Massacre doesn’t justify massacre: Israel, Gaza and war crimes

Reactions amid a search for casualties at the site of an Israeli strike on a residential building in Gaza City in October 2023

Omer Bartov writes in Haaretz on 6 December 2023:

Only the shock and horror produced by the unspeakable Hamas massacre of October 7 can explain the bizarre op-ed recently published on these pages by a number of respectable historians. Presuming to expose my opinion piece, published in The New York Times on November 10, as “inflammatory and dangerous,” the authors insist that the role of “historians is to construct arguments based on the facts we know, not the ideas we choose to believe.”

It appears that once they glimpsed the title, “What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide,” my respected colleagues hardly left themselves time to read the rest of the text, before charging head-on into their inexplicable apologia of Israeli policies.

So let me briefly address some of the misrepresentation and allegations of this article, and then ponder its moral implications, always keeping in mind that its authors are all historians who have written extensively on issues related to the Holocaust, refugees, displacement, humanitarianism, trauma, revenge, and memory, among other things.

The authors open by expressing worry that I use the word “believe,” chiding me instead to stick to the evidence. Curiously, I actually use the word only twice in my op-ed. Once, to state that “as a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza.” And a second time, when I address scholars like them, stating that “if we truly believe that the Holocaust taught us a lesson about the need—or really, the duty—to preserve our own humanity and dignity by protecting those of others, this is the time to stand up and raise our voices, before Israel’s leadership plunges it and its neighbors into the abyss.”

But the authors refuse to heed this warning. Instead, they indulge in a series of embarrassingly apologetic arguments that end up justifying the unjustifiable. Using a rhetoric that has become common among those who wish to elide the extraordinarily high toll of civilian lives in Gaza resulting from Israeli military operations, they claim that I “marginalize” the massacre by Hamas, even though I clearly describe it as a war crime and a crime against humanity. Additionally, they assert and that I give “no agency to Hamas,” although the entire point of my essay is to assess the nature of the retaliation by the Israeli army to October 7.

Even more strangely, the authors conclude that I am “correct to suggest that dehumanization of the enemy is common when entering battle”—a statement I never make in my essay—and go so far as to “acknowledge that what some Israeli leaders have said are truly despicable statements that cannot be ignored.” But visibly worried by the implications of their statement, they then swiftly contradict themselves, adding that “dehumanizing terrorists… is not evidence of genocidal intent but a reflection of the limits of language to describe behavior that truly seems inhuman.”

What to make of this? Dehumanizing language is “despicable,” but dehumanizing “human animals” is a correct depiction of reality? And what, then, is one to do with such “subhumans”?

The fact of the matter is, of course, that the use of dehumanizing language is one of the first signs of a potential genocide. The Hutu called the Tutsi “cockroaches”; the Nazis called the Jews “vermin.” Nor have Israeli political leaders and military leaders confined themselves to calling Hamas members “human animals,” but have repeatedly spoken in ways that dehumanize, and indicate a desire by some to destroy Gaza and even remove its population as a whole.

This has two effects. First, it acts as incitement to the troops on the ground. Second, it can indicate an intent which, when combined with specific actions, could potentially be used as evidence of genocidal actions.

The authors ought to know this, since they actually cite the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, similarly cited in my own essay. They repeat my own argument that the civilian deaths, now estimated at 15,000, including thousands of children, were, as far as we know, not killed with the intent to destroy them as such. Why, then, were they killed? According to the authors it occurred “for strategic reasons like a military response to a brutal terrorist attack.”

Now let us ponder this assertion for a moment. Should we not question whether such a high number of civilian deaths is justified in a military response to a terrorist act? Is there a particular limit over which we should not go, or can we kill twice as many, or ten times as many, “for strategic reasons”? This is the question I raise in my article, which the authors of the response entirely fail to consider. Had they consulted easily accessible documentation on international humanitarian law, they might have reached different, less rhetorical conclusions.

According to the Geneva Conventions, of which Israel is a signatory, and the rule of proportionality that is part of these conventions, this exceedingly high civilian toll may well appear as disproportionate to the military goals set and achieved, as well as to the political goal desired, which has not yet been articulated by the Israeli government—that is, what their plans are for the day after the dismantling of Hamas they set as their military goal. ( It is for this reason that I write—to the authors’ horror—that there is a high likelihood of the IDF having carried out “serious violations of the laws and customs of war,” or in layman’s terms, war crimes.

This will need to be forensically investigated. For instance, if the IDF dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a site with hundreds of displaced people because underneath there were a couple of Hamas commanders, killing scores or hundreds of civilians alongside these commanders, the law of proportionality may rule such an action to be a war crime. Multiply such actions by a factor of ten, or a hundred, and the actions behind the 15,000 dead begin to emerge.

But the authors of the response to my article, scholars who spent their careers on the study of the Holocaust, the killing of innocents, the memory and commemoration of genocide, and humanitarianism, seem to think that the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including very high numbers of children, “for strategic reasons,” raises no moral or legal questions whatsoever.

To be sure, they write, “the suffering in Gaza is indeed a horrible catastrophe,” but they take no responsibility for it as citizens of a country whose army has displaced 1.7 out of 2.2 million Gazans, destroyed a vast proportion of their homes, and has cramped them into barely livable conditions. To their minds, “Hamas has to be blamed in manufacturing what has become an untenable humanitarian crisis.”

Unfortunately, according to international law, that is false. An occupying army, even if it is fighting a criminal organization, is responsible for the fate of the civilian population in its areas of operations and occupation.

As for the moral content of this view, this is a truly appalling statement by anyone, let alone coming from scholars we should expect to provide moral and ethical guidance.

The same kind of extraordinary callousness is shown by the authors’ denial of events on the West Bank. Here, too, they agree that the situation there is “appalling,” only to immediately deny that there are clear signs that it “sliding toward ethnic cleansing.” How many hundreds more of Palestinians in the West Bank need to be killed before these scholars of inhumanity cry out?

The authors self-righteously “caution against leveraging one’s expertise as a historian of genocide to assert that ‘it is very likely that war crimes, even crimes against humanity, are happening’ without providing specific evidence.” The problem, it would appear, is hardly lack of evidence, but rather a combination of tunnel vision and warped logic awkwardly employed to defend what they must know in their heart of hearts is wrong. “If every act of military aggression is described as ‘verging on’ genocide,” the exclaim, “the legal and historical term quickly loses its meaning.” But of course, acts of military aggression are by definition breaches of international law except in cases of self defense. Israel can rightly claim that its actions were in self-defense. What it cannot claim is that massacre justifies massacre.

My op-ed called upon scholars such as the authors of this article to use their moral authority and professional knowledge as bulwarks against the brutalizing and dehumanizing rhetoric by Israeli political and military leaders, as well as by the talking-heads on the media. Even as Israeli TV networks keep praising Israelis for their immense humanity and compassion for each other, and praise the IDF as the most moral army in the world, they spare their audiences any images of the immense human suffering in Gaza, and present any empathy with the fate of innocent Palestinian victims as enemy propaganda.

The authors of this letter could have made much better use of their time had they shown some moral courage and cautioned against this coarsening of sentiments in Israel, rather than composing this clumsy and untenable apology for a discredited regime and a military trying to win back the public’s confidence through mass destruction of property and lives. These scholars, my colleagues, have betrayed their calling, and eventually, when the dust settles, they too will be called to account.

Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor at Brown University

This article is reproduced in its entirety

NB This article is a response to ‘Charging Israel With Genocide in Gaza Is Inflammatory and Dangerous’, Haaretz, 28 November 2023 by five historians, 4 of whom are Israeli and and 1 American