The evolution of Omer Bartov

Successfully challenging the libel that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza means tackling the arguments of its most sophisticated exponents. That is despite the fact that anti-Israel activists typically reduce the term to a political swearword.

There is a small number of people who can make an erudite case that Israel is guilty of genocide. They have impressive academic credentials, extensive knowledge of the subject and often close familiarity with Israeli society. Defeating the allegation means opposing their case head on.

Omer Bartov is probably the most high profile of these scholarly genocide accusers. He is professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown university, an Ivy league institution. He served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, including in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, ending his career as a company commander. Bartov is also a tireless campaigner writing articles and appearing in interviews in America, Britain, Germany (he speaks fluent German) and beyond. Unsurprisingly anti-Israel media figures, such as Owen Jones and Mehdi Hasan, adore him as he gives considerable moral authority and intellectual coherence to their claims. The fact that his opinions are clearly honestly held no doubt adds even more to his credibility.

What follows is a political critique of Bartov’s arguments. Others have tackled the question of alleged Israeli genocide from the perspective of international law. Natasha Hausdorff, the legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, is a particularly articulate exponent of this approach. But here I want to look at how Bartov’s arguments fit into the broader debate. It can also be instructive to look more closely at one expert’s arguments rather than tackling the case in general.

In the early stages of Israel’s war in Gaza he argued that Israel was not yet committing genocide. In an article (paywall)   published in the New York Times on 10 November 2023 he said: “I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.” However, the onus of the article was clearly that there was a potential for genocide. ( In contrast, Raz Segal, another Israeli-American Holocaust expert, argued that Israel was already committing genocide in an article published on 13 October 2023. That, extraordinarily, was before Israeli troops even set foot in Gaza).

What changed Bartov’s mind, to argue that Israel was committing fully-fledged genocide, was the IDF’s move into the southern Gazan city of Rafah in May 2024. As he wrote in a Guardian essay last August:  “since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions”. That was not because there was a surge in Palestinian casualties at that time. On the contrary the IDF evacuated the civilian population. It was rather, as Bartov told Mehdi Hasan in a Zoteo interview, that Israel crossed the threshold because its goal had become “making the entire strip unliveable”. For him that is sufficient to classify Israel’s actions as genocidal. Essentially, although the IDF managed to evacuate about one million people who had congregated there, their lives had become hellish.

At this point it becomes possible to start picking holes in Bartov’s argument. There are good reasons to question the claims of genocide and even the less heinous charges, such as war crimes, are typically exaggerations or misrepresentations. Of course the likes of Hasan and Owen Jones have no interest in interrogating his claims. Their goal is simply to use his arguments to bolster their case.

The first thing to notice is that, as is typical in charges of genocide against Israel, Bartov moves the goalposts in terms of the definition. In the Zoteo interview he himself quotes the seminal 1948 UN convention on genocide which defines genocidal acts as those “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. So Bartov acknowledges that Israel is not committing genocide according to the strict definition. He is of course entitled to make that shift but then it is important to recognise that genocide is not being used to mean what most people assume.

It should also be noted that Israel has shifted around the civilian population in Gaza several times precisely to try to avoid killing them. Of course from the perspective of someone living in Gaza it is no doubt hellish and terrifying to live in such conditions. But if Israel’s goal was to slaughter Palestinians it has the capacity to carpet bomb the whole area. That would be much more straightforward if it was actually bent on genocide.

Israel’s actions have to be seen as part of an existential war against Hamas and several other Islamist movements backed in turn by Iran. It is not a battle between a mighty Israel and Palestinian civilians. From Israel’s perspective it was vital to move into Rafah not to kill or displace civilians but to cut Hamas’s supply lines from Egypt. The terror group was heavily dependent on underground tunnels with the neighbouring country to smuggle arms and people across the border. It is true that in recent months Israel has gained the upper hand against its enemies but that was after a year of hard fighting.

More broadly it should be remembered that Hamas spent years preparing the Gaza battlefield so it was literally shielded by the civilian population above. As I have previously argued: “The scale of Gaza’s tunnel complex is monumental. London has a population of about nine million people, who are served by a Tube network of about 250 miles, of which about half is in tunnels, with the rest above ground. In contrast, Gaza has a population of just over two million people. But it is estimated to have about 300 miles of tunnels. So Gaza has about a quarter of London’s population, but about two and a half times the length of its tunnels.” When Hamas launched the 7 October pogrom it knew it would draw Israel into a war in this carefully pre-prepared environment. 

It is also vital to remember that Hamas, like other Islamist organisations, has openly stated genocidal intentions against Israel. Its goal is not self-determination for the Palestinians – a concept alien to the Islamist world view – but slaughtering Jews. For it the destruction of Israel is just a necessary precondition for establishing an international Islamic order. 

Hamas’s genocidal intent, conforming to the orthodox definition of genocide, as in its 1988 covenant, is to wipe out Israel’s Jewish population. I could not put it better than this 2004 article from the New Republic, an American magazine, which states that: “The charter of the Hamas movement, issued in 1988 as the fundamental document of this Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, must be read to be believed. It contains, among its fundamentalist Islamic preachings, the most blatant anti-Semitic statements made in a publicly available document since Hitler’s own pronouncements.” The author of that article 20 years ago was in fact Omer Bartov although more recently he has taken to signing open letters ridiculing such claims. That was despite the fact that during the 7 October pogrom in southern Israel it clearly put its openly stated anti-Semitic ideology into practice.

Bartov’s take on Israel’s alleged statements of intent is also questionable. Is Israel deliberately setting out to slaughter Palestinian civilians? He sometimes endorses such claims, certainly does not challenge them, and is sometimes subtly ambiguous.

Few probably noted the ambiguity in the wording in an interview with Owen Jones but it is worth dwelling on. Bartov noted that “there was a slippery slope between speaking about Hamas and speaking about Gazans in general”. He also said that many statements “could be interpreted as genocidal” as opposed to saying they were genocidal.

What he failed to draw out was that it is all too often the anti-Israel side which slides down the slippery slope. Take the frequently repeated claim that Yoav Gallant, Israel’s then defence minister, referred to Gazans as “human animals” who had to be eliminated. That was certainly the implication of a letter  in the New York Review of Books co-signed by Bartov. Yet click on the link provided in the piece and it notes that Gallant’s remarks were directed at what it called “Hamas fighters”. I would prefer the word “terrorists” but it is nevertheless right about the intended target. There are also video clips in which Gallant’s “human animals” phrase clearly refers to Hamas. For example, here (Hebrew) he refers to the “human animals” as the “Daesh (Isis) of Gaza”.

None of these points mean that Israel is beyond criticism. There are certainly examples of extremist Israeli figures saying abominable things and no doubt instances of misbehaviour from IDF troops and units. But the anti-Israel case is packed full of misdirection and selective quotes. It also ignores the fact that Israel is in the midst of an existential war against multiple adversaries avowedly bent on its destruction. Their doctrinal anti-Semitism is there for all who care to look rather than a fiction cynically weaponised by Israel’s supporters.

It is surely not Bartov’s intention but his tireless presentation of the genocide case has strengthened considerably the narrative that presents Israel as intrinsically evil. This inverts reality by presenting Israel as a perpetrator of genocide rather than the intended victim of genocidal forces. That false premise is in turn is a powerful force driving contemporary anti-Semitism.

PHOTO: "Keynote Omer Bartov (BEYOND-Konferenz) 14.06 (cropped)" by Bildungsstätte Anne Frank is licensed under CC BY 3.0.