government having made all these statements, saying, okay, we were angry and all that, but we have to behave like human beings. It could have been stopped by the United States in November, December, President Biden could have said stop and everything would have stopped because Israel could not do any of what he was doing for more than three weeks without constant supply of arms from the U.S. but he wasn't. And then it became what it is. Now.
- [49:57]
Martin DeCaro
You quote here an Israeli 95 year old military veteran whose motivational speech to IDF troops preparing for the invasion of Gaza exhorted them to wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children. He did not say, kill Hamas's soldiers and spare the civilians. He said, wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children. And he was given a certificate of honor by the Israeli President Herzog for providing, quote, a wonderful example to generations of soldiers. So it's been assumed by many people that at some point Israel would have to agree to a Palestinian state end its occupation because endless conflict was not sustainable. The Palestinians, simply speaking, number in the millions and cannot be made to disappear. Is this assumption wrong?
- [50:46]
Omer Bartov
Look, there's 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians between the river and the sea. And either they find a way through one state, two states, a confederation to share the space, or the violence will continue. Most people are not going anywhere. They're staying there. Will there be two states? I don't know. I think that right now, if nothing happens, the trajectory is different. The trajectory is that Israel will become a full blown apartheid state, not just de facto, which it is already in the west bank, and that's what's being created now in Gaza, but de jure. If under President Trump, Israel is allowed to annex territories in the west bank and in Gaza, then that will be a deore apartheid state because Israel is not going to give citizenship and voting rights to people who will now become, not at least, as they're called, occupied, but will be part of sovereign Israel. And I'm afraid that it looks to me that this may well be the direction and that it could last for quite a while. It will mean that Israel will become impoverished. Its economy is going down the drain right now, increasingly isolated internationally. Even its allies will become increasingly embarrassed to associate with it. It will no longer be a democracy or even have a semblance of democracy. There is already growing restrictions not only obviously on Palestinians, but also on its Jewish citizens of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, closing down of newspapers. It will become an authoritarian state and it could last as such for several decades. But I don't think that in the long run it could continue to exist.
- [52:45]
Joe Biden
Ever since Harry Truman first recognized Israel, every American president, Democrat and Republican, has worked for peace between Israel and her neighbors. Now the efforts of all who have labored before us bring us to this moment, a moment when we dare to pledge what for so long seemed difficult even to imagine, that the security of the Israeli people will be reconciled with the hopes of the Palestinian people. And there will be more security and more hope for all.
- [53:27]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History as it Happens. Thirty years since the Budapest memorandum was supposed to assure Ukraine of its territorial integrity and sovereign independence. Russia's war in Ukraine will soon enter its fourth year. Is it becoming a world war? We'll speak to Michael Kimmage next as we report History as it Happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign up@historyasithappens.com.