Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Fariba Amini writes: Omer Bartov recently wrote an Op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he described the war on Gaza as a genocide. His piece garnered a great deal of praise but also criticism by scholars and journalists who reject the term “genocide” for what is happening in Gaza.
Professor Bartov is the author of several important books regarding the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and its aftermath.
His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong? will be published in April 2026.
He is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Department of History and a Faculty Fellow, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University.
He was kind enough to make time for me and grant me this interview despite his busy schedule.
F.A. Let me begin with your background. You were born in Israel and served in the Israeli Army. You were badly injured during your time as a commander. What was it like?
O.B. I was injured on December 12, 1976, in a training accident as the commander of three armored personnel carriers (APCs). The entire brew of the APC in which I was riding was injured. I spent a month in the hospital with facial fractures, as well as nerve and dental damage, and was in danger of losing an eye. The accident was the result of negligence in allotting training areas in the base.
Your parents moved to Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Why did they move there? What was their reason?
My mother came with her family from Poland as an 11-year-old girl in 1935. Her father was a Zionist but was also motivated by the growing economic difficulties and antisemitism, as well as personal reasons, especially seeing to begin a new life rather than remaining under the influence of his somewhat authoritarian father. The rest of the family that remained in Poland were all murdered in the Holocaust. My father was born in Palestine, hourly after his parents emigrated there from Poland in the mid 1920s. My paternal grandfather was also a staunch Zionist and wanted his firstborn to be born in Eretz Israel.
Your mother was born in Ukraine, in a town where pogroms took place. Can you give us some background to the massacre of Jews in the town where she was born?
I wrote extensively on the event in my mother’s hometown of Buczacz during the Holocaust in my book Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018). The town and the region of Galicia in which it was located had had an interethnic population of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews for about 400 years. With the rise of nationalism in the late 19th century tensions between these groups intensified, and the Jews came to be seen as unwanted outsiders. World War I brought great violence and devastation to the region. The region was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and subjected to nationalization of the economy and massive deportations of all ethnic groups, enhancing tensions between them. The Germans took over in July 1941 and by June 1943 murdered most of the Jewish population, some 10,000 people, both by deportations to extermination camps and by mass shootings in situ. The genocide was facilitated by large-scale collaboration by the local Ukrainian population and police units recruited locally. Over 90% of the Jewish population of Galicia was murdered. The Polish population was then ethnically cleansed by Ukrainian nationalist militias. After the war this region, which is now West Ukraine, became almost purely Ukrainian.
Omer Bartov, The Butterfly and the Axe [A novel] (Amsterdam Press, 2023). Click her to Buy.
You became a professor at Brown, and you have written several books, among them your recent one. Can you elaborate?
My early research was on the crimes of the Wehrmacht in World War II, especially on the Eastern Front in its war against the Soviet Union. I wrote about it in my books The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (1985), and Hitler’s Army (1991). I then turned to the relationship between total war and genocide, elaborated in my books Murder in Our Midst (1996), Mirrors of Destruction (2000), and Germany’s War and the Holocaust (2003). I also wrote on the recycling of antisemitic images in film in my book The “Jew” in Cinema (2005). More recently I became interested in the politics of memory in Ukraine and the history of interethnic relations in the eastern borderlands of Europe, about which I wrote in my books Erased (2007), Anatomy of a Genocide (2018), and Tales from the Borderlands (2022).
In a NY Times op-ed piece, which you wrote recently about the genocide in Gaza, you said when I see a genocide I can see one. How do you compare the two genocides, the one perpetrated by the Nazis and the one now taking place in Gaza. I realize comparisons between the two are not warranted but how did you conclude that what is happening today in Gaza is now a genocide?
Determining whether genocide is taking place is not a function of comparing it to the Holocaust but rather of seeing whether it conforms to the definition of genocide provided in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNGC, 1948). The convention defines genocide as “the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These include “(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Israeli ;leaders have repeatedly made genocidal statements indicating an intent to destroy that part of the Palestinian people in Gaza as such; and Israe; has systematically destroyed Gaza (over 70% of the building including health, educational, religious, cultural, and sanitation structures and the entire infrastructure of the Strip), has killed anywhere between 60,000-100,000 people, the majority women and children, wounded 140,000, displaced 2 million (almost the entire population), caused a dramatic drop in life expectancy, created the greatest orphan crisis in modern history, with 40,000 children having lost one or both parents, and 41% of families caring for children not their own. 14,000 women have lost their husbands. One of five babies were born immaturely or underweight because of lack of food. Miscarriages rose 300% since October 2023; one of three pregnancies was defined as high risk.
The clear goal of the Israeli government is to make Gaza uninhabitable for its population, to push it to the southern part of the Strip, and then to remove from the Strip altogether. In late May 2025 PM Netanyahu was cited at a discussion in the foreign and security committee: “We are destroying more and more houses; they have nothing to return to. The only consequence resulting from this will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate out of the Strip. Our main problem is [finding] states that will take them in.” He added, in reference to the plan for distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza [GHF], that reaching these “distribution sites” will be dependent on preventing the return of Gazans to the places from which they came. A few days before that minister Smotrich explained: “I think that it will be possible to declare that we ‘won’ within a few months. Gaza will be totally ruined; its citizens will be concentrated south of the Morag corridor [the axis that dissects the Strip from east to west between Khan Yunis and Rafah] – and from there large numbers of them will leave to other countries.”
These actions conform to subsection (a), (b), (c) and (d) of the UNGC.
What is Benjamin Netanyahu’s endgame?
First, to stay in power; second, to ethnically cleanse Gaza and then repeat that at least partially in the West Bank. Finally, to settle those areas with Jews and erase the memory of previous Palestinians’ life there.
Where will 2 million Palestinians end up?
If this action succeeds, they may end up in Indonesia, Libya, and Ethiopia, with which there are reportedly negations over transfer. Others will remain in Gaza as a debilitated population living under a harsh apartheid regime.
At the end of your NY Times op-ed piece, you argue for one state solution. Edward Said also prescribed that. To me and many others, it seems highly unlikely. How will that happen after the events on October 7th?
I do not argue for a one-state solution. What I prefer is a confederation, as outlined by “A Land for All,” a Palestinian/ Israeli group and plan which I support and belong to. The guiding principle of this plan is the creation of two sovereign states, Israela and Palestine, alongside the 1967 border, which will have open borders between them and make a distinction between citizenship and residence (as in the EU), so that Palestinian citizens could live in Israel but vote for a Palestinian parliament, and Israeli citizens could live in Palestine but vote for the Knesset. I elaborate much more on this in my forthcoming book. Look up also documentation on the organization’s website.
Can you compare Hamas with Irgun, the Haganah or all the military wings in the early stages of Israels’ creation? Irgun and Hagenah were engaged in terrorist activities. But two of their leaders became PMs of Israel. How do we explain this?
I think the more appropriate analogy is between Hamas and the Haredi National Religious movement in Israel now, an outgrowth of the Gush Emunim movement, represented now by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in combination with Jewish supremacy racism represented by Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir. Both Hamas and the Jewish National Religious movement want to create a religious (halachic/Islamic) state where Jews or Palestinians will be the overwhelming majority and religion the law of the land; both are anti-democratic., anti-liberal, xenophobic, homophobic, and tend toward extreme violence. They feed on each other by raising the specter to their people of control and destruction by the other side. The Irgun was also a terrorist organization, but its ideology was rooted in Jabotinsky’s ideas which tended to be quite liberal. His successor Menahem Begin was a democrat and parliamentarian. He would have been appalled by the current government’s action and where Netanyahu has taken the old revisionist party (Herut, Likud). The Haganah was largely dominated by socialists and Ben Gurion for all his faults was also a democrat. Of course, many leaders of resistance movements in the past century ended up as chiefs of state, for better or for worse, but for men such as Begin and Ben Gurion (who detested Begin) the current ideology driving Israel and its genocidal actions would have been anathema, I believe.
There is a saying in the Jewish tradition that we should leave this world better than we found it. How do the settlers deal with this notion? How can they even accept to live with the notion that the army they support is killing people including children and women who had nothing to do with Hamas.
The elements that have taken over the settler movement are messianic, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, Jewish supremacist and racist. They are calling for the eradication of Gaza and its population. They represent the greatest distortion of Judaism since the Zealots of the Second Temple.
Don’t you think the antisemitism terminology that is now used in every action of anyone who opposes Israeli policy has gotten out of hand or lost its meaning?
Allegations of antisemitism against those who protest Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza are a tool for silencing speech and have nothing to do with real fear or worry about antisemitism. Indeed, they are often used by people who themselves have a record of antisemitism or other racist inclinations. Moreover, this abuse of the label of antisemitism threatens to incite a rise in real antisemitism, which is incited now by the actions of Israel, which falsely claims to represent Jews around the world and therefore is endangering the very same diaspora who support it seeks.
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