A LEADING expert on the Holocaust and genocide has arrived at the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is “committing genocide against the Palestinian people”.
Omer Bartov, the dean's professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the Ivy-league Brown University in the US, penned a 3500-word essay for the New York Times on Tuesday outlining his reasoning.
Bartov, who was born in Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but has taught in the US since 1989, said: “I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.”
Noting that experts including Francesca Albanese – the UN special rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories – and Amnesty International had come to the same conclusion, Bartov went on: “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.”
Writing in the New York Times, Bartov said the UK was among the nations to have “feebly protested Israeli actions”, noting that they have “neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps”.
The genocide professor went on: “For the last year, the IDF has not been fighting an organised military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on October 7 has been destroyed … Today the IDF is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing.”
He continued: “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, and no institution dedicated to researching and commemorating it, has issued a warning 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.”
Bartov further said: “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 IDF, 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.”
You can read the full essay in the New York Times.
