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'That Is Genocide!' Israeli-American Holocaust Historian Tells Mehdi
https://zeteo.com/p/that-is-genocide-israeli-american?fbclid=IwY2xjawGsXWJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHQMlTt2LJG7rVHr8hDaTszibdClyB9TzgMkop2-PfZVO4_5DaV8CMKSliQ_aem_O09u2Wrx8dFYfmTMm-_ElQ
A powerful, wide-ranging conversation, plus audience Q&A, on Gaza, Israel, antisemitism, and more, with Omer Bartov, the world-renowned Holocaust and Genocide Studies professor.
MEHDI HASAN AND TEAM ZETEO NOV 18, 2024
In a special event hosted by Busboys & Poets in Washington DC, Mehdi sat down in front of a live audience with Omer Bartov, the esteemed professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University to discuss Israel, Gaza, genocide, semantics, and how counter-productive it can be to weaponize anti-Semitism.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has described the Israeli-American academic as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide and, in conversation with Mehdi as part of the ‘Gaza Lecture Series,’ he unpacks the meaning of the word “genocide,” why Bartov was initially hesitant to use the term when describing Israel’s attack on Gaza, and the exact moment he changed his mind.
“The Genocide Convention is not about whether you can accuse Israel of something or not. It gives a definition of what genocide is,” Bartov said. “And if you see any country that acts in this manner, and you don’t respond … then you are breaking the entire edifice of international law that was created in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent that from happening.”
For Bartov, the invasion of Rafah in May represented a turning point that convinced him that Israel wasn’t just committing war crimes — it was committing a genocidal campaign.
“You can say now that this is clearly an operation whose goal is to destroy the ability of Palestinians to live in that area as a group,” Bartov said. “And, in my definition, that is genocide.”
Watch the full fascinating interview to hear more about what he thinks about the extremist direction of the Israeli military, the current far-right Israeli government, the weaponization of antisemitism to shield Benjamin Netanyahu from criticism, and how the United States could have prevented Israel from committing genocide against Palestinians.
This talk was part of Busboys & Poets’ The Gaza Lecture Series of 2024 organized in partnership with the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding of Georgetown University. Zeteo was proud to be involved in this important conversation.
If you are a paid subscriber, please do leave your feedback in the comments below!
In case you missed them, have a look at some of our other interviews and articles:
Is Gaza a genocide?
You can say now that this is clearly an operation whose goal is to destroy the ability of Palestinians to live in that area as a group. And in my definition, that is genocide.
Have you come across a genocide where it's been so openly advertised?
The goal of Netanyahu is that any criticism of Israel can immediately be transformed into an anti-Israeli. anti-Semitic argument. What kind of level of dehumanization of Palestinians is being done? Occupation creates dehumanization. That's what it does. And it does not only dehumanize those you're occupying, it dehumanizes the occupiers.
You said the Israeli military is behaving like Nazis back in the late 80s. As a historian, you can't understand anything in history without comparing it. If you say the Holocaust is unique, Nothing like that happened before, nothing like that happened after. It stops being a historical event. It becomes metaphysical.
My guest today is Omar Bartov, one of the world's leading experts on genocide. He's an Israeli-American academic and author. He is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, and no less an authority than the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has described him as, quote, one of the world's leading specialists on the subject of genocide.
I interpret that as he knows his shit on this subject, because there's a lot of people running their mouths online on this issue who don't know what they're talking about. So I'm actually very honored to be alongside someone who does know what they're talking about. I'm just going to jump straight into it.
Omar and I are going to have a chat. Then we're going to open it up to questions from around the restaurant. That's weird, around the restaurant. I'm doing an event in a restaurant. I plan to eat afterwards as well, just to be clear. Oh, well, let's talk about the term itself, the G word,
which a lot of people in the US media don't like to say, as I've discovered in recent months. It's a deeply contested term. Recently, I was interviewing a man named Piers Morgan for Zeteo. And he said, what's happening in Gaza is not a genocide. You can't say what Israel is doing is a genocide.
Because if it was a genocide, they would be killing everyone there or trying to kill everyone. And that's what a genocide is, he said to me. That's how a lot of people, ordinary people, define the term when they hear it. How do you define genocide? What is the actual definition of genocide?
Hi, Mehdi. Yeah, we just got straight into it. Hi, everyone. This is my first experience also speaking at a restaurant on a mic. So, different people define genocide in different ways, but there's only one definition that actually matters under international law, and that's the definition in the Genocide Convention of 1948,
which interestingly was accepted by the UN as a result of what happened in World War II, Nazi crimes and especially the Holocaust. And that definition says that genocide is acts committed with the intent to destroy a group, could be a religious group, ethnic group, national group, in whole or in part as such.
So what matters here is A, that you can show intent, and B, I'm sorry that you're eating, but B, that you're killing people not as individuals, but as members of the group, that your intent is to destroy the group rather than simply the people who belong to that group. And so it's not a question of numbers.
It's not that you have to have millions of people. It's that your intention is that the group, as a group, will disappear even as members of the group remain alive.
Okay, so on that basis, let us cut to the chase right at the outset. The big question, in your view then, is Gaza a genocide? Does what's happening there meet the definition of a genocide, the crime of crimes?
Right, so one problem with the term genocide, once it was invented, and it was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who was then living in the United States, one problem with that term is that because it's considered to be the prime of crimes,
whenever you see something horrible happening and you think a lot of people are being killed, you say, well, this must be genocide. although it could be a war crime, it could be a crime against humanity, it could be an atrocity, but not necessarily a genocide. So when following the Hamas attack of October 7,
which in my view was a war crime and a crime against humanity, Israel attacked Gaza. And within weeks it was clear that war crimes were being committed and crimes against humanity, and I can explain what that means. And in November, I actually published an op-ed in the New York Times where I wrote that there is
good evidence that there are war crimes and crimes against humanity, and I warned that this may become a genocide. There were many people who were saying already that it was genocide, and I was not convinced that it was still that, although thousands of people had already died. And by May 2024, when the IDF attacked Rafah,
which was the last attack in this campaign, I had become convinced that it was, in fact, that the IDF was actually carrying out a genocidal campaign in Gaza. And the reason was that That was the last concentration of civilians who had been fleeing because the IDF was telling them to move from one place to another.
There were about a million people there who had been already displaced several times. And the Americans were saying to the Israelis, don't attack because you're going to kill a lot of civilians. And the IDF said, don't worry about it. We'll move them. And they moved them. to the Amawasi area, which is the beach area in southwestern Gaza.
And then they attacked Rafa. To me, that meant at that point that this whole operation was not simply about destroying Hamas and not simply about releasing the hostages. Both have not been accomplished yet. but rather that it was about making the entire strip unlivable for Palestinians. And if you looked back from there,
you could see that what the idea was doing is a systematic campaign that was not only fighting Hamas, not even only killing large numbers of people, but also systematically destroying universities, schools, mosques, museums, anything that could make for the life of a group as a group, and making Gaza, including its infrastructure, completely unlivable.
And now we can say since October, since early October, the IDF is carrying out a specific operation in the northern part of Gaza, the northern third of Gaza, north of the Netzarim Corridor, as they call it, which is to empty it entirely of its population, flatten it,
with settlers already waiting on the other side of the border to move in. So in that sense, you can say now that this is clearly an operation whose goal is to destroy the ability of Palestinians to live in that area as a group. And in my definition, that is genocide.
So on the one hand, it's a big deal when an Omar Bartov comes out and says this is a genocide because of your scholarship, your history, your studying of Nazi Germany, and the fact that you are an Israeli. That matters whether we like it or not.
People take it more seriously when you say it versus when I say it. You also served in the Israeli military when you were a younger person, like other conscripts. What's interesting, though, is another Israeli-American historian, Raz Siegel, who I'm sure you know, he came out days after October 7th in Jewish Currents,
and he said it's a textbook case of genocide. And as you mentioned, you weren't at that point at that time. And I interviewed you... Some people probably don't know this, but I used to have a show on MSNBC. And I interviewed you at the start of November.
And you said to me, the possibility of a genocide is staring us in the face. I think it was the first discussion of genocide on American cable news at that time. But you were saying, it could be. Potential. I'm worried about it. But you weren't there. And then, as you said, you wrote the New York Times piece.
And then this summer, you wrote a big Guardian essay, which I urge everyone to read if they get a chance, in which you talked about visiting Israel this year, in which you talked about Rafa. And you said, I no longer have any doubts. You also did an interview with the Guardian more recently.
And you said, I want to quote you. You said, there was a concerted and intentional effort mosques, museums, public buildings, housing, infrastructure. If you look back, these are your words, you could say that this was happening from the beginning. So I'm just wondering, in hindsight, did you get it wrong by coming to this so late?
When you were saying to The Guardian more recently, you could see it from the beginning. Netanyahu was saying Amalek, they were saying cut off electricity and water. In hindsight, do you think it was from the beginning? And if you could go back, would Omar Vartoff say on November to me, it's a genocide?
Look, possibly, but I would say the following. When that piece of The Times came out, that was early November, and my view now is that had President Biden in November or December said to Netanyahu, you have two weeks to wrap this up, And if you don't, you're on your own.
Meaning the IDF cannot operate more than three weeks without constant supply of emissions by the U.S. It's a 24-hour kind of supply. Then it may not have become genocide. Had it stopped then, we would have said, yes, there were war crimes. Yes, there were crimes against humanity because so many civilians were killed.
But whether there was a goal to accomplish that or not, it hadn't happened. Now, intentions, as I already wrote then in November, intentions were expressed at the very beginning, October 8th. Israeli leaders with executive authority were saying, wipe them out, stop the water, stop the electricity, and so forth and so on, flatten Gaza.
But you have to connect intentions expressed to operations on the ground. You have to see them being implemented because people can also just speak, you know, just make a lot of noise. That takes time to determine. And as I say, I think it could have been stopped in November or December 23,
and then it might have not reached the kind of scale that we're seeing right now.
You know the counter-argument, Omar, that to accuse the Jewish state, Jews, of a genocide is a blood libel. It's anti-Semitism of the worst kind because Jews were the victims of the worst genocide, the Holocaust. And now you're using this trauma of genocide against them, accusing them of this great crime.
What is your response to that line of argument? I'm sure you've heard it.
Yes, I've received some emails to that effect, calling me a couple and other things. Look, there's a curious thing here. In 1948, two things happened. The State of Israel was created and the Genocide Convention was agreed on by the UN. Both events had to do with the Holocaust.
There was an international consensus at the time after the Holocaust that the Jews having been persecuted, having had no state to protect them and so forth, that it was time to allow the Jews to have a state of their own, a refuge, a haven, a safe haven.
And there was an agreement by the international community, again, on something that is very peculiar. The Genocide Convention is, we can talk about it, but it's a very peculiar law, international law, that this should never happen again. That what happened in World War II, mass crimes, including the genocide of the Jews, should never happen again.
So both the establishment of the state and the Genocide Convention are directly connected to the Holocaust. Yes, it is to me, personally, it's horrifying that the State of Israel, which was created in the wake of the Holocaust, stands accused of genocide. It's unthinkable.
But the genocide convention is not about whether you can accuse Israel of something or not. It gives a definition of what genocide is. And if you see any country that acts in this manner and you don't respond, if you allow it as Israel is being allowed now, impunity, in part because of these kind of arguments,
then you are breaking the entire edifice of international law that was created in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent that from happening. And that is a much greater tragedy and much more dangerous to all rogue states thereafter, which will all say, look, I mean, you let them get away with it, what about us?
Then accusing Israel of what it is actually doing.
Yeah, it's funny because the Israelis often say we're being held to a different standard to everyone else. What you're saying is hold them to the same standard as everyone else. Nothing more, nothing less. And the Genocide Convention says that. Were you surprised, Omar, to see the International Court of Justice take up the South African case to talk
about the plausibility of genocide in Gaza, even though the lead U.S. judge quit the court and then walked it back conveniently? Where do you think that case will even end up?
No, I was not surprised. By the way, the ICJ started deliberating such cases only recently. This is quite new, although it could have done it since it was established, and it was established with the UN. It didn't do it because of the Cold War. There's all kinds of reasons, and there are only a few cases,
one of which, of course, is the case between Russia and Ukraine, And that's interesting in the sense that one problem with the Genocide Convention is that if you identify that a country is carrying out genocide in its own borders, in its own sovereign borders, you are obliged as a signatory to do something about it,
meaning to interfere in the internal affairs of another state, which states really don't like. And so that's why it's so peculiar. And Ukraine went to the ICJ to say Russia attacked us saying that we were carrying out genocide, and we are not. So Russia was actually using that for that purpose. Now,
the ICJ had a filing from South Africa, a very detailed one, and it took it up for very good reasons. What will it do with it? I don't think we know all these courts are also political courts. I'm skeptical that at the end, and it depends a bit what happens in the coming months or years,
as long as it takes them to adjudicate this, I'm skeptical that they will identify the entire war as genocide because they'll probably fall back on a war of defense. However, I think that what I just identified now, that is that The attempt now to completely destroy, ethically cleanse entirely, the northern third of Gaza,
might actually be identified itself as a genocidal action. Similarly to what happened vis-a-vis for Bernica, those of you who remember, during the war in Bosnia where the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia did not identify the whole war by Serbia as genocidal, but did identify the killing of 8,000 boys and men, Bosnian boys and men, as genocide.
And I think that this particular case, what we are seeing now, which has been sold on Israeli TV by this general island, the retired general, for months. Yes, openly.
Openly. I mean, two things on the history of genocide here. Let's take your expertise here. Do you know of a genocide in your study of this topic you teach at Brown? Have you come across a genocide where it's been so openly advertised, right? They're not hiding it.
They're literally going on Israeli television and saying, let's burn it down. Let's flatten them. Let's kill them all, et cetera. That's my first one on the history. And number two, is it correct to say Because he's really saying right to self-defense, right? Ad nauseum. Even critics of Israel will start with, Bernie Sanders will start with,
Israel has a right to self-defense. But isn't it the case, and correct me if I'm wrong, I was never one of your students, so let's find out today how much I know about stuff. Isn't it the case that in most cases of genocide, I'm thinking of Rwanda, for example, you mentioned the Balkans.
Everyone doing the genocide always says we're fighting a war of self-defense. Mm-hmm.
So first of all, you can take my class next semester. I'll be in Rhode Island, quick as you can say. So in several cases, most importantly here, the Holocaust, The Nazis were very open about it. Hitler made a speech saying that if the Jews unleash, the Judeo-Bolshevists unleash a war against us,
the end of it will not be the Bolshevization of Europe, but the extermination of the Jewish people. And he warned that there would be a genocide. In Rwanda, in fact, there were calls on the radio. There was, in fact, the minister of communications was found guilty of genocide, although he never killed anyone simply for incitement. And incitement,
by the way, is exactly what Netanyahu was doing, what Gallant was doing, his former minister of defense now, and so forth. So, yes, it does happen. The problem is to establish intent. Not only that people say, I'm gonna kill you, I'm gonna destroy you, but that you can connect them to actions on the ground, right?
That it's not just things being said at the heat of the moment. As for the second question, most genocides occur either at a time of war, or when people say that it's a war. It's usually done to appear as if it's a military operation. And this goes back to the very first genocide of the 20th century, 1904,
by the Germans in what is now Namibia. It's the same with the genocide of the Armenians during World War I. It's the same with the genocide of the Jews in World War II. It's the same in Rwanda because there's an invasion by the Tutsi from the north.
It's the same in Campuchia when there's a war going on in Vietnam. So there's always this kind of cover. As for a war of defense, so Israel claimed that it's a war of defense. And a war of defense is the only war that is legal under international law. If you're attacked, you have every right to defend yourself.
There's a problem with it in the sense that a war of defense would be an international war and Gaza is not an independent state. It's actually occupied. It was occupied by Israel before the war. It had an internal regime of its own. But the outside borders... But even if the war is legal,
let's say it is a war of defense, a legal war,
that does not give you any license to commit crimes during that war. And I want to say, you can say the same thing about Hamas. You can say, and I would say, under international law, if you are under a regime of oppression, if you are being prevented from self-determination, you have the right to resist.
It's legal to resist. But how do you resist? It does not mean that you have a right to kill civilians, to rape, to kidnap. That you don't have a right to do. So even if the war was legal, which is dubious, the way it's conducted is illegal.
And as you pointed out, war crimes were committed from day one, regardless of the debate about genocide. Is my mic working? I can't keep track of this anymore. One thing I was going to say, you mentioned Germany. It's a real bugbear of 1905 German. Germany did not one but two genocides, right? Minimum. That's just starting at two.
We could get higher. And right now, the German government is pontificating on behalf of Israel, saying, Does anyone else find this bizarre argument that because you did a genocide, you get to be the experts on what isn't a genocide? Now, I'm like, be quiet. Sit this one out, Germany, please. Please. It's ridiculous. You are Israeli.
You were born and raised in Israel. You're also an American citizen. You're a dual national, like me. I'm telling you, we're doing a debate like, chef, this is amazing. Never done anything like this. You went back to Israel this year for the first time after October the 7th.
And it was, tell us, what kind of country did you find?
Yeah, so I wrote about that in the Guardian. Look, I mean, I have very close connections to Israel. I left it in 89, but I've been going there often. I have family there. My son lives there. He has a family there. And many of my best friends live in Israel.
And I was a bit ambivalent about going there, but I have grandchildren there now, just born, so I wanted to see them. Congratulations. Thank you. Twins. And it was a difficult experience because so many people, look, I don't know people that are on the right wing. I don't know Fetmas.
My friends are sort of left of center to very left. They're mostly well-educated people, well-traveled, cosmopolitan, they speak various languages. And what I encountered was an inability of the majority of the people that I spoke with to have any empathy whatsoever to what was being carried out in their name in Gaza. When I raised it,
people just changed the subject. Wow. People did not want to talk about it. And to me, this was very... I'd never seen that. Now, often people would tell me, you don't know what we went through. You live in Boston. What do you know? And it's true. Most of the people killed and taken hostage
were from kibbutin, were people from the left. There were peace activists there. There were people who dedicated their lives to that. And they were also killed because no one asked them who they were. And so many of my friends personally knew, personally knew many or some of the people who were killed. But the inability, the intentional indifference,
the intentional refusal to talk about what was happening there was very jarring. And it's still going on right now. I tried to think about it through work that I did many years ago on the crimes of the German army. You know, in Germany, you mentioned Germany. When I started researching Germany, it was in the late 1970s.
And at the time, Germans had accepted, yeah, okay, they did the Holocaust. But who did it? It was the SS, it was the Gestapo, it was all those nasty people that none of our families belonged to, right? We are just... good decent Germans the German army had nothing to do with it and I said no that's
impossible and so I spent several years researching it and of course the German army was deeply involved in that and there were 20 million people who had served in the German army and so everybody had relatives in the German army and it took I mean my studies were published in 85 91 Well into this century,
it's remained very difficult for Germans to accept that their own relatives had served in a criminal military organization. And so when you think about these Israelis now, they have children. grandchildren, nephews, cousins who are all serving in the IDF because the IDF is not like the American Army. Everybody's drafted.
And for them to accept that their own families are engaged in a genocidal war is at the moment completely impossible.
So I totally get that. But let's take it one step further. There's the denialism, which I get, right? Nobody wants to say my cousin or my brother went out to Gaza to kill women and children. Totally understand that. But what about the people who know what's going on, who see what's going on?
Because in Germany, in World War II, they didn't have TikTok.
No.
Right now, and I don't know how many of you are subscribers to Zateo, I know all of you will be by the end of the night, but those of you who are will have seen a documentary we produced that you watched, Omar, and gave us a blurb for called Israel's Real Extremism,
where a British crew went out to Israel and interviewed some of the soldiers who have filmed themselves looting houses, mocking Palestinians, dressing up in women's clothing that's not theirs, and putting it on the internet for everyone to see. What kind of level of dehumanization of Palestinians is being done whereby it's not just people saying to you, Omar,
well, I don't want to talk about it, change the subject, it wasn't my nephew, versus the people who go, yeah, I saw the TikToks, aren't they great? Isn't this wonderful? This is how we should treat Palestinians.
Look, I mean, it's a difficult issue. First of all, far more people knew... during World War II, what was going on, and why did they know? Because soldiers who were serving on the Eastern Front, or, mind you, American soldiers serving in the Pacific, were sending letters, accounts, photographs of atrocities.
to their mothers, to their girlfriends, being proud of it. And there are still millions of those in various attics in German homes to this day that people still find every once in a while. So things are usually much better known than people would admit. But you're right that now there are all these social media reports.
People are posting this stuff. It's illegal for them to do it. It's a breach of army discipline. But they're doing it anyway. The army's not doing anything about it. And people can watch it. There's now another show on Ajazeera.
Another documentary.
It's hard to say how many people And you can hear them on the Israeli media saying, yes, just kill them all. There are obviously a lot of people saying that. I don't know if it's the majority. I think the army as such, because he was so humiliated on October 7th, because the fiasco was unbelievable,
wanted to show that he could do it. The... composition of the IDF has changed tremendously since I certainly... More settlers. Far more right-wing people, far more settlers, far more religious fanatics in it, among the soldiers and among the middle-ranking generals, officer corps. And so there is much more hate, much more brutality. But as I say,
there is a large part of the public, and I suspect it's more than half, who are deliberately not watching. Now, if you watch Israeli TV, you wouldn't know any of this. It's simply not on Israeli TV. If you see anything about Gaza on Israeli TV, it's through the gun sights of an IDF soldier,
and all you see through that are ruins. You don't see people. None of this is reported. But, of course, you can get an app of Al Jazeera and watch it. It's not a problem. People choose not to know. They know and they deny at the same time. So you mentioned the Israeli military.
Just to deal with. Just to deal with. Israeli military followed by happy hour. This is good. Also, I'm deeply distracted by these two cheeseburgers right here. I'm sorry to put you guys on the spot, but I hope they taste good. I'm sure they taste amazing. They smell great. Omar and I will be eating after this.
The Israeli military, look, there are people who think... That the world began on October the 7th, 2023. There was nothing happening in the Middle East prior to October 7th, 2023. Interestingly, you in, I think, 89 or 87, you can correct me, wrote a letter during the first intifada.
To Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, today he's eulogized as a great peacemaker by Western liberals. He was the guy who told Israeli soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian protesters in the First Intivada. You wrote a letter to him saying that based on your research that you just mentioned to everyone,
you were the guy researching Nazi Germany and the German military, the Wehrmacht. You said the Israeli military is behaving like Nazis. Effectively, is this my summary of your letter? Well, watch out. We're heading in that direction. You invoked a Nazi parallel, did you not? Back in the late 80s.
Yes, so I was in a little shrimp. I had just come back from my PhD at Oxford. When the first indifada broke out, Rubin issued that in order to break their arms and legs. Literally, that's what the instructions said. There was a postcard going around which described a particular case in which a
Palestinian boy was taken on a police jeep, military police jeep, and then thrown out of it and killed. And I was supposed to sign it, but I was so appalled by that that I wrote in very small letters on the postcard that I had just come back from researching the Wehrmacht, the crimes of the German army,
and that under his leadership, he was leading the Israeli army in the same direction. And two weeks later, I didn't expect that anything would happen or that he would read it, of course. And two weeks later, I got a letter from the Ministry of Defense. And in the letter, in the envelope, there was a letter from him,
one line, saying, how dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht. That's the German armed forces. To me, that meant something. It meant that he actually was aware, because he took the time to respond to me, he was aware that something was not right. And whatever he did later on, and whatever we say about Oslo,
I think that Rabin began to understand that what I had sort of sketched out in my own clumsy way that if you continue with those, and that's what you're alluding to, with that kind of occupation, over time, occupation creates dehumanization. That's what he does. And he does not only dehumanize those you're occupying, he dehumanizes the occupiers.
That is what he does. And I think he understood that. And he, in his way, wanted to change that.
But the reason I bring up the letter to Rabin, Rabin to one side, a conversation for another day. We have the IHRA definition of antisemitism, very controversial definition that a lot of people in a lot of Western countries are trying to enshrine into law.
We know the Trump administration is going to go big on it next year on college campuses. And yet... You have you, a scholar of the Holocaust, saying you can make comparisons. You can talk about the Israeli military in the context of the German military.
Ronald Reagan famously called Begin in 1982 when he was wiping out Beirut and said, this is a Holocaust. He used the H word in a way I can't think of any modern American president daring to say. What do you make of that idea? Because the IHRA says if you compare Israel to Nazi Germany,
that's one of their case studies of anti-Semitism. What do you make of that?
So look, I'll say two things. First of all, speaking not as an Israeli or as a Jew or as whatever, but as a historian. You can't understand anything in history without comparing it. If you say the Holocaust is unique, nothing like that happened before, nothing like that happened after, it stops being a historical event. It becomes metaphysical.
It's something that you can't understand anything in history without seeing it within a context, without comparing it to other events. So the whole idea that you can't compare one army to another, one genocide to another, is absurd. It's a political statement, but historically it's useless.
On the definition, the IRA definition, it's not even a definition, it calls itself a working definition. And it's been pushed by the Netanyahu government now, multiple governments now for many years, It is, as you say, it has a very short definition of anti-Semitism itself, which is fine.
And then it gives 11 examples of what would be anti-Semitic speech, and seven of those 11 examples are about Ezra. Surprise! That is the problem. The result of that is that... and that's the goal of Netanyahu, is that any criticism of Israel, can immediately be transformed into an anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic argument. Anti-Zaranist, anti-Semitic argument.
So it's interesting. I want to open it up to questions for the while. I think we have Mike Robyn. Before I do that, one last question on what's in the news. What I find so fascinating is, as you say, nothing can be compared to Nazi Germany, nothing can be compared to the Holocaust,
nothing can be compared to Hitler, including Donald Trump. People get very upset when his own generals are calling him a fascist. Those are all off-limits. when Israel wants to be the ones doing the comparing. So this week, we were told that a bunch of racist Israeli soccer hooligans shouting genocidal statements are the new Anne Frank.
I'm not making that up. People literally put up pictures of Anne Frank saying, in the city of Anne Frank, this has happened again, which is insane, right? No one's supporting the violence on the streets of Amsterdam from any side. I'm not. But the idea that football hooligans getting into fights, and in this case,
getting into fights over racism and what's happening in Gaza, they were literally chanting, all the schools are closed because all the kids are killed. The idea that that's Anne Frank, that's a Holocaust, that's a pogrom, what do you make of that?
Well, you know, Guido Levy, who is maybe one of the two bravest journalists in Israel, wrote a piece on that, and he said, while people were coming out saying there's a pogrom in Amsterdam, and the entire media was covering the so-called pogrom, there's a daily pogrom in the West Bank happening every day, and nobody's reporting that.
These Maccabi Tel Aviv hoodlums, whatever they are, are known to be racist. They were chanting these things. They were tearing down Palestinian flags from private residences, and they got into fights with other people. Because they were not in Tel Aviv, they went out to them. They burned down a taxi. the decision by mainstream American media, European media,
let alone Israel, not to talk about the fact that these people who came there, including among them people who had just come back from service in Gaza, not reporting that at all and presenting that as an anti-Semitic pogrom tells you all you need to know about how the media...
is in many ways providing Israel with cover for what it is doing at the moment in Gaza. And mind you, not only in Gaza, I just want to add that not only in the West Bank, but also destroying schools of villages now in southern Lebanon. And as of today, moving further north.
Well said, the media providing cover to Israel's genocide. And also, Joe Biden woke up from a nap to post also about innocent victims of anti-Semitism in Amsterdam. Thanks, Joe. We will miss you not. Okay, I'm going to repeat the question only because we're taping as well, so I'm not sure if it's catching.
The question is, has this been going on for a long time, the denial of genocide? In particular, because we're in the U.S., which was built on a genocide. And interestingly, we have a Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., which is very powerful. I urge you all to go there.
But we don't have a memorial for the genocide we did.
Look, I mean, genocide is a term that gets to be used legally only in 1948. You can apply it back to events that happened before, and you can talk about genocide of Native Americans, you can talk about genocide of the aboriginals in Australia and so forth. There has always been denial,
but I think that the importance of the Genocide Convention and of the effort by Rafael Lemkin, this Jewish-Polish lawyer who fought for it, was to actually say, yes, this existed before. The first genocide that he thought of was the genocide of the Armenians. This is what moved him in the 1930s when he started thinking about it,
was an attempt to say, okay, the international community has an obligation to identify the crime, to try to prevent it, and if it can't, to punish those who carry it out. So... This is something that all of us, not only people at the White House, all of us are responsible to actually put into effect.
So the question to Professor Bontov is, there's a lot of media manipulation. What is the best way of having dialogue between different sides, given what's going on around a topic as divisive as this?
So if you mean different sides, Israeli Jews and Palestinians, if you mean different sides in terms of people having different opinions in general, these are two different questions. I think that for a public debate between different sides, the most important thing is for people to inform themselves,
to try as best they can to get out of the social media bubbles where they always find opinions that they agree with and to try to actually find other sources of information and to engage to the ability that they can with people who think differently. If you talk about Israelis and Palestinians,
there are Jewish Israelis and Palestinians who are actually trying to speak with each other. But the atmosphere right now is such that it's extremely difficult and often dangerous for them to do that. And we should encourage that. And I think that the public in general has a responsibility, especially if you live in a democratic country.
to put pressure on your own representative on people who depend on you to vote for them to make sure that they move out of that kind of passivity the fear of speaking out even when you know that they they know the truth but they won't do anything about it and to force them through public action, through demonstrations,
through activism, to either express their real opinions or to leave and to no longer elect them. And this is something that we don't see enough of today in the United States. And one has to understand, the United States is totally complicit And what is happening, the United States is the country that is providing Israel with impunity,
both by giving it a flow of arms and by giving it diplomatic cover. It could change that at a moment. And it won't do it unless there is much more pressure on the government and on representatives than there is at the moment.
Yeah, great question. The second question, for everyone who didn't hear it, was about Israeli media and politicians seem to be able to get away with saying more than you can say in the United States. One example of that, Haaretz headline this week said ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza.
I've not seen the Washington Post or the New York Times say ethnic cleansing in any of their headlines. So that's one question to you. And the other question was the relationship between the Holocaust and the Nakba in 1948.
So I teach a class on the Holocaust and the Nakba, actually. This will be easy for you. You can take that one, too. There is obviously a connection between the Holocaust and the Nakba. Not in the sense that they are analogous events. They're very different events. And my interest is not in comparing them to each other,
but rather in understanding that they are inextricably linked to each other. We have to understand that The Holocaust ends in 1945. The expulsion of the Palestinians happens in 1948 during a war, and actually quite a bitter war, between Jews, Palestinians, and then other Arab armies. Quite a number,
at least a third of the soldiers who are serving in the IDF in 1948 are people who came as refugees from Europe, many of them Holocaust survivors, and they participate in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Many Holocaust survivors who had been displaced numerous times had lost their homes, had lost their families, had lost everything they had.
When they come are offered housing. They're offered housing that had belonged to Palestinians. In many cases with still warm food on the table. So the connection is, first of all, that the events are so close to each other, and people move from one event to the other.
The second very important connection is that both, and I'm hoping to write on that a book, both groups see their own national trauma, the Nakba for Palestinians and the Holocaust for Jews as constitutive elements of their own national identity. And as a number of people have written,
and you can read a very interesting book edited by Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir, that's an Israeli, a Palestinian from Israel and a professor at the Hebrew University, You can think of those two events, these two constitutive events, not as competing with each other, but as two overlapping traumas that can bring people together if they recognize
each other's tragedy. So that's the first one. On Israeli media being blunt. Yeah, look, I mean, it's it's a bit of it's not accurate. So, yes, Haaretz has these headlines. This was a leader by Shoker in Haaretz and some other op-eds. But hardly anybody reads Haaretz. It's mostly foreigners who read Haaretz. In Israel, hardly has any readership.
Plus 972, which I highly recommend to all of you. It's a fantastic publication, but hardly anybody reads the Hebrew version of it, a local pool. In Israel now, if you say things like I'm saying, then you're not really safe. And you can be visited by the police, called by the Shabak, arrested, fired by your university,
as has happened to several Palestinian scholars.
I can't believe that would ever happen in the Middle East's only democracy. All right, should we take two more? So just to repeat the question, one was asking about the comparison between Palestinians referring to their dad as martyrs and saying, do you mind me asking, are you Jewish yourself?
It depends on who you ask.
Okay. Well, I asked you, but that's fine. I just wanted to check where you're speaking from within the community or not. But with Jews not referring to 6 million people in dead in the Holocaust, does that affect the discourse in any way and the cultural discourse? And then the other question was about can Israelis distinguish themselves from
their government on this issue when it's not just one issue. It is a decades-long Israeli state project the encroachable on Palestinian land.
So, on the first question, actually, if you look at memorials or rhetoric about the victims of the Holocaust, they're said to have died, Al-Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying God. And they're called Kiddushim, holy people. So first of all, there is, and it's part of a Jewish tradition. I'm not talking about Zionism or the state of Israel.
There is actually a Jewish tradition of calling the victims of pogroms and other calamities as holy, which is the Jewish equivalent. But in Israel, certainly since the 1980s, the Holocaust has started playing a particular political role in solidifying Israeli society around the Holocaust, not only as a case in which six million died sanctifying God,
whether they were religious or not, most of them were, but also as an imminent danger. And so Jewish martyrdom in that sense is not only looking to the past, but also looking forward And that's very much part of Israeli politics today. That's why immediately after October 7, the argument was so many people,
so many Jews have not been killed, such a large number of Jews has not been killed since the Holocaust. The Holocaust was immediately invoked. Hamas came to be called Nazis on the Israeli media. So there's a constant association of what is happening right now with the Holocaust. So it's not only about martyrdom,
it's also about an identification of Palestinians and Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation as somehow endangering Israel with another genocide.
And the other question was, distinguish yourself from the government.
So... Look, it is in fact true that Israel has been occupying about the same number of Palestinians as the Jewish citizens since 1967. And that occupation, there were people opposed it. When I was in high school, we were marching against the occupation and saying, occupation corrupts. And it has corrupted Israeli society to the core.
There were people opposed it. But by and large, Israeli society as a society became increasingly used to it. To the extent that people bought into the long-term Netanyahu narrative that you can manage the occupation. You don't have to solve it. We can't resolve that issue. We can manage it.
And October 7th, in that sense, is important because it denormalized that. you can no longer go back to the way things were. So on the one hand, yes, I agree that many Israelis were complicit in normalizing the occupation, but I think it's also important to identify that there are very different political trends in Israel
And I at least would like to encourage more of that because ultimately you want to see a change from within and not only us talking about that society from without. Okay,
so first question was a question about exploitation of economic resources, how that interlinked with genocide. Second question was a great question about if you obsess over intent as the convention requires, does that prolong the crimes? And the third question is about settlements in Gaza.
So these are all big questions. You're going to do them in 30 seconds each. I'll be very quick. The kind of environmental calamities that we are facing are going to create, if not genocide, more and more violence. There's no question about it because large numbers of people are going to start
moving from one part of the globe to another. That is going to lead to more and more conflict between groups. So yes. On the question of intent, I agree, but look, genocide is not a better or worse crime than crimes against humanity or war crimes. So if you identify that a country is carrying out war crimes,
but you're not sure that it's genocide, it does not mean that you're taking it off the hook or that you should. So in that sense, genocide is a very... particular crime but you can be found guilty of other crimes such as war crimes and
crimes against humanity and on the last question my answer is that I think the goal of the current Israeli government that does not appear to be going anywhere for the next three years at least is to gradually take over the Gaza Strip, to make the Gaza Strip increasingly impossible for Palestinians to live in,
and to hope that the Palestinians either just wither or somehow leave. And in fact, this is also increasing the policy in the West Bank. Whether it succeeds or not depends at the moment not on what is happening in Israel, unfortunately, but only if external pressure can be brought to bear.
So on that note, let me give myself the privilege of a last question on that, because we didn't talk about... It's really weird. This is the first conversation I've had with anyone in days where a single name has not come up, and that is the name of Donald J. Trump.
And I would say, how worried are you about what will happen, especially in the West Bank? When Trump takes office today, Smotrich has said he's looking forward to applying sovereignty to the West Bank, full-on annexation. Netanyahu sent a far-right Kahanes settler to be his new ambassador in D.C. Trump is expected to send David Friedman back to Israel.
He's sending Elise Stefanik, hardcore supporter of Israel, to the U.N. What do you make of, just briefly, Trump and Israel in the coming months?
Look, I mean, I have no idea what Trump has in mind. I know that there are people around him who do, but I don't know, and I think he doesn't either. I have to say that the Biden administration has failed so miserably on this war That I don't know. I know one thing.
Look, Netanyahu didn't give a hoot for Biden. He got away with everything. He is scared of Trump. There are people in Israel on the left, whatever left is left there, who are hoping... that Trump for his own reasons will want to put an end to this ongoing violence.
I am skeptical about what kind of end he has in mind, but I just don't know.
So, yeah, there is a theory that he will want to take credit for, because Trump loves nothing more than taking credit, for ending a war or getting hostages out. I'm going to hand back to Andy and say thank you to Busboys and Potes for hosting us today. Thank you.
Thank you to Nader and the Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown for hosting his Gaza Lecture Series. Where else do you get a chance to come to a restaurant in D.C. and get an Ivy League professor tell you about the history of genocide, which is a great opportunity. Thank you to Omar Bader for taking time out.
And I've got to make... One last shameless plug to subscribe to Zeteo tonight. We heard a question to talk about media manipulation. We heard Omar talk about how Amsterdam was misrepresented in media. I don't know if you saw the ridiculous re-editing of the Sky News video on your socials. We complain a lot about the media.
I'm saying here's a chance for you to invest in an alternative to the media you don't like. So please do support Zeteo if you get a chance. Back to Andy. Thank you.
Thank you.
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The silence and inaction of most Western governments and the Western media is deafening. The reluctance to call the systematic slaughter of Palestinians, the starvation inflicted on them and the bombing of Gaza a genocide is beyond comprehension.
The obvious dehumanization of the Palestinian people continues unabated. And now with the election of Trump, Bibi will accelerate the genocide and annex large parts of the West Bank and Gaza. The so-called two state solution is long dead.
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So much truth here….the point made by Professor Bartov that the occupation also dehumanizes Israelis is crucial. Hence the widespread denial and minimization by Israelis of the horrors their country is committing.
How do we break through the indifference by many Americans regarding our support of this genocide and mobilize greater pressure on the Israeli government? And keep our sanity in the meantime as we prepare for another trump presidency.
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Trump and his minions are not waiting until January 25 to take "presidential actions." Pressure is being put on the ICC not to indict Netanyahu for the ongoing genocide and now ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which will soon occur in fast-time in the West Bank with annexation. By appointing Huckster Huckabee to be our ambassador to Israel, Trump is echoing the Christian Zionist thinking that Palestine does not exist so how can anyone be committing a genocide? And Israel's new ambassador is Mr. Leider, a follower of Rabbi Kahane who advocated an Israel free of Arabs, Muslims and Christians, and if they don't leave kill them. Leider's friend walked into a mosque and opened fire, killing dozens. He leads the voices calling for the increase of settlements and the expansion of Greater Israel on the rubble, bones and bodies of Palestinians. We are witnessing the Bibi-Trump "final solution" to the Palestinian problem: not two states, not one state, but no state and no existence except as refugees for those who survive this holocaust.
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