A Genocide Scholar Asks “What Went Wrong” in Israel

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0:47You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In recent years, and especially since October 7th and the war on Gaza that followed, I've tried to hear out a range of voices on the question of Israel and Palestine on this show. We've heard from Palestinians like the poet Mossab Abu Toa, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his essays in The New Yorker. I've spoken with the writers Raja Shehada and Yossi Klein Halevi, the broadcaster Yonit Levi, the philosopher Avishai Margulie, the historian Rashid Khalidi.

1:37I asked peace negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley about how this conflict could possibly end. Now today, I'm in conversation with Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born historian of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and a professor at Brown University. Bartoff describes the terrible events of October 7th as a war crime. But as Israel's war ground on, with a death toll that by now exceeds 70 ,000 Palestinians, he wrote an essay in the New York Times that described the war as a genocide, which for an Israeli and a scholar of genocide was a startling thing and had an enormous impact on its audience.

2:20Omar Bartov has now published a book reappraising his homeland called Israel, What Went Wrong. Bartov was born in 1954, and as a kid he was unquestioning of mainstream Zionism. But in adulthood, as Israel began building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, his thinking began to evolve. By 1973, Bartov was a young soldier doing his required military service when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, the so-called Yom Kippur War. I was in uniform then. Everybody was entirely shocked. I should tell you, the first thing that came to my mind on October 7th, 2023, was October 6th, 1973. Because the sense of shock, the lack of preparedness, the arrogance that had been there before both events.

3:21It was very similar. I don't think you were alone, right? I mean, I think most Israelis who were old enough to remember 73 made the parallel, and maybe Hamas was not acting by accident in its dates. Yeah, it missed by one day, but yes. You were serving in the IDF, which of course is legally required for citizens over 18, and you wrote about that time. You said this, Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of Arish, which was then occupied by Israel, pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population, observing us from their shuttered windows.

4:03For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people. It seems to me that your military service really did, as you said earlier, begin to shape you as a human being and as a scholar. It did. I was very young, and I was very well socialized. What is that? So I did what young men in Israel did. I did it without thinking twice. I wanted to be a combat soldier. I wanted to be an officer. And I became one. I did my best. And I thought that I was, generally, I thought I was doing the right thing. And then there were moments when I had that feeling, that uncanny feeling. and they were at that moment in El Arish in northern Sinai.

5:00They were, you know, I served for about a year in Gaza. I served in the West Bank. So the sense, this question that you suddenly ask yourself, what am I doing here? Why am I here? This is not my home. It would come up, but it was not. I can't say that it was a fully developed political understanding. It was a feeling that something was not right. I'd say that my maybe moment of real awakening was only really in 1988, 87, 88, with the outbreak of the first Intifada. that was a moment I was still young I was an officer in reserve I had every likelihood that I would be called up to go and break their bones as we were told to do by the Minnesota defense at the time Yitzhak Rabin and that was not something I wanted to do and I was quite outraged at that point, I could see where this was heading.

6:22And that was when I had the cheek to write Rabin a little note saying that he was leading the IDF in the same direction that I had researched and saw the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, had gone down that slippery slope of brutalizing an army. You wrote a note to Yitzhak Robin, who was the defense minister, comparing the Israeli reaction to the First Intifada to the Wehrmacht, to the German army. Did you get a response? I did. And I was shocked because I didn't actually write him a private letter. There was a postcard going around describing a particular atrocity of killing a Palestinian child.

7:10And I was so outraged that I took my pen and wrote in tiny letters that statement and sent it to him. And I had no expectation of ever hearing from him. And two weeks later, a former letter from the Ministry of Defense arrived, and it had one line on it, which said, How dare you compare the Wehrmacht to the IDF? And I thought, I must have hit the nerve. And my reading of this later on was that Rabin must have been thinking about this. It wasn't me who caused him to think about it, but that something was happening that he realized himself, despite his brutal orders at the time, that this was not a supportable condition, that this would indeed corrupt Israeli society.

8:02You studied abroad. I believe you got your PhD in England? Yeah, I was at Oxford at St. Anthony's College. And I'm talking to you now. You're at Brown University. Why did you make your home abroad? The first Intifada broke out in December 1987. I was very frustrated with that event. I did not want to go and serve. I also didn't want to go to jail for not serving. I was also quite unhappy with the way the university, where I was teaching then, Tel Aviv University, was operating. And I had an opportunity. I was offered a fellowship at Harvard for three years. So I never, certainly not in the early years, I didn't really think that I'd just left the country for good.

9:00But as time went by, both professionally, I found the United States to be a very good place for me. And politically, I felt increasingly alienated from how Israel was evolving. How are you feeling about that now? You're sitting in the United States where political tumult is extraordinary. Is it so much more congenial to you than life would have been in, say, Tel Aviv University? Yeah, that's a good question. I think about that, you know, because— Because Americans constantly, when something horrible happens politically, especially in an extended way, whether it was during the Vietnam period, they say, well, we're going to leave.

9:44We're going to go to Canada or wherever they're going to go. But they very rarely do, or they do it in very small numbers. In Israel, one of the great fears about what's going on politically is that so many of the best and the brightest will in fact leave and have been leaving. Yes, about 200 ,000 have left since October 7th. Which is a huge number for a small country. Yeah, and they're also among the best trained, the best educated elements of society. They're often not leaving for political reasons, mind you. They're leaving because the economy is in the dumps. They're leaving because the schools have become religious and they don't see a future for their children.

10:28I would not go back to Israel now. In fact, the last time I went to Israel was December 2024. And I've not been there since. And I don't intend to go there at least until the elections and depending on the outcome of the elections. I'm not sure I would be safe there for one thing because I've been quite outspoken and if anybody looks at what I wrote and they may not well let's get into that um just weeks after October 7th very short period of time after you wrote a a an op-ed in the New York Times saying there was no proof of a genocide in Israel's bombardment of Gaza which had just really begun and and and it was horrific, but it had just begun.

11:17And you wrote this, we know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time. So take me back to that moment. What were you seeing then that suggested that there was in fact, in your view, an imminent genocide that was preventable.

11:46You have called October 7th itself a war crime. It's not as if you're in the business of excusing what happened that day by any stretch of the imagination. Look, I mean, what Hamas did, killing about 800 civilians, taking 251 hostages, was obviously a war crime and potentially a crime against humanity. There's no question about it. What troubled me, by the time that article came out, I think on November 10th, so just a month after these events, about 10 ,000 people in Gaza had already been killed by then. And the majority of them were assumed to be, and it's now we know, were civilians. And there was massive destruction.

12:36of homes and other facilities in Gaza. So as I wrote there, there was already pretty good evidence that war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity, meaning killing of large numbers of civilians, were already occurring. But I also refer there to the fact that there was a rhetoric in Israel which had a genocidal content. There were people in executive positions in the Israeli government, in the Israeli military, in the security establishment, who were making genocidal statements, statements that could be also construed as incitement to troops. And Israel had conscripted over 300 ,000 reservists who were exposed to, you know, their civilians, and they're exposed to this kind of rhetoric.

13:26They shall have no water. They shall have no food. They will have no power. They are human animals, and they will be treated as such. That kind of rhetoric, remember what Amalek did unto you, that scared me. That's what Netanyahu said about Amalek, the figure in the Bible. But let me ask you, this is a crucial question. How do you define genocide? The only definition that I find relevant in these cases exists. It's a definition that is in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which is a UN convention from 1948. It defines genocide as acts carried out with the intent of destroying a particular group, could be a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, as such.

14:21So you have to show that there is an intent to destroy a group as a group, And you have to show that this intent is being implemented. And I was very worried in November that this was the way things were going. And the reason I really wrote this article was I was hoping that someone in the Biden administration would pay attention. Because I was clearly aware then and now that Israel can only operate at this sort of volume of operation, this kind of intensity, with constant help from the United States in providing arms, in providing economic help, and in providing a diplomatic iron dome in protecting Israel, mostly in the Security Council through its veto power.

15:17The truth of the matter is that had President Biden acted in November or December of 2023 to stop Israel, had he told Netanyahu, you have two weeks to wrap this up, and if you don't, then you'll be on your own, then we might have said that there were war crimes, there was terrible destruction, and it might have become a genocide, but it didn't. But the Biden administration did not act. And by May 2024, it became clear that this pattern of operations, a genocidal pattern of operation, which conformed to the statements that were made immediately after October 7th, was actually being implemented.

16:02You write in your book that the May 2024 attack on Rafa, Rafa is a city in the southern end of the Gaza Strip, that to you was the turning point. What happened in that attack and why did that change how you were viewing the question of genocide? In the city of Rafah that before the war had a population of about a quarter of a million people, at that point in May there were a million people. Half of the population of Gaza was concentrated in Rafah. And the reason was that they were displaced by the IDF. The IDF told them to leave their homes for their own safety because their neighborhoods, towns, villages would become areas of operations and move out, move south.

16:52Obviously, after that, the IDF actually demolished their homes. But they now were concentrated in large numbers in Rafah. So if the army were to move into the city, and that's what the Biden administration was saying, they would have killed vast numbers of people. And so the administration said, don't do that. And the IDF said, don't worry about it. We'll take care of it. And they moved those people to Al-Mawasid, which is the coastal area in southwestern Gaza where there was no humanitarian infrastructure whatsoever. And then they moved into the city and flattened it. By August, Rafah is gone.

17:33It doesn't exist. What was the pattern of this entire operation? What was the IDF trying to accomplish? Because there was an official war goal, which was our goal is to destroy Hamas and release the hostages. And there was, of course, a contradiction between the two because, as we know, hostages died because of IDF operations. So trying to destroy Hamas actually also— But figure me what Netanyahu would say to you, I know, if you were facing him, he would say, come on. They could have ended the whole thing by releasing the hostages. They didn't release the hostages. Hamas built a vast infrastructure underground to protect not the people of Gaza, but Hamas itself, leaving.

18:20And that they wanted this. They wanted this to encourage international outrage against the state of Israel. And you know the arguments, and you can fill them out yourself. So the first argument is that had they released the hostages, we would have stopped. But of course, Hamas was perfectly happy to release the hostages. That's what Hamas was offering. Release our prisoners, and we will release the hostages in an agreement. No, disarm was another question, but that's a different condition. So you have to decide what the condition is. Almost all the hostages who came back came back through agreement with Hamas.

19:05The idea that you would get them released through military operations failed miserably. The idea that you would destroy Hamas by destroying Gaza similarly failed miserably. Because Gaza has been destroyed, but Hamas is still there. It did not destroy Hamas, and in the process, the IDF carried out genocide of the population. The opportunity is to empty Gaza of its population. What they wanted to do was to ethnically cleanse Gaza. They didn't want genocide. They didn't want to kill them all. They wanted them to leave. And go where? But of course, exactly. There was no place for them to go. The big difference between the Nakba of 1948 and what happened in 23, 24, 25 in Gaza is that at the time the borders were open in 48, they could flee.

19:59And they did flee to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Syria. In 2023, 2024, Israel, of course, did not open its borders. Egypt did not open its borders, and they had no place to flee. And so, ethnic cleansing, which was what the Israeli government wanted to carry out, became genocide. Not for the first time. This is historically quite common. Many genocides started like that. Part of the reaction that you've got, I imagine, to your use of the word genocide, I wonder what pain that caused you and what reaction you got, particularly from Israelis. Look, I mean, I want to start by saying that we can say that our heart is broken by saying that.

20:48But first of all, our heart must be broken because of the suffering of the people who suffered in Gaza, above all. of that suffering and of the fact that that was caused by Jewish men and women, Israeli Jews, by people who are the children and grandchildren of my friends. That does break my heart, yes. And the state is still, to this moment, in complete and total denial of what it had done. That does break my heart. Now, how do people respond to it? Some have sort of felt uncomfortable themselves because they know that what I'm saying is correct. They may not want to call it genocide because in Israel, people associate the word with the Holocaust.

21:37And they say, well, it doesn't look like the Holocaust, which it doesn't. What happened in Gaza is not the Holocaust. What happened in Gaza is a particular genocide that happened in Gaza, very different from the Holocaust, but conforming to the definition of genocide by the UN, which, as I said, is the only one that matters. Another form of pushback that you get also is that, wait a minute, the United States, in the Second World War, in the firebombing of Dresden, of Tokyo, more recently in its war against ISIS, that it was unbelievably brutal. and in the rearview mirror might not have been, quote-unquote, necessary in the military sense and certainly in the humanitarian sense.

22:28So why all this uproar around Israel? So, yeah, I mean, there are many such questions. And you can also say, why do we talk about Israel or not, about what Russia is doing or China is doing or Somalia and so forth. But to this particular case, the U.S. killed about 600 ,000 German civilians in open cities intentionally, knowing that they were killing civilians with the idea that maybe that will make the civilians stand up against their own regime. They just tried it again in Iran, having not learned that lesson, that it doesn't work that way. It never did. It never will. Or Vietnam. Or Vietnam.

23:13So why is that not genocide? The question is, what was the intent? And as I said, in genocide, intent matters. How do you discern intent? When the U.S. occupied Germany, what did it do to the Germans? It did the Marshall Plan in Germany. It invested money in Germany to rebuild Germany. It set to work to reconstruct Germany. Israel's goal in Gaza, you can see what its goal in Gaza is right now. Gaza now, the population of Gaza lives in less than half of the territory. It's unhoused. It's living in tents. It has no infrastructure. They're living there like dogs. And nobody is doing anything about it.

24:02And the plan, the future of the genocide in Gaza, seems to be to create a kind of resort town for the rich and to have the Palestinians be the water carriers for that. Those who will clean the toilets, wash the dishes, and the rest of the time live in so-called humanitarian towns, which would be akin to concentration camps. At the same time in the West Bank, you're seeing more and more settler violence that's countenanced by the right-wing government. Do you think a change in government in Israel would make any difference at all? Even those who are supposed to be left of center in that opposition, which may hopefully become a coalition, have no plan whatsoever that I have seen as to what to do with the issue of Palestine and Palestinians.

24:55You're referring to Yair Golan and others. Yair Golan and, yeah, I mean, none of them. Yair Lapid. Or Gantz or Lapid or none of them. So what difference would it make? For the Palestinians, in the short run, I don't think it'll make any difference. I'm speaking with the historian Omer Bartoff. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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26:45his homeland. It's called Israel, What Went Wrong. I'll continue my conversation now with Omer Bartov. You teach at Brown. And specifically, I want to talk about another word that evokes a lot of emotions. We just discussed genocide. Here's the other one, Zionist. Zionist, when I was growing up, I'm just a few years younger than you, meant something quite different. It had a very different electrical charge to it, depending on what community you were sitting in. What does it mean to the students that you teach? What does it mean to you? I teach right now on the Holocaust and the Nakba. And I have a large number of students.

27:34I have Muslim students, I have Jewish students, I have Palestinian students, Pakistani, many regular American students. And I think that they have different opinions. They're open-minded. They want to know. They're not worried. When they come to class initially, they're sort of uncomfortable with each other, and they don't know what's going to happen. And as they're exposed to more readings and to more knowledge, they open up, and they just want to understand. and I think that's the great thing about a university and that's what this current atmosphere that exists that tries to control teaching, that tries to tell you what you can teach or what you can't teach is destructive of education, quite a part of understanding this particular event.

28:24I don't have great faith in universities right now and university administrations right now. They're cowering. and faculty have never been known to be the most courageous people in the world. So I worry about it. More students want to come to this class because they feel a need to understand and there's very little on offer because so many faculty are afraid of teaching about Israel-Palestine. They're afraid of being condemned as anti-Semitic. And I frankly don't give a damn what people think. I think you've got that pretty covered though. on the anti-Semitic end by being an Israeli Jew. Is that a kind of shield against that kind of attack?

29:12I don't know because my administration tells me that they get hundreds of emails telling them to fire me, that I'm in the pay of Hamas and Qatar and that I'm an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew at the same time. I'm afraid I get the same. I'm afraid I get the same when I write from there. Well, let's get to the word Zionism. I grew up in a Zionist. home, you know. And I did everything that a good Zionist Israeli, which is very different from Zionist American does. Tell the listeners what that meant to you. My existence in Israel was self-evident. I had no questions about it. I was born into it.

29:49I ran barefoot on the sand. I spoke Hebrew as my first language. It was my home. It was my place. And I did the things that you were supposed to do. I went to the army. I did everything as a good Israeli. I didn't even think of myself truly neither as a Jew nor as a Zionist. I was an Israeli young man. But did you have some conception somewhere in the back of your mind? We discussed this earlier, the discussion about this was very scant, that had your mother, for example, stayed in Poland a bit longer, she would have ended up in Auschwitz. And that Zionism at a certain point, and we'll talk about it in terms of the Palestinians in a second, was that this was the last refuge available because it's not as if the rest of the world was welcoming Jewish refugees, including this country, by the way.

30:46Look, I mean, when I was growing up, this was all very abstract. I knew all these arguments, having received the education that I had, I could not understand why Jews were living anywhere else. It's not only about those who, you know, got out at the last time or didn't from Europe. I could not understand why Jews were living in America. I went to Germany and I was asking German Jews, why are you living here? You should live in Israel. So to me, it was completely self-evident. The more, the deeper understanding, when I was writing about my mother's hometown, I truly realized that had my grandfather not made a decision in 1935 to take his three children and his wife and move to Palestine, and he was dishonest, I would not have been born because I know exactly what happened to those who stayed behind.

31:39And so, yes, of course, it was an argument that we, my generation, internalized. So, you know, as I write in the book, I mean, we all belong to mutilated families. And we knew it vaguely, but we also took our, one has to understand that we took our existence as self-evident, like all children do. And the question of why are we here and what did it take to make this our place, how much violence was involved in making us be born as a self-evident consequence of that act, that came later. We were basically, my generation was raised on two denials, two fundamental denials, fundamental to Zionism. One was the Shlilata Galut, as it's called in Hebrew, the negation of the diaspora.