Ivy League Holocaust professor charges Israel with genocide -Andrew Harrod
https://www.jns.org/ivy-league-holocaust-professor-charges-israel-with-genocide/
Not even Jews facing a recent organized pogrom in Amsterdam received his complete sympathy.
Omer Bartov, Brown University’s Samuel Pisar professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, called Israel’s ongoing Gaza military campaign a “genocide operation” in a Nov. 11 podcast “Gaza and the Question of Genocide.”
Addressing Georgetown University’s Saudi-supported Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), Bartov, an Israeli Holocaust historian, failed miserably to substantiate his outrageous accusation. The irony that a scholar of such reputation and subject specialty would make such egregiously false claims was not lost on Bartov’s hosts, who surely invited him knowing that his stance would be useful in their propaganda war against Israel.
As ACMCU’s reliably anti-Israel director Nader Hashemi moderated, Bartov discussed Israeli policies in the post-Oct. 7, 2023 context. He said the barbarous Hamas jihadist assault upon Israel “should be classified as a war crime and as a crime against humanity.”
“Potentially, if you want to connect it to the Hamas Charter of 1988, you could also describe it as a genocidal act. I am less strong on that,” he added, even though the events of Oct. 7 clearly reflected Hamas’s longstanding genocidal intentions.
Bartov’s slander of Israel’s self-defense response as genocidal rested upon the hackneyed trope of civilian collateral damage. “In order to save the lives of [Israeli] soldiers when you’re moving into a heavily built-up area,” air and artillery strikes precede Israeli advances into Gaza, he said. Thus, Israeli military leaders “order the population to leave for its own safety, and then you assume that the population left even if many people don’t leave,” perhaps, for example, “because they’re sick.”
Such military operations would inevitably “kill large numbers of civilians,” Bartov said, without explaining how Israel or any other country could avoid such tragedy while defending itself. His analysis ignored Israel’s great efforts to minimize civilian harm documented by expert military analysts. As a result, Israel has maintained an unparalleled collateral damage ratio of just over one civilian death to one Hamas combatant death.
Bartov justified his genocide calumny by charging that Israeli combat operations are “making the entire area uninhabitable for the Palestinian population of Gaza.”
“There had been systematic destruction, not only of housing and certainly not only places where Hamas might have been, but systematic destruction of universities, of schools, of mosques, of museums, and of residences and of infrastructure,” he said. Bartov left unexplained how cities like Berlin, Stalingrad or Manila had fared any better during World War II urban combat. Nor did he explain how Israel Defense Forces could mitigate the destruction of infrastructure given Hamas’s well-documented tactic of embedding itself in civilian institutions like hospitals, thereby turning every military strike into a propaganda image of Israeli brutality.
Bartov made excuses for the Hamas attacks and Palestinians supposed uprising in righteous rage against Israel, saying, “When a population lives under oppressive rule over a long period of time, and especially if it is prevented from its desire to realize self-determination, even under international law, it has a right to resist.”
According to Bartov, Gaza, Hamas’s terrorist launching pad, which Israel withdrew from in 2005, is “constantly besieged by the Israelis.” He bemoaned some 2.3 million Palestinians “caged into this very narrow strip of land,” even though Gaza is about as densely populated as London, and Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, have higher densities.
He also depicted Palestinians, who are “constantly losing more and more land” to Israeli settlement—the Gaza withdrawal notwithstanding—as victims. Without offering any specifics or evidence, he worried about a “creeping ethnic cleansing of the West Bank,” the historic Judea and Samaria heartland of the Jewish people disputed with Palestinians.
Bartov also denounced “daily pogroms” by Israelis in Judea and Samaria against Palestinians, even though Palestinian violence against Israelis far outweighs any “settler violence” against Palestinians. Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has denounced accusations such as Bartov’s as a new “blood libel” supported by dubious statistics.
Israeli citizens and security forces publicly condemn any Israeli violence against innocent Palestinians, a stark contrast to Palestinian jihadist incitement against Israelis.
Judea and Samaria are “clearly an apartheid regime,” said Bartov, with “two populations living under two entirely different law-legal systems,” one “more or less liberal” for “Jewish [sic, actually all, Arabs included] citizens of Israel,” while the “other system is military rule” for Palestinians.
He never explained why Israeli security controls over Palestinians, including military raids like “walking into a house at 4:30 in the morning,” are merely illegitimately “asserting supremacy.” After all, repeated expressions of Palestinian popular support for Hamas post-Oct. 7 have amply demonstrated the Palestinians’ genocidal hostility to Israelis and the Jewish state. Such inveterate anti-Jewish animosity calls into grave doubt his assertion that “most Palestinians and most Jews want the same thing,” namely an equal “self-determination,” which he fantasizes can find fulfillment in some Arab-Israeli “confederation.”
Only Jews are maligned in Bartov’s presentation. He worried about Israel becoming “a kind of authoritarian, Hungary-like regime with a fake democracy, but growing limitations of freedom of speech.” He warned that Israel in Gaza wants “to empty that area and start moving in settlers,” even though Israeli public opinion and the current Israeli government are opposed.
Bartov invoked the common trope of Israeli Arabs as “second-class citizens.” Yet they reject becoming part of any Palestinian state, despite his persistent references to “Palestinians” in Israel. By contrast, these Arabs increasingly identify with an Israel that provides a living standard unknown among most Arabs worldwide through rising education and income levels.
Not even Jews facing a recently organized pogrom in the city of Amsterdam received his complete sympathy. He implied that this violence could have multiple interpretations. “Like all these events, it depends where you start looking, and the minute you make [the] cut-off, then you have already distorted the entire event,” he argued.
For all of Bartov’s scholarship documenting past Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews, his views of modern Israel and its Muslim enemies are deeply distorted. His moral calculus often exculpates jihadist aggressors while blaming Jewish victims. As a historian, Bartov demonstrates a far better understanding of the past than the present.
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