STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
A scholar of genocide is using that word to describe Israel's offensive in Gaza. Omer Bartov asserts it's a genocide even though he says he's a Zionist who grew up in Israel.
OMER BARTOV: I served in the Israeli military for four years, ended up as a company commander and served in the Reserve Service until I left the country in 1989.
INSKEEP: Omer Bartov is now a U.S. citizen who studies the Holocaust at Brown University. He says the October 7 attack by Hamas shocked him. He also was disturbed by the ferocity of Israel's military response. But he says he was slow to make his accusation. Many scholars of genocide have chosen not to use that term for Gaza, and he was one of them.
BARTOV: People use the term genocide to describe something that is terrible, rather than actually seeing whether what they're observing conforms to the definition of genocide as defined by the U.N. in 1948. There were people who expected that there would be genocide right away. There are people who think that Israel has always been involved in genocide. And I did not think that.
INSKEEP: It sounds like part of your reluctance is just that this can be an overused word that brings more heat than light to a discussion.
BARTOV: Correct. It does describe a very particular crime. It describes an attempt to destroy a group as such, not simply killing many people, which is horrible enough, but to destroy a group.
INSKEEP: What evidence then caused you to decide after all this time that you think genocide does apply?
BARTOV: This was in May 2024. The IDF decided to move into the last town in Gaza, the town of Rafah, which is on the Egyptian border in the southernmost part of the Gaza strip. To move in there despite the fact that there were about 1 million Palestinians there, most of whom had been displaced by the IDF and told to move there for their own safety. And then the IDF decided to move there nonetheless and moved about 1 million people from that town to the beach area and then went into Rafah and proceeded to destroy it. By August, it was mostly gone.
It was at that point that I asked myself, what is actually the goal of what the IDF is doing? Is it what it said, to destroy Hamas and to release the hostages? Or is it something else? And what you could see was a pattern of operations that conformed to the statements that were made in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, which was to systematically destroy Gaza. That is to destroy schools, universities, museums, everything - hospitals, of course, water plants, energy plants. In that way to make it uninhabitable for the population and to make it impossible, if ever this is over, for that group to reconstitute its identity as a group by completely erasing everything that is there.
INSKEEP: Why do you not accept the IDF justification that they say they're going after Hamas, that Hamas has been in tunnels, under buildings, hiding amid the civilian population?
BARTOV: Well, they are also going after Hamas. They are trying to find Hamas militants. But most of what they're doing is not that. Most of what they're doing is destroying Gaza.
INSKEEP: I want to address one other layer of this because, as you probably know, somebody listening will judge this argument based on who they think you are. And you've said you grew up in Israel. You served in the IDF. Somebody listening who's critical of your point of view might say, well, he's currently at Brown. He's written for the Guardian. He has a certain political agenda, and that's informing his point of view rather than his scholarship. How would you answer somebody who may be thinking that?
BARTOV: Well, I mean, we all have points of view. Hopefully, all people have some political point of view. That's not a bad thing. That's a good thing, to actually look at the world around you critically. But also, I think that what the Israeli government is doing now is going to undermine the very basis of Zionism, the very basis of the state of Israel. There is every right for Jews to self-determine and have a state of their own. But the state that now exists and the policies that it pursues are going to make it into a full-blown apartheid state with an authoritarian government that will be violent not only against Palestinians but also will be and is already quite violent against its own internal critics. And that is the path to the destruction of the state itself. And I hope that it can still be prevented.
INSKEEP: Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. Thanks so much.
BARTOV: Thank you.
INSKEEP: We reached out to Israel's government about the scholar's assertion of genocide but did not hear back.
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