Israel is guilty of “genocide, ethnic-cleansing & annexation” in Gaza; the US is “totally complicit”; Israel faces “a terrible future” & could “implode”: Professor of Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Brown University, Omer Bartov
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One of the world’s foremost scholars on the holocaust and genocide studies has said Israel is guilty of “genocide, ethnic-cleansing and annexation” in Gaza. Prof. Omer Bartov added that the United States is “totally complicit”. He said Israel faces “a terrible future” and if it does not consciously change it could “implode”.
In a 45-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, to mark the first anniversary of the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which is the 7th of October, Prof. Bartov said that President Biden could have insisted in November or December of 2023 that Israel must ceasefire and find a political solution to the crisis in Gaza but he consciously and deliberately refused to do so. Prof. Bartov called this a “major mistake”.
In the interview to The Wire, Prof. Bartov said if Israel continues the way it has been behaving for the last year it will become “increasingly isolated” and “impoverished”. The people who will suffer the most are the Palestinians who are 50% of the population in the land area that Israel controls. However, Prof. Bartov added that the Jewish people will also suffer.
I will stop there because I firmly believe you should hear Prof. Bartov yourself. His interview is a commanding tour d’horizon both of the situation in Israel and the mood of the Israeli people as well as the situation in the region and internationally. Very rarely will you come across an academic and scholar with the grasp Prof. Bartov has of the subject and his enormous sweep of the details. I can confidently add that you will learn a lot from this interview and it will give you a great sense of perspective as we approach the first anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
To help you, I will give you the list of questions asked. They will indicate the rich analytical content of this interview. If there is only one interview you see to mark the anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war, I strongly recommend it should be this one.
Here are the questions:
1) It’s one year since the Israel-Hamas war began and during those 12 months you have done two famous newspaper essays on how you view the situation in Israel. In November, writing for The New York Times, you said “there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza”. But in August, writing for The Guardian, you said: “It was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions … the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory.” Can you start by explaining what’s convinced you – a former IDF soldier but also a historian of the Holocaust – that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza?
2) In your August article for The Guardian you wrote about a meeting at Ben-Gurion University in June which was interrupted by a group of students, many of whom had been soldiers who had fought in Gaza. Of them you write: “The young men and women I spoke with that day were filled with rage … because, I think, they felt betrayed by everyone around them”. You say they felt betrayed by the media, by senior commanders, by politicians, by intellectuals and leftists, by the US government and by anti-semitic students protesting against Israel in western universities. You say “they seemed fearful and insecure and confused”. Tell me about the mood of these people because, I presume, they are the future of Israel.
3) You write that these young students reminded you of “the German students union” of 1930 which was taken over by the Nazis. You end that part of the essay with the words: “I left that meeting filled with trepidation and foreboding”. What precisely were you worried about? What were your fears?
4) I know that Israeli society – with the exception of some people like Gideon Levy – have accepted or even supported what Israel is doing in Gaza. But what is the impact on the soldiers themselves? They are the perpetrators of this horror. Are they all like the students at Ben-Gurion University or are some filled with repulsion and guilt for what they were made to do?
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