I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.
JVL Introduction
Dr. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University.
From someone who did not think that Israeli action in the period after October 7 amounted to genocide, the evidence has forced Bartov to change his mind.
“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
In a brilliant and deeply troubling essay Bertov’s historical knowledge and analytical perspicacity and moral clarity shine through.
“How,” asks Bartov, “will Israel’s future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust?”
This essay should be compulsory reading for every MP – and indeed for all of us.
RK
This article was originally published by New York Times on Tue 15 Jul 2025. Read the original here.
I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.
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This useful essay contains examples of the attempt by some very clever people to draw attention away from a true understanding of what Israel is doing in Palestine. That Israel is committing genocide by any reasonable and sensible definition is clear, and just because that genocide doesn’t take the identical form to Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ doesn’t make it the less so. The twisted sophistries, the semantical gymnastics, that Israel’s apologists so glibly enact cannot change the fact that Israel is using the most appallingly violent means to end the existence of a functioning society, and however many of its individual members it needs to kill to achieve its purpose. Words are either a tool or they are a weapon. Hiding this genocide behind a shield of diversionary words only serves to ensure its continuation.
Without wishing to downplay the value of this strongly expressed condemnation of the genocide of the Palestinian people, there are aspects of this article that are concerning.
Why did it take him so long to “see it”? His academic colleague Raz Segal, whom he references, saw it in October 2023. Where, as others have asked, is the academic integrity of having “resisted” coming to that conclusion?
He rightly criticises the portrayal of Hamas as Nazis, but he passes on without comment Martin Shaw’s questionable description of the Hamas attack as genocidal. Would we now categorise as genocidal the slave revolts in the US or the anti-colonial revolts in Africa and other imperial settings. Terrible deeds were perpetrated in these including massacres of women and children, but in essence they were reactions to and acts of resistance against their oppressors. We would not now call them acts of genocide, even if the oppressors did so at the time and used the attacks as an excuse for reprisals that themselves were genocidal, as in German South West Africa and German East Africa.
The most disturbing statement in the article is the reference to Israel’s loss of its “incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust”. Really? Incontestable morality? Never mind the Nakba, never mind, the years of internal oppression, never mind the occupation. What next: A land without people? Making the desert bloom? The most moral army in the world? If only we could go back to the heady days of 1948 (or perhaps just 6th of October 2023), then everything would be all right again?
No, the rot was there from the start, and even those of us who are not genocide scholars can see it.