On 15th July, a long article/essay by historian Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust studies and genocide at Brown University, appeared in the New York Times.
In particular, throughout the decades, the Israeli academic historian has studied the involvement of the Wehrmacht in the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Bartov has demonstrated that the Wehrmacht was in every way a profoundly Nazi institution that played a key role during the Holocaust in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. The German army was therefore not an apolitical force with little involvement in war crimes or crimes against humanity during the Second World War.
The author’s statements about Hamas attack on Israel on 7th October 2023 and the counterattack in Gaza therefore deserve special attention. Just one month after the events, the author believed that there was evidence of war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Israeli army in its counterattack, however, evidence did not appear to him to be sufficient to suggest the crime of genocide.
In May 2024, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ordered approximately one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah – the southernmost and last relatively undamaged city in the Gaza Strip – to move to Mawasi beach area, despite the lack of adequate shelter for the population. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a task that was largely completed by August.
In the face of a progressive chain of events, the historian has investigated the pattern of operations carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces, which reveals their compliance with genocidal statements made by Israeli leaders in the days following Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a “huge price” for the attack and that the IDF would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas operated, “into rubble”, and had called on “the residents of Gaza” to “leave now because we will act with force everywhere”. Netanyahu urged his citizens to remember “what Amalek did to you,” a quote that many interpreted as a reference to a biblical passage calling on the Israelites to “kill men and women alike, the infants” of their ancient enemy.
The use of biblical quotes in this context of war led to considerable concern, which has been addressed by authoritative voices. Even recently, much discussion has followed an article written by theologian Vito Mancuso, which was published on 13th July in the Italian newspaper La Stampa. While we can draw numerous useful lessons on the correct exegesis of biblical texts, it appears to be truly difficult to accept that we “cannot explain what our eyes see in the Middle East”. This is how an esteemed scholar expresses himself, saying that he has no answers because, living in the Diaspora, he does not have “sufficient knowledge of the reality and politics to understand what is happening in that region, let alone to judge”. We could offer for discernment the concreteness of historians and the comparative method proposed by Gariwo Foundation also as civil pedagogy in this framework.
In his essay, Omer Bartov has reported that government and military officials claimed to be fighting against “human animals” and subsequently called for “total annihilation”. Nissim Vaturi, Vice-president of the Parliament, has entrusted Israel with the task of “wiping the Gaza Strip off the face of the earth”. So even in the Diaspora, or in any case far from the Middle East or the Holy Land, we can easily understand that the intention expressed is 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”. Thus, the author has got to the inevitable “conclusion” that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Omar Bartov, from a Zionist family, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer, and not without military expertise has researched war crimes and the Holocaust; he has explicitly linked his painful conclusion to his professional background. “I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one”. “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”.
And, as Gariwo Foundation, we would like to bitterly add that a growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can be defined as genocide. The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”. Therefore, in determining what genocide is, we must both establish intent and demonstrate that it is being perpetrated. In the case of Israel, such intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. However, intent can also be inferred from a pattern of operations on the field, as became clear in May 2024 – and has become increasingly clear since then – with the systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip perpetrated by the Israeli Defense Forces.
This is the central passage of Omer Bartov’s essay: “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 will 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”.
Indeed, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of houses but also of other infrastructures – government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, sewage treatment plants, agricultural areas and parks – reflects a policy aimed at making the recovery of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely.
Numbers concerning the destruction in Gaza are confirmed by an investigation conducted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported by the author: “An estimated 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 have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than one year old. More than 2,000 families 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 to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 people have been wounded and maimed. Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita 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. 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 7th October 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”.
On the basis of this analysis, the scholar “knows what he sees”, namely that the IDF is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing, and has quoted Netanyahu’s former chief of staff and Defense Minister, Moshe Yaalon, for his attempt to clear the northern part of Gaza of its population. “After Israel’s breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the I.D.F. has been executing a well-publicized plan to concentrate the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: 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 of the territory. This is also being facilitated by a plan 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 in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens”.
When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly moved from one so-called safe zone to another, bombed relentlessly and starved, ethnic cleansing can turn into genocide. The documents available on Gariwo website show that this was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century.
“Only a few scholars of the Holocaust — 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”.
The moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has enjoyed so far, according to the author, is running out, as historian Anna Foa warned early on, referring to Israel moral drift, a suicide.
In the final part of the essay, arguments become compelling: “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 repeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are “uninvolved,” not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants”.
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. Every 25 April, we see the picture of the insignificant Grand Mufti talking to Hitler, equating Palestine with Nazism, and now it is the turn of the entire population of Gaza, a Nazi-style enemy.
“Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since Israel breached the cease-fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu’s government”.
Eventually, the historian’s concerns have prevailed: “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 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” a genocide. Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal, have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described 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.”
A rift is therefore emerging between the community of Holocaust scholars and genocide scholars. According to Bartov, “...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 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 in an essay, “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.
In this debate, we invite to reflect on why the use of terms appears to be increasingly reckless; if the word anti-Semitism is objectively overused, the term anti-Judaism is also becoming so, and therefore the accusation of genocide that was levelled against Israel would draw “on deep wells of hatred in Christianity and Islam”.
The 27th January, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is the only common date of civil remembrance for EU member states. Some 25 years of educational policies have led to reflection on ‘Never Again’, which has taken on a pivotal role in politics, education and identity. But what will now be the consequences of the rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? It is not a mere academic dispute. The culture of remembrance created in the last few decades around the Holocaust has necessarily led to reflection beyond the genocide of the Jews.
The author has written, “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. 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 as 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...” “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”.
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Photo by Bildungsstätte Anne Frank, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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