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The Opinions
I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.
00:26:48
An Israeli historian answers his critics, and explains why his home country’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide.
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Host
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
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Dan Waken
I'm Dan Waken, 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 was deeply fraught for many. So I wanted to talk to Bartow 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.
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Omer Bartov
Thanks for having me.
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Dan Waken
Then I think it's important to start by saying that you reached this conclusion over time. In fact, about a month after October 7, you published a Times Opinion essay that said, quote, 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?
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Omer Bartov
The point of that earlier op ed was not simply to say that no genocide is happening. What I was trying to say there was that I could see that there were war crimes being carried out by the IDF in Gaza and to warn that if this were not stopped, then what the IDF 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 my view was who was at the time that had the Biden administration in November or December 2023, told Netanyahu, you have two weeks to wrap it up and after that you're on your own. Israel would have stopped and possibly we would not have been 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 appear to be genocidal. But of course, one say at the time that these were said in the heat of the moment in response to the massacre of 800 Israeli civilians by Hamas. But it turned out when you looked at the pattern of operations by the IDF was one that was implementing precisely those statements, which were, we need to flatten Gaza. There are no uninvolved people there. There are human animals. They should get no water, no food. All these statements that appear to have a genocidal content in which them of course, served also as incitement to the troops on the ground, coming from their own political and military leaders. But By May of 2024, I concluded that what the IDF 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 completely and 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 were they fighting to stop. And one hopes that it will finally stop.
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Dan Waken
I think this is a good point to jump in and ask how you define a genocide.
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Omer 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. And he was trying to understand what it meant that you are 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 course 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 are killing people or making life impossible for people, 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 then that they're trying to implement that intent. So of course, numbers matter. There have to be significant numbers. And I've seen responses saying, well, I mean, if Israel killed a million Gazans, then it would be a genocide. But 50, 60, maybe 100,000, that's not good enough. Well, 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, destruction of the cultural and 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 or in part as such.
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Dan Waken
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?
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Omer Bartov
No. I mean, if you really wanted to make an analogy with the Nazis, I would say that the distinction would be between 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.
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Dan Waken
One of the other 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. Of Hamas's failure to surrender?
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Omer Bartov
Yeah. That, unfortunately, is merely an indication of the success of Israeli propaganda. If Hamas were to surrender and to hand over the hostages, what do you think Israel and the IDF 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 IDF from completely demolishing Gaza, whatever is left of it, from taking over Everything is the presence of hostages there. So the only limit on movements by the IDF to completely destroy Gaza is the fact that there are still hostages there. Netanyahu himself has said that his goal is absolute victory. And of course, it's not really defined what he means by absolute victory, but it means complete control over the Gaza Strip.
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Dan Waken
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 firebombing of Dresden. Why was that not considered a genocide? And why is this case considered a genocide?
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Omer Bartov
So, you know, 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 that was a war crime. Why is it not genocide? Well, think what happened when the Americans occupy Germany. Did they kill all the Germans? Did they say that Germany is 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, well economically, that they lost the war but won 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.
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Dan Waken
So let's move away from the politics and the issue of morality and talk a bit about you, about you personally. You served in the IDF 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 another people. Did you think about your experiences in Gaza as you wrote this essay? And if so, how did you think about them?
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Omer Bartov
Yes, look, I mean, 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. And 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 like your Usual Israeli male. And it began dawning on me that when you occupy people, there is something about that situation. I wasn't even. 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, of asking yourself, why am I here? And there was a sense of mutual threat. You know, when you patrol in a city and you are walking 30 men with guns in a city, you obviously are 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 the 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. So that the society that I was a member of in the early 1970s, in 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 aspects 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're the boss. And how do you do that? You break into people's home 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.
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Dan Waken
Is that kind of dehumanization a prerequisite to genocidal action?
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Omer Bartov
Yes, it is. One of the signs of genocide is that you start talking about a particular group as not human, as different, as 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 October 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 can sit with us in a cafe and be completely normal people.
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Dan Waken
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?
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Omer 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. And 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. And if we teach the Holocaust, then we would understand that. And I was never sure why, when you teach brutality, dehumanization, 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 the American, very much the American interpretation of the Holocaust as it grew, because it was not always there. It took a long time. It really comes in, 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, I think that 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, of commemoration, of teaching, of 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, of. With a humanistic message of never again. Never again what? Never again inhumanity, 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.
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Dan Waken
So 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?
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Omer 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, 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 change 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 as being a full blown apartheid authoritarian state. And such states don't last very long. So after that, 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, to some kind of settlement between the Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants of that land. But right now it's heading in the opposite direction.
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Dan Waken
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?
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Omer 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 it loses support and 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, and so that process will not only erode support for Israel, but I'm afraid can also give license to more prejudice against Jews wherever they are.
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Dan Waken
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, you know, the country of your birth and your origin.
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Omer Bartov
Look, I mean, it's actually heartbreaking. I mean, I grew up there, my best friends are there, I have family there. And there are many things that I love and certainly loved about that country. And to see it change so dramatically, both in a sort of long term process and then very, in a kind of accelerated, on steroids kind of transformation since October 7th is heartbreaking. And what I can say is that I'm a big supporter of the state of Israel. I am an Israeli citizen. I believe the Jews have the right like every other people to self determine. I'm not against Zionism at all. I think Zionism was a movement that called for emancipation and liberation of Jews and for human rights. But the kind of Zionism that exists in Israel now, the kind of state that it has become, I can't support it.
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Dan Waken
Omer, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation. I really appreciate it.
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Omer Bartov
Thanks very much then Foreign.
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Host
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur Vishaka Darba, Christina Samuluski and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.