OMER BARTOV, [email protected]
Available for a limited number of interviews, Bartov is Dean’s 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 is prominently quoted in a recent piece in The Guardian: “I don’t know of any comparable situation. Recent estimates show that about 70 percent of the structures in Gaza are either completely destroyed or severely damaged. The argument that the I.D.F. [Israel Defense Forces] is conducting a war in Gaza is simply cynical, there is no war in Gaza. What the I.D.F. is doing in Gaza is demolishing it. Hundreds of buildings are being bulldozed every week. This is not a secret, but mainstream media coverage has been insufficient.”
He also recently wrote the piece “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” for The New York Times.
Bartov writes: “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. …
“The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts 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. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.”