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Omar Bartov historian of the holocaust said in late 2023 said it was very likely that war crimes and crimes against humanity were happening in Gaza, but concluded then that "there is no proof that genocide is taking place".
'Then in 2025, he sent shock waves through academic and legal circles by reversing his position, publishing an essay in the New York Times headlined, "I'm a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it."'
Here he is interviewed alongside the famous journalist Gideon Levy, who also reluctantly came to the conclusion that a genocide was happening.
I am not a scholar and do not have an opinion about whether the Israeli Jews committed genocide.
It is enough to say they are responsible for a holocaust.
Holocaust, of course, means burnt sacrifice.
It is important too to say up to 600,000 Arabs died in Gaza and certainly many more than the 80,000 that Hamas and Israel said.
Talking about the artificial fuss over the story in the New York Times about dogs trained to rape Arab prisoners in Israeli gaols (you read it here first), Professor Bartov has an excellent answer.
The Israeli prosecutor and press have reported that a number of prisoners have been raped. It's very well known in Israel. The Israeli public is indifferent or in many cases happy about this.
Gideon Levy adds: "Nicholas Kristof is a great journalist. I believe in every word he writes but he's not the only one as Omar just mentioned and the only way to to fight it for Israel is to attack the messenger instead of looking upon ourselves, looking in the mirror, realize that in our jails there is a real barbaric catastrophe and to draw the lessons out of it."
The dogs are a detail, the many rapes are the story and the torture and the murders.
Nathan J. Robinson
ReplyDeleteYour book is an analysis of how reporting about Gaza distorted the facts of what happened, and attempted—albeit partially unsuccessfully, given the state of public opinion on Israel-Palestine now—to create a false narrative about the destruction of Gaza. But before we get into that, let us lay out the actual facts, in brief, of the genocide. You do use the word genocide. You use it unashamedly. In doing so, you are adopting the language of the consensus of human rights groups. So before we get to the distortions, I hope you could give us a little bit of a summary of the real picture that you think people ought to understand of what happened in Gaza starting in October of 2023.
Adam Johnson
Yes, so obviously I'm not a genocide scholar, nor am I a lawyer. However, I rely on what we'd broadly consider to be Western experts, in Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, 86% of whom voted in favor of a resolution saying it's a genocide. And obviously, Doctors Without Borders, the Lemkin Institute, and various others charged with studying it professionally.
It's universal consensus for a number of reasons. Chief among them are what actually happened, the high level of civilian deaths, and the use of starvation as a weapon. But of course, most acutely and most notably at the time were the genocidal statements made by Israeli officials themselves, up to and including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave his infamous Amalek speech on the eve of the invasion, where he made biblical reference to killing every man, woman, child, and animal, as it turns out, as well as, of course, Yoav Gallant, who said that they were human animals and "We're going to cut off water and food." And then, of course, there was President Isaac Herzog's "no innocent people in Gaza" speech, I think, on October 12 or 13. So these are the pieces of evidence that have been used by genocide scholars.
Of course, genocidal statements were made by many members of the War Cabinet and administration, including claims of Nakba, openly. So, evidence for genocide is fairly overwhelming. I think it mostly comes from, again, their genocidal statements, both in terms of dehumanizing the whole of the population as well as forecasting what they ended up doing, which is starving and creating tent cities and, of course, mass slaughter under the very thin military auspices of "eliminating Hamas," something that, of course, everybody knows was never possible, nor was it ever sort of a legitimate goal in any meaningful sense, because to them, anyone shooting back that is not on the Israeli or US payroll is considered Hamas.
ReplyDeleteAnd so that's the opening premise, and it's not one I really spend a lot of time litigating, because I think it's self-evidently true in key ways. And also, of course, if you don't accept that, or you reject the consensus of the scholarship on this, then I'm probably not going to convince you anyway. I think the book is primarily marketed to and written for what I would call fence-sitting liberals who vaguely sense that the media created the conditions for genocide but don't necessarily have the evidence for it or the argumentation and logic for it. So this book attempts to take those people and convince them of this so they themselves can sort of defend against that in the future and sort of look back at who was responsible and talk about what it means to have accountability, both politically and in terms of the media.
Robinson
Even though it is accepted as a premise in your book, it is important to remind people of what a genuine, principled media would have reported during this time, namely the unfolding of a genocide. There were deliberate attacks on aid workers and journalists and the deliberate destruction of mosques, universities, and hospitals, over and over and over—just an endless series of quite deliberate atrocities with everyone at every level of the Israeli government, from ordinary soldiers to high officials, saying pretty explicitly—often in Hebrew, the English language statements were a little softer—all sorts of horrendous things about why they were doing what they were doing to the Palestinians, and it had very little to do with eliminating Hamas.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-media-sold-a-genocide