Omer Bartov decries genocide in Gaza

I have a subscription to the New York Review of Books (NYR) and I often find its articles enlightening. Many of its contributors are Jewish writers and intellectuals and they speak knowledgeably about Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

One of those people in Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Bartov was born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and later at Oxford. As a young man, he served in Israeli army. He has family in Israel and visits there regularly.

Bartov had an article in the April 24, 2005, edition of the NYR titled Infinite License. In it he talks about a visit that he made in 2015, and about two visits in 2024. I am going to quote liberally from the article because it seems irrefutable in its observations and conclusions.  

Cruel occupation of West Bank

In 2015, Bartov visited the West Bank with his twenty-two-year-old daughter. He writes:

“In Hebron we saw how the military had emptied the town’s once-thriving center of its Palestinian population and blocked it off for use only by the Jewish settlers who had taken over. We also saw the contempt with which troops treated the local Arabs – the true owners of the place – and the arrogant conduct of settlers protected by heavily armed soldiers. In a park named after Meir Kahane, the racist rabbi and founder of the fascist Kach party, we saw a shrine built for Baruch Goldstein, a physician who in February 1994 massacred twenty-nine worshipers and injured more than a hundred others in the Cave of the Patriarchs, which also serves as a mosque – an event that sparked the suicide bombing campaign Hamas launched that April. The inscription on Goldstein’s grave enthuses that this mass murderer – revered by Israel’s newly-reinstated minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Givr – ‘gave his soul for the Jewish people, its Torah and its land of clean hands and pure heart.’

For my daughter, who had internalized a quite different view of Isreal in the US, the sheer cruelty and heartlessness of the occupation was simply shocking. A state that allowed this only a few miles from what is supposed to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ we agreed, had lost its moral compass; a Jewish population that allowed this abomination just across the separation wall had lost its conscience. This was eight years before October 7.”      

Israelis ignore horrors in Gaza

In December 2024, Bartov visited his son’s family, including new twin grandchildren, born eleven months earlier. Bartov circulated widely among friends and acquaintances and he compared the mood with that during his previous visit in June 2024.

“I had been struck [in June] by the almost total inability of Jewish Israelis – not least liberal or left-wing people I have long known – to even acknowledge the horrors that the IDF was perpetrating in Gaza. Now [in December] I perceived a certain change. More people seemed aware of the extraordinary devastation being wreaked there, less often from the TV news than from newspaper articles and social media videos posted by IDF reservists. The Israelis I talked to had little desire for revenge or more violence. But neither did they exhibit much empathy. In its place was a kind of resignation, indifference, and despair.”

Western countries silent on Gaza genocide

Bartov, who is an expert in studying genocides, writes about what he sees happening in Gaza.

“[The] sense of ‘never again’ permits most Jewish Israeli citizens to see themselves as occupying the moral high ground even as they, their army, their sons and daughters and their grandchildren pulverize every inch of the Gaza Strip. The memory of the Holocaust, has perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

If we take into account the killed, the wounded, the thousands buried under the rubble, the thousands of ‘indirect’ deaths due to the destruction of most medical facilities, the thousands of children who will never fully recover from the long-term effects of starvation and trauma, we can undoubtedly conclude that Israel has deliberately subjected the Palestinian people in Gaza, most of who are refugees from the partition of Palestine in 1948 or their descendants, to ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,’ as stated in Article II (c) of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.

The rest of the world, especially Israel’s Western allies and Jewish communities in Europe and the United States, will have to grapple with this reality for many years. How was it possible, well into the twenty-first century, eighty years after the end of the Holocaust and the creation of an international legal regime meant to prevent such crimes from ever happening again, that the state of Israel – seen and self-described as the answer to the genocide of the Jews – could have carried out a genocide of Palestinians with near-total impunity? How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put in place to prevent a repetition of this ‘crime of crimes.’”   

Canada is complicit in Gaza

Newly elected Pope Leo XIV, in first Sunday noon blessing in Rome, called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, for humanitarian relief to be provided to the “exhausted civilian population,” and for all hostages to be freed.” Those are clear and moral imperatives. The Israeli government has rejected a ceasefire and continues its blockade of life saving food and other aid.

Canada is one of the countries whose complicity is allowing Israel to, in Omer Bartov’s words, “[carry] out a genocide of Palestinians with near-total impunity.” We have a new government making new promises. It is long past time for Canada to take a much more aggressive and moral stand on the Gaza genocide. It will be to our undying shame if we do not.