OMER BARTOV, Omer_Bartov@brown.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Bartov is Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Department of History at Brown University. His books include Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.
He just wrote the piece “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel” for The Guardian, which states: “This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history — and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree.”
Bartov writes: “The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were ‘liquidated.’ References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.
“Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.”
Bartov’s piece delves into key speeches by Israeli leaders over the decades and poems which animate Israeli thought. He also traces his own developing assessment about what Israel is doing and where its future lies.
