Genocide researcher Omer Bartov critical of his homeland
An afternoon in at the end of 2024, the American-Israeli Holocaust researcher sat Omer Bartov in a popular cafe in Tel Aviv and pondered what a society that participates in genocide looks like. As he looked around among the young men and women at the cafe tables, he arrived at the answer: “Like this.” He knew that many of the young guests sipping their espresso could be soldiers on leave from Gaza. On the surface, everything seemed normal. Under it, he saw a country trapped in its own despair and indifference to the fate of the Palestinians a few miles away.
After Hamas’ terrorist act on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza thereafter he wrote in the New York Times in the summer of 2025: “I’m a genocide scholar. I know what it is when I see it.” He further develops these thoughts in the newly published book “Israel: What went wrong” (Random House).
Omer Bartov, a prominent genocide and holocaust scholar at Brown University in the US, is the grandson of Polish Jews who moved to British Mandate Palestine in the 1920s. It was their salvation. Their relatives who stayed in Poland were exterminated. Bartov grew up in Israel and did military service in Gaza for a year in the 1970s. The occupation was young then. Now it has been going on for almost a lifetime.
The 3rd of June will he speak in Oslo at the Center for Holocaust Studies and minority views – a sister organization to Sweden’s Holocaust Museum. This has caused the Israeli embassy in Oslo to protest loudly. The critics in the Israeli press are not merciful either. “Bartov’s genocide accusations feed on the Palestinian resistance rhetoric that legitimizes and promotes Hamas,” said the Jerusalem Post, for example.
But Bartov is both analytical and saddened by what has happened to his former homeland. What struck him is how the country’s Jewish majority population sees itself as a victim, also since their military devastated Gaza and de facto annexed the West Bank. He questions whether Israel can be called a democracy. The Israelis who protested against the Prime Minister Netanyahu’s way to run over the Supreme Court has focused almost entirely on how it undermines the rights of Israeli Jews, he argues. However, the Supreme Court has never ruled against the occupation as such.
He finds nothing that justifies Hamas’ massacres and kidnappings, but also nothing that justifies Israel’s choice to destroy almost all hospitals and health care facilities, universities, energy systems, desalination plants and other infrastructure in Gaza, including cultural monuments and an overwhelming proportion of homes. It shows that the intention of the war was so much more than to break Hamas. It was also “about making the area uninhabitable and denying the residents everything that creates a group identity and continuity,” he writes.
Immediately after October 7, several Israeli leaders expressed themselves in a dehumanizing way about Palestinians. It was said that they were human animals and that there were no innocents in Gaza. Biblical accounts were invoked of how God called upon the people of Israel to wipe out their enemies, the Amalekites. Such statements were followed by military actions. The Genocide Convention’s criteria for intent have been met, Bartov concluded.
Almost all in the hostages who returned home alive from Gaza were released as a result of negotiations between Israel and Hamas. The large-scale military operations did not lead to many liberations. Bartov explains it by the fact that Israel’s far-right ministers and eventually Netanyahu also saw the war as an opportunity to once and for all seek to end the Palestinian issue in Gaza.
As a researcher, he has studied the progress of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. He found that German soldiers who committed mass murder on the Eastern Front saw themselves as victims of “Jews and Bolsheviks”. He recalls the German genocide in Namibia in 1904 (then German South West Africa), when the German military ordered a war of extermination against the Herero people, after they had attacked German settlers. Only in 2021 did Germany recognize the events in Namibia as a genocide.
Bartov also compares with how Joseph Conrad explores the innermost essence of European colonialism in the novel “Heart of Darkness” when he has the colonizer Kurtz scribble the words “Exterminate every bastard” in a report on how to pacify the local population in the Congo.
Other historians have shown how even high-ranking bureaucrats in the Ottoman Empire, who participated in the 1915 Armenian Genocide, saw themselves as victims. The ultra-nationalist civil servant Mustafa Reşat (1878–1953), which has been called for an “Ottoman Eichmann”, claimed the right to deport, torture and exterminate Armenians during the First World War. He saw it as patriotic acts to save a threatened nation from “Armenian traitors”. He saw them as “internal enemies” who betrayed the Turkish nation. He did not forgive Armenians who cultivated dreams of independence and he pulled all Armenians over a comb.
When Omer Bartov trying to understand why so many Israeli Jews seem indifferent to all the casualties in Gaza, he attributes it not only to Hamas’ acts of terror that shocked an entire nation, but also to a long-term habituation to the occupation. For a long time, the Israelis believed that the occupation could be “managed” behind fences, roadblocks and walls, while Netanyahu believed that Hamas would settle for the millions of dollars from Qatar. But all this exploded on October 7.
A fundamental error in Israel’s early history, Bartov believes, was that the promises in the 1948 Declaration of Independence to guarantee all citizens complete political and social equality regardless of religion, race or gender, as well as to define the country’s borders, were never fulfilled. Israel would need a constitution that guarantees civil rights, also for the 20 percent minority who are Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The occupation since 1967 has only made matters worse. From it was born the Jewish-Messianic settler right and, on the Palestinian side, Islamists such as Hamas. If Israel had instead acknowledged its guilt for the suffering of the Palestinians during the Nakba, the Palestinian refugee catastrophe of 1948, and sought ways for compensation and coexistence, it might have been able to create a model for the entire region and ultimately reconciliation with the Palestinians, he reasons.
He wishes that Zionism, Israel’s state-supporting ideology, could be relegated to the archives. After the post-Holocaust Zionism fulfilled its promise to create a homeland for persecuted Jews, it developed into an ideology of ethno-nationalism and ethnic uprising. In its most extreme form, it is represented today by the ministers of the settler right Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Omer Bartov no longer believes in the talk of a two-state solution. He believes that the Israeli thinker Dahlia Scheindlinwriting in Haaretz, has presented one of the most thoughtful proposals for a solution: a confederation of two sovereign nations living side by side in peace and full partnership on the same land. This vision differs from the Oslo Accords, which never led to a two-state solution, and today’s reality where the Israelis are citizens and the Palestinians are lawless subjects in occupied territory.
Bitte Hammargren is a freelance writer and Middle East analyst.
