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Holocaust Scholar Says Israel’s Actions in Gaza Constitute Genocide [1]
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Date: 2025-07-27
Dr. Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American and a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. Bartov was born in Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and he had postings as part of the occupying force on the West Bank and in Gaza. In 1976, Bartov was severely wounded in a training accident while a member of the Israel Defense Force, the IDF. In a July 15, 2025 op-ed in the New York Times, Dr. Bartov explained why he believes Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza.
Bartov is a globally recognized expert on war crimes and the European Holocaust. He joins a large number of experts in genocide studies and international law who have reached the same conclusion. He believes to deny genocide in Gaza “will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again.” He describes it as a “threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.”
By November 2023, one month after the Hamas attack on Israel, Bartov already believed there was “evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza,” however he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to support charges that Israel was committing the crime of genocide.
In May 2024, the IDF ordered one million Palestinians in the city of Rafah to evacuate and move to an area without shelter. The Israeli army then destroyed much of Rafah. According to Bartov, it was no longer possible to deny that IDF operations in Gaza were consistent with statements expressing “genocidal intent” by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and other cabinet members. Netanyahu promised to turn the Gaza Strip “into rubble” and demanded that “the residents of Gaza” leave. To dehumanize Palestinians, government and military officials declared that Israel was fighting “human animals” and called for “total annihilation.” The deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, tweeted that Israel would erase “Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” His “inescapable conclusion” was that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people”
The crime of genocide can be difficult to establish. As defined in a 1948 United Nations resolution, it must include the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Intent is the key determinant. Israel denies all accusations that it has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It claims that it investigates any report of crimes by its armed forces, however it rarely makes findings public and any acknowledged illegal actions are treated with “light reprimands.”
Bartov charges that the “systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely.” Almost three-fourths of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged, almost 60,000 people have been killed including more than 17,000 children and another 10,000 people may still be buried in the ruins. Health officials report over 138,000 people have been wounded and maimed including the greatest number of amputee children per capita in the world.
According to Bartov, to describe what is happening in Gaza as a war is a “misnomer.” Hamas military units that attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 have been destroyed. Currently the IDF, with the support of the United States and using American equipment and weapons is engaged in demolition to make most of Gaza unlivable and ethnic cleansing, forcing the entire Palestinian population into three small zones constituting a fourth of the original territory. Palestinians would essentially be imprisoned in these enclaves. When an ethnic group is constantly displaced from “one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing” morphs into genocide.
A growing number of influential Holocaust scholars are starting to identify Israeli actions in Gaza as genocide. They include Shmuel Lederman in Israel, William Schabas in Canada, British specialist Martin Shaw, Dirk Moses of the City University of New York, Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, and Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Meanwhile silence by many Holocaust scholars hesitant to label Israel actions in Gaza as genocide makes a mockery of the slogan “Never again.” It has become an excuse for “destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.”
The Trump administration is now trying to force American universities to adopt a definition of antisemitism that will brand any critic of Israeli action in Gaza as an antisemite. Bartov fears “the study and remembrance of the Holocaust could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice” and as “a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole.”
Bartov believes “the moral and historical credit which the Jewish State has drawn on until now is running out.” He is “deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state” and that “Such states, as history has taught us, do not last.” He hopes “an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity.”
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