A leading scholar of the Holocaust and genocide warned Tuesday the continued "silence" of many in his field of study regarding Israel's massacre of Palestinians in Gaza "has made a mockery of the slogan 'never again''" as he outlined in a New York Times opinion piece how he came to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in the besieged enclave.
At that point, about 1 million Palestinians had been ordered to the so-called "safe zone" of al-Mawasi—which was then targeted in numerous attacks.
Months after one top Israeli official called for the "total annihilation" of Gaza—home to more than 2 million people—Bartov concluded that the government's "actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population."
"I'm a Genocide Scholar," reads the essay's headline. "I Know It When I See It."
Like a number of other experts who were at first reluctant to designate the assault on Gaza a genocide—the term coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944—Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Omer Bartov gradually came to recognize Israel's campaign of targeted starvation, bombings on civilian infrastructure, forced displacement, and other attacks as genocidal violence as he watched the early months of the war in late 2023 and early 2024.
By May 2024, he wrote at the Times, "it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of [Israel Defense Forces] operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack," including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's threat to turn Gaza into "rubble" and his call for Israeli citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you"—a reference to the biblical passage calling on the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" in their fight against an ancient enemy.
At that point, about 1 million Palestinians had been ordered to the so-called "safe zone" of al-Mawasi—which was then targeted in numerous attacks.
Months after one top Israeli official called for the "total annihilation" of Gaza—home to more than 2 million people—Bartov concluded that the government's "actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population."