[[link removed]]

I’M A GENOCIDE SCHOLAR. I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT.  
[[link removed]]


 

Omer Bartov
July 15, 2025
The New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A professor of Holocaust and genocide studies comes to a painful
conclusion about Israel’s actions in Gaza. My inescapable conclusion
has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian
people. _

Photo illustration by Kristie Bailey/The New York Times; source
images from Iryna Veklich, Anadolu/Getty Images,

 

A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed
there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes
and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza.
But contrary to the cries of Israel’s fiercest critics, the evidence
did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide.

By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million
Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last
remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to
the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter.
The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly
accomplished by August
[[link removed]].

At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern
of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting
genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas
attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy
would pay a “huge price
[[link removed]]”
for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where
Hamas was operating, “into rubble
[[link removed]],”
and he called
[[link removed]] on
“the residents of Gaza” to “leave now because we will operate
forcefully everywhere.”

Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember “what Amalek did
to you,
[[link removed]]”
a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical
passage calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women,
infants and sucklings” of their ancient enemy. Government and
military officials said they were fighting “human animals”
[[link removed]] and,
later, called for “total annihilation
[[link removed]].”
Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X
[[link removed]] that Israel’s
task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of
the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its
Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today
— to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or,
considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave
through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water,
sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for
Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a
group.

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing
genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist
home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F.
as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and
writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion
to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been
teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can
recognize one when I see one.

This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in
genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s
actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca
Albanese
[[link removed]],
the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty
International.
[[link removed]] South
Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International
Court of Justice.

 
Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press  //  New York Times
The continued denial of this designation by states, international
organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated
damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the
system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of
the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever
again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on
which we all depend.

***

The crime of genocide was defined
[[link removed]] in 1948 by the
United Nations as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” In
determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both
establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel’s
case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials
and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of
operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024
— and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has
systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip.

Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to
contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was
coined by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to
attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue
that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often
serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime.

Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed,
it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a
particular group of people from other crimes under international law,
such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while
other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians
as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a
group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it
would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or
cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by
adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to
prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is
occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this
crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a
sovereign state.

The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications.
Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on
a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of
humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of
the international community. A finding by the International Court of
Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if
enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions.

Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of
genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the
International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country.
And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the
stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain
long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out.

***

Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of
crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when
breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally
meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and
political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully,
say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites
about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human
shields.

In fact, the systematic
[[link removed]] destruction
in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure —
government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques,
cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas,
and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of
Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely.

According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated
[[link removed]] 174,000
buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70
percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000
people
[[link removed]] have
been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including
[[link removed]] more
than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality
count. More than 870
[[link removed]] of those children
were less than a year old.

More than 2,000 families
[[link removed]] have
been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600
families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people
are believed [[link removed]] to still
be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been
wounded and maimed.

Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number
[[link removed]] of
amputee children per capita
[[link removed]] in
the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing
military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will
suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their
lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have
had little access to hospital care
[[link removed]].

The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by
most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the
I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version
of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been
destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces
and retains control over the population in areas not held by the
Israeli Army.

Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition
and ethnic cleansing. That’s how Mr. Netanyahu’s own former chief
of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in
November described
[[link removed]] on
Israel’s Democrat TV and in subsequent articles
[[link removed]] and interviews
[[link removed]] the
attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population.

 
Mahmoud Issa/Reuters  //  New York Times
On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from
resuming the presidency, a cease-fire went into effect, facilitating
the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
But after Israel’s breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the
I.D.F. has been executing a well-publicized plan to concentrate
[[link removed]] the
entire Gazan population in a quarter
[[link removed]] of
the territory in three zones
[[link removed]]:
Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the
Strip’s southwestern edge.

Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by
the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every
remaining structure and establish control over the other
three-quarters
[[link removed]] of
the territory.

This is also being facilitated by a plan
[[link removed]] that provides
— intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution
points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the
south. Many Gazans are killed
[[link removed]] in
a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens
[[link removed]]. On July 7, Defense
Minister Israel Katz said
[[link removed]] the
I.D.F. would build a “humanitarian city” over the ruins of Rafah
to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area,
who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to
leave.

***

Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide.
But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has
nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone
to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can
morph into genocide.

This was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century,
such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now
Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and,
indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to
expel the Jews and ended up with their murder.

To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust
[[link removed]] —
and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it —
have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war
crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This
silence has made a mockery of the slogan “Never again,”
transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity
wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a
carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past
victimhood.

This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current
catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian
existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against
Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that
the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out.

Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi
genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its
security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz.
This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its
enemies as Nazis — a term used
[[link removed]] repeatedly
by Israeli media figures to depict
[[link removed]] Hamas
[[link removed]] and, by extension,
all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are
“uninvolved,” not even the infants, who would grow up to be
militants.

This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel’s invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat,
then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker.
This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed
at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza.

The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is
shielded by its own media’s self-censorship, expose the lies of
Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi-like
enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the
hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the “most moral army in the
world.”

Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as
Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it
breached the cease-fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms
shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic
or political steps
[[link removed]] that
might deter Mr. Netanyahu’s government.

For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest
in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing
[[link removed]] in
February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to
turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” and then letting
Israel get on with the Strip’s destruction and turning his attention
to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again
pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire
and put an end to the relentless killing.

***

How will Israel’s future be affected by the inevitable demolition of
its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the
Holocaust?

Israel’s political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide.
There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed
change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this
conflict other than an Israeli-Palestinian agreement to share the land
under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states,
one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the
country’s allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that
Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps
irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such
states, as history has taught us, do not last.

Another question arises: What consequences will Israel’s moral
reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the
politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its
intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face
up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide
wherever they occur?

Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and
remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral
reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged
in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other
genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer
toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide.

In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli
genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman joined
[[link removed]] the growing chorus
of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian
international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last
year and has recently described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza
as “absolutely” [[link removed]] a
genocide.

Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O’Brien
[[link removed]],
president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and
the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas
attack was genocidal),
[[link removed]] have
reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk
Moses [[link removed]] of
the City University of New York described
[[link removed]] these
events in the Dutch publication NRC as a “mix of genocidal and
military logic.” In the same article, Uğur Ümit Üngör, a
professor at the Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not
think it’s genocide, but “I don’t know them.”

 

Most Holocaust scholars I know don’t hold, or at least publicly
express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the
Israeli Raz Segal
[[link removed]], program
director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in
New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos
Goldberg and Daniel Blatman,
[[link removed]] the
majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of
the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied
Israel’s crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues
of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and
antisemitism.

In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined
[[link removed]] that
“genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for
broader challenges to Israel’s legitimacy,” expressing his worry
that “they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide
itself.” This “genocide libel,” as Dr. Goda referred to it
in an essay
[[link removed]],
“deploys a range of antisemitic tropes,” including “the coupling
of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images
of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that
charge Israel with genocide.”

In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by
U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an
antisemitic act.

Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey
Herf, wrote
[[link removed]] in
The Washington Post that “the genocide accusation hurled against
Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred” found in “radical
interpretations of both Christianity and Islam.” It “has shifted
opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of
Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil.”

***

What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and
Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe.
The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust
encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to
play a crucial role in politics, education and identity.

Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for
representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that
the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance,
diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to
mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in
an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the
heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity.

Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel’s genocide in
Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide
studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct
the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated
instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by
the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust
— is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a
politics of denialism and impunity as well.

By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to
teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying
Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine
everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for
in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human
being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let
inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of
nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer
vengeance.

 
Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no
longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust
in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so
relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a
cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., the study and remembrance of
the Holocaust could lose its claim to be concerned with universal
justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its
life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by
the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event,
before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a
lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole.

Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a
whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us
without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to
stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial
hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that
were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors
of the 20th century.

Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the
possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future
without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will
have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their
name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the
Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the
horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and
may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more
rational and less fearful and violent manner.

This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death
and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the
overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with
the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share
the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza
and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the
only just reckoning.

_[OMER BARTOV is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at
Brown University.]_

* Genocide
[[link removed]]
* war crimes
[[link removed]]
* crimes against humanity
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* gaza strip
[[link removed]]
* Palestinians
[[link removed]]
* Palestinian people
[[link removed]]
* Benjamin Netanyahu
[[link removed]]
* International Criminal Court
[[link removed]]
* ICC
[[link removed]]
* Holocaust
[[link removed]]
* The Holocaust
[[link removed]]
* Holocaust Studies
[[link removed]]
* Genocide Studies
[[link removed]]
* anti-Semitism
[[link removed]]
* Jewish community
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]