Renowned Genocide Scholar Says 'I Know It When I See It'—And He Sees It in Israel's Assault on Gaza

A leading scholar of the Holocaust and genocide warned Tuesday the continued "silence" of many in his field of study regarding Israel's massacre of Palestinians in Gaza "has made a mockery of the slogan 'never again''" as he outlined in a New York Times opinion piece how he came to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in the besieged enclave.

"I'm a Genocide Scholar," reads the essay's headline. "I Know It When I See It."

Like a number of other experts who were at first reluctant to designate the assault on Gaza a genocide—the term coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944—Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Omer Bartov gradually came to recognize Israel's campaign of targeted starvation, bombings on civilian infrastructure, forced displacement, and other attacks as genocidal violence as he watched the early months of the war in late 2023 and early 2024.

By May 2024, he wrote at the Times, "it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of [Israel Defense Forces] operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack," including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's threat to turn Gaza into "rubble" and his call for Israeli citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you"—a reference to the biblical passage calling on the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" in their fight against an ancient enemy.

At that point, about 1 million Palestinians had been ordered to the so-called "safe zone" of al-Mawasi—which was then targeted in numerous attacks.

Months after one top Israeli official called for the "total annihilation" of Gaza—home to more than 2 million people—Bartov concluded that the government's "actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population."

He wrote that his interpretation of Israel's actions is now that Netanyahu's government wants "to force the population to leave the strip altogether" and "debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation, and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group."

"My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people," wrote Bartov, noting that his assessment is that of an expert who grew up in a Zionist home, spent the first half of his life in Israel, and served in the IDF as well as researching the Holocaust and other war crimes.

"This was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could," wrote Bartov. "But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one."

He added that his conclusion is supported by the destruction of an estimated 174,000 buildings, or 70% of those in Gaza; the killing of more than 58,000 people, nearly a third of whom have been children and nearly 900 of whom were under one year old; and the extermination of more than 2,000 families in their entirety.

CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour noted that Bartov spoke to her last December about his conclusion that Israel is committing genocide.

"If you look at the pattern of what the IDF has been doing, not only has it been moving the population around, every safe zone... tends to get also bombed and shelled," he said at the time. "But also systematically destroying universities, schools, mosques, museums, and hospitals, of course—anything that makes for the health and also the culture of a group, and therefore, by now we have a population that is being completely debilitated."

Bartov published his essay as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said it had recorded the deaths of 875 Palestinians who were killed while seeking aid, with the vast majority killed at or around aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S.- and Israel-backed privatized aid group that has been rejected by the U.N. due to its lack of neutrality.

"The latest deadly incident happened at around 9:00 am on Monday, July 14, when reports indicated that the Israeli military shelled and fired towards Palestinians seeking food at the GHF site in As Shakoush area, northwestern Rafah," said the OHCHR on Monday of an attack that killed at least two people and injured nine others—days after a hospital in Rafah received more than 130 patients, the majority of whom suffered gunshot wounds they'd sustained while trying to access food distribution sites.

Last May, former Human Rights Watch executive director Aryeh Neier—who was also reluctant to apply the term "genocide" to Israel's attack on Gaza—said Israel's "sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory" was what finally convinced him the assault is a genocide.

While backing the militarized GHF aid operation, Israel has continued to block humanitarian assistance from entering Gaza through crossings and has prevented experienced aid groups from distributing food to starving Palestinians.

Israel "has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz" and has portrayed its attack on Gaza—which it and its allies in the U.S. and other Western countries have persistently claimed it is targeting Hamas—as a fight against an enemy comparable to the Nazis.

"The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self-censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi-like enemy," wrote Bartov.

Progressive political strategist Waleed Shahid suggested Bartov's conclusions flew in the face of recent comments by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who in March said the term "genocide" as it related to Gaza should be rejected as antisemitism.

Bartov warned that the refusal of many Holocaust scholars and the political establishment in the U.S.—the largest international funder of the IDF—to confront the reality of Israel's attack on Gaza could ultimately make it impossible "to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before."

"Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism, and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural, and political endeavors of the 20th century," wrote Bartov.

He expressed hope that "a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name."

"Israel," he added, "will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity."