Watch Full ShowIsraeli American scholar Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust, says Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip is at risk of becoming a genocide. The monthlong air and ground war has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave, a majority of them women and children. Israel has also severely limited the movement of food, water, fuel, medicine and other essentials into Gaza. Bartov says the disproportionate killing of civilians by Israel, as well as dehumanizing statements by Israeli leaders and suggestions of mass expulsion, are of grave concern. He recently joined hundreds of lawyers and academics in signing an open letter warning about Israel’s violations of international law in Gaza. “There is an indication that there are war crimes happening in Gaza, potentially also crimes against humanity,” says Bartov. “If this so-called operation continues, that may become ethnic cleansing … and that may become genocide.”
“Clear Intention of Ethnic Cleansing”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov Warns of Genocide in Gaza
Omer Bartov professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University.
Democracy Now November 10, 2023
AMY GOODMAN: “If there is a hell on Earth, it’s the north of Gaza.” Those were the words of a U.N. official earlier today as Israel intensifies its aerial and ground assault. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled on foot from northern Gaza after being forcibly displaced by Israel’s attacks. More than half of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged over the last month.
On Thursday, the Biden administration announced Israel has agreed to implement what the White House described as daily four-hour pauses in areas of northern Gaza to give Palestinians a chance to head south. Many Palestinians fear they’ll never be allowed to return home. Some have accused the Biden administration of facilitating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Images of Palestinians fleeing on foot have been widely compared to the Nakba, or catastrophe, when some 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes upon Israel’s founding in 1948.
We begin today’s show with the Israeli-born historian Omer Bartov, who recently signed an open letter warning of Israel committing a potential genocide in Gaza. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has cited him as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. Bartov is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.
Democracy Now!‘s Juan González and I spoke to professor Omer Bartov on Wednesday from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I began by asking him to talk about his own experience serving as an Israeli soldier in the northern Sinai in the 1970s and how it’s impacted his view on what’s going on today.