David Remnick: In recent years, and especially since October 7th and the war on Gaza that followed, I've tried to hear out a range of voices on the question of Israel and Palestine on this show. We've heard from Palestinians like the poet Mosab Abu Toha, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his essays in The New Yorker. I've spoken with the writers Raja Shehadeh and Yossi Klein Halevi, the broadcaster Yonit Levi, the philosopher Avishai Margalit, the historian Rashid Khalidi. I asked peace negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley about how this conflict could possibly end.
Now today, I'm in conversation with Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born historian of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and a professor at Brown University. Bartov describes the terrible events of October 7th as a war crime. As Israel's war ground on, with a death toll that by now exceeds 70,000 Palestinians, he wrote an essay in the New York Times that described the war as a genocide, which, for an Israeli and a scholar of genocide, was a startling thing and had an enormous impact on its audience.
Omer Bartov has now published a book reappraising his homeland, called Israel: What Went Wrong? Bartov was born in 1954, and as a kid, he was unquestioning of mainstream Zionism. In adulthood, as Israel began building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, his thinking began to evolve. By 1973, Bartov was a young soldier doing his required military service, when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, the so-called Yom Kippur War.
Omer Bartov: I was in uniform then. Everybody was entirely shocked. I should tell you, the first thing that came to my mind on October 7th, 2023, was October 6th, 1973. Because the sense of shock, the lack of preparedness, the arrogance that had been there before both events was very similar.
David Remnick: I don't think you were alone. I think most Israelis who were old enough to remember '73 made the parallel. Maybe Hamas was not acting by accident in its dates.
Omer Bartov: Yes, it missed by one day. Yes--
David Remnick: You were serving in the IDF, which, of course, is legally required for citizens over 18, and you wrote about that time. You said this, "Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of Arish, which was then occupied by Israel. Pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows, for the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people." It seems to me that your military service really did, as you said earlier, begin to shape you as a human being, and as a scholar.
Omer Bartov: It did. I was very young, and I was very well socialized.
David Remnick: What does that mean?
Omer Bartov: I did what young men in Israel did. I did it without thinking twice. I wanted to be a combat soldier. I wanted to be an officer. I became one. I did my best. I thought that I was-- generally, I thought I was doing the right thing. Then there were moments when I had that feeling, that uncanny feeling. They were at that moment in El-Arish, in northern Sinai. I served for about a year in Gaza. I served on the West Bank. The sense, this question that you suddenly ask yourself, "What am I doing here? Why am I here? This is not my home." It would come up. I can't say that it was a fully developed political understanding. It was a feeling that something was not right.
I'd say that my maybe moment of real awakening was only really 1988, '87, '88, with the outbreak of the first intifada. That was a moment-- I was still young. I was an officer in reserve. I had every likelihood that I would be called up to go and break their bones, as we were told to do by the Minister of Defense at the time, Yitzhak Rabin. That was not something I wanted to do. I was quite outraged at that point. I could see where this was heading. That was when I had the cheek to write Rabin a little note saying that he was leading the IDF in the same direction that I had researched and saw the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, had gone down that slippery slope of brutalizing an army.
David Remnick: You wrote a note to Yitzhak Rabin, who was then Defense Minister, comparing the Israeli reaction to the first intifada to the Wehrmacht, to the German army. Did you get a response?
Omer Bartov: I did. I was shocked because I didn't actually write him a private letter. There was a postcard going around describing a particular atrocity of killing a Palestinian child. I was so outraged that I took my pen and wrote, in tiny letters, that statement, and sent it to him. I had no expectation of ever hearing from him. Two weeks later, a formal letter from the Ministry of Defense arrived. It had one line on it which said, "How dare you compare the Wehrmachts to the IDF?" I thought I must have hit a nerve.
My reading of this later on was that Rabin must have been thinking about this. It wasn't me who caused him to think about it, but that something was happening that he realized himself, despite his brutal orders at the time that this was not a supportable condition, that this would indeed corrupt Israeli society.
David Remnick: You studied abroad. I believe you got your PhD in England.
Omer Bartov: Yes, I was at Oxford, at St Anthony's College.
David Remnick: I'm talking to you now. You're at Brown University. Why did you make your home abroad?
Omer Bartov: The first intifada broke out in December 1987. I was very frustrated with that event. I did not want to go and serve. I also didn't want to go to jail for not serving. I was also quite unhappy with the way the university where I was teaching then, Tel Aviv University, was operating. I had an opportunity. I was offered a fellowship at Harvard for three years. I never- certainly not in the early years, I didn't really think that I'd just left the country for good. As time went by, both professionally, I found the United States to be a very good place for me. Politically, I felt increasingly alienated from how Israel was evolving.
David Remnick: How are you feeling about that now? You're sitting in the United States, where political tumult is extraordinary. Is it so much more congenial to you than life would have been in, say, Tel Aviv University?
Omer Bartov: Yes, that's a good question. I think about that, because--
David Remnick: Americans constantly, when something horrible happens politically, especially in an extended way, whether it was during the Vietnam period, they say, "Well, we're going to leave. We're going to go to Canada," or wherever they're going to go, but they very rarely do, or they do it in very small numbers. In Israel, one of the great fears about what's going on politically is that so many of the best and the brightest will, in fact, leave and have been leaving.
Omer Bartov: Yes, about 200,000 have left since October 7th.
David Remnick: Which is a huge number for a small country.
Omer Bartov: Yes. They're also among the best trained, the best educated elements of society. They're often not leaving for political reasons, mind you, they're leaving because the economy is in the dumps. They're leaving because the schools have become religious, and they don't see a future for their children. I would not go back to Israel now. In fact, the last time I went to Israel was December 2024, and I've not been there since. I don't intend to go there at least until the elections. Depending on the outcome of the elections, I'm not sure I would be safe there, for one thing, because I've been quite outspoken. If anybody looks at what I wrote, and they may not--
David Remnick: Let's get into that. Just weeks after October 7th, very short period of time after you wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying there was no proof of a genocide in Israel's bombardment of Gaza, which had just really begun, and it was horrific, but it had just begun. You wrote this. "We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time."
Take me back to that moment. What were you seeing then that suggested that there was, in fact, in your view, an imminent genocide that was preventable? You have called October 7th itself a war crime. It's not as if you're in the business of excusing what happened that day by any stretch of the imagination.
Omer Bartov: Look, what Hamas did, killing about 800 civilians, taking 251 hostages, was obviously a war crime and potentially a crime against humanity. There's no question about it. What troubled me by the time that article came out, I think on November 10th, so just a month after these events, about 10,000 people in Gaza had already been killed by then, and the majority of them were assumed to be, and it's now we know were civilians. There was massive destruction of homes and other facilities in Gaza. As I wrote there, there was already pretty good evidence that war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity, meaning killing of large numbers of civilians, were already occurring.
I also refer there to the fact that there was a rhetoric in Israel which had a genocidal content. There were people in executive positions in the Israeli government, in the Israeli military, in the security establishment, who were making genocidal statements, statements that could be also construed as incitement to troops. Israel had conscripted over 300,000 reservists who were exposed to-- They're civilians, and they're exposed to this kind of rhetoric. "They shall have no water. They shall have no food. They will have no power. They are human animals, and they will be treated as such." That kind of rhetoric, "Remember what Amalek did unto you." That scared me.
David Remnick: That's what Netanyahu said about Amalek figure in the Bible. Let me ask you, this is a crucial question. How do you define genocide?
Omer Bartov: The only definition that I find relevant in these cases exists. It's a definition that is in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which is a UN convention from 1948. It defines genocide as acts carried out with the intent of destroying a particular group. Could be a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, as such. You have to show that there is an intent to destroy a group, as a group, and you have to show that this intent is being implemented.
I was very worried in November that this was the way things were going. The reason I really wrote this article was I was hoping that someone in the Biden administration would pay attention, because I was clearly aware then and now that Israel can only operate at this volume of operation, this intensity, with constant help from the United States in providing arms, in providing economic help, and in providing a diplomatic Iron Dome, in protecting Israel, mostly in the Security Council through its veto power.
The truth of the matter is that had President Biden acted in November or December of 2023 to stop Israel, had he told Netanyahu, "You have two weeks to wrap this up, and if you don't, then you'll be on your own," then we might have said that there were war crimes, there was terrible destruction, and it might have become a genocide, but it didn't. The Biden administration did not act. By May 2024, it became clear that this pattern of operations, a genocidal pattern of operation which conformed to the statements that were made immediately after October 7th, was actually being implemented.
David Remnick: You write in your book that the May 2024 attack on Rafah. Rafah is a city in the southern end of the Gaza Strip. That, to you, was the turning point. What happened in that attack, and why did that change how you were viewing the question of genocide?
Omer Bartov: In the city of Rafah, that before the war had a population of about a quarter of a million people, at that point in May, there were a million people. Half of the population of Gaza was concentrated in Rafah. The reason was that they were displaced by the IDF. The IDF told them to leave their homes for their own safety, because their neighborhoods, towns, villages would become areas of operations and move out, move south. Obviously, after that, the IDF actually demolished their homes, but they now were concentrated in large numbers in Rafah.
If the army were to move into the city, and that's what the Biden administration was saying, they would have killed vast numbers of people. The administration said, "Don't do that." The IDF said, "Don't worry about it. We'll take care of it." They moved those people to Al-Mawasi, which is the coastal area in southwestern Gaza, where there was no humanitarian infrastructure whatsoever. Then they moved into the city and flattened it.
By August, Rafah is gone. It doesn't exist. What was the pattern of this entire operation? What was the IDF trying to accomplish? Because there was an official war goal, which was, "Our goal is to destroy Hamas and release the hostages." There was, of course, a contradiction between the two, because, as we know, hostages died because of IDF operations. Trying to destroy Hamas, actually, also--
David Remnick: Forgive me. What Netanyahu would say to you, I know, if you were facing him, he would say, "Come on, they could have ended the whole thing by releasing the hostages." They didn't release the hostages. Hamas built a vast infrastructure underground to protect not the people of Gaza, but Hamas itself, leaving-- That they wanted this. They wanted this to encourage international outrage against the state of Israel. You know the arguments, and you can fill them out yourself.
Omer Bartov: The first argument is that had they released the hostages, we would have stopped. Of course, Hamas was perfectly happy to release the hostages. That's what Hamas was offering. Release our prisoners, and we will release the hostages-
David Remnick: And disarm.
Omer Bartov: -in an agreement. No, disarm was another question, but that's a different condition. You have to decide what the condition is. Almost all the hostages who came back came back through agreement with Hamas. The idea that you would get them released through military operations failed miserably. The idea that you would destroy Hamas by destroying Gaza similarly failed miserably because Gaza has been destroyed, but Hamas is still there. It did not destroy Hamas. In the process, the IDF carried out genocide of the population.
The opportunity is to empty Gaza of its population. What they wanted to do was to ethnically cleanse Gaza. They didn't want genocide. They didn't want to kill them all. They wanted them to leave.
David Remnick: And go where?
Omer Bartov: Exactly, there was no place for them to go. The big difference between the Nakba of 1948 and what happened in '23, '24, '25 in Gaza is that at the time the borders were open, in '48, they could flee. They did flee, to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Syria. In 2023, 2024, Israel, of course, did not open its borders. Egypt did not open its borders, and they had no place to flee. Ethnic cleansing, which was what the Israeli government wanted to carry out, became genocide. Not for the first time. This is historically quite common. Many genocides started like that.
David Remnick: Part of the reaction that you've got, I imagine, to your use of the word genocide. I wonder what pain that caused you, and what reaction you got, particularly from Israelis.
Omer Bartov: Look, I want to start by saying that we can say that our heart is broken by saying that, but first of all, our heart must be broken because of--
David Remnick: The suffering of the people who suffered in Gaza, above all.
Omer Bartov: Of that suffering and of the fact that that was caused by Jewish men and women, Israeli Jews, by people who are the children and grandchildren of my friends. That does break my heart. Yes. The state is still, to this moment, in complete and total denial of what it had done. That does break my heart. Now, how do people respond to it? Some have felt uncomfortable themselves because they know that what I'm saying is correct. They may not want to call it genocide because in Israel, people associate the word with the Holocaust, and they say, "Well, it doesn't look like the Holocaust," which it doesn't.
What happened in Gaza is not the Holocaust. What happened in Gaza is a particular genocide that happened in Gaza. Very different from the Holocaust, but conforming to the definition of genocide by the UN, which, as I said, is the only one that matters.
David Remnick: Another form of pushback that you get also is that, wait a minute, the United States in the Second World War, in the firebombing of Dresden, of Tokyo, more recently in its war against ISIS, that it was unbelievably brutal, and in the rear view mirror might not have been "necessary" in the military sense and certainly in the humanitarian sense. Why all this uproar around Israel?
Omer Bartov: Yes, there are many such questions. You can also say, why do we talk about Israel and not about what Russia is doing, or China is doing, or Somalia, and so forth. To this particular case, the US killed about 600,000 German civilians in open cities intentionally, knowing that they were killing civilians with the idea that maybe that will make the civilians stand up against their own regime. They just tried it again in Iran, having not learned that lesson that it doesn't work that way. It never did. It never will.
David Remnick: Or Vietnam.
Omer Bartov: Or Vietnam. Why is that not genocide? The question is, what was the intent? As I said, in genocide, intent matters. How do you discern intent? When the US occupied Germany, what did it do to the Germans? It did the Marshall Plan in Germany. It invested money in Germany to rebuild Germany. It set to work to reconstruct Germany.
Israel's goal in Gaza, you can see what its goal in Gaza is right now. Gaza now, the population of Gaza lives in less than half of the territory. It's unhoused, it's living in tents. It has no infrastructure. They're living there like dogs, and nobody is doing anything about it. The plan, the future of the genocide in Gaza seems to be to create a resort town for the rich and to have the Palestinians be the water carriers for that. Those who will clean the toilets, wash the dishes, and the rest of the time live in so-called humanitarian towns, which would be akin to concentration camps.
David Remnick: At the same time, in the West Bank, you're seeing more and more settler violence that's countenanced by the right-wing government. Do you think a change in government in Israel would make any difference at all?
Omer Bartov: Even those who are supposed to be left-center in that opposition, which may hopefully become a coalition, have no plan whatsoever that I have seen as to what to do with the issue of Palestine and Palestinians.
David Remnick: You're referring to Yair Golan and--
Omer Bartov: Yes, Golan-- I mean, none of them. Gantz or Lapid or none of them. What difference would it make? For the Palestinians, in the short run, I don't think it'll make any difference.
David Remnick: I'm speaking with the historian Omer Bartov. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and we've been speaking today with Omer Bartov. He's a professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies at Brown University, and he's written many books about the Second World War. His new book asks profound and troubling questions about his homeland. It's called Israel: What Went Wrong? I'll continue my conversation now with Omer Bartov.
You teach at Brown, and specifically, I want to talk about another word that evokes a lot of emotions. We just discussed genocide. Here's the other one, Zionist. Zionist, when I was growing up, I'm just a few years younger than you, meant something quite different. It had a very different electrical charge to it depending on what community you were sitting in. What does it mean to the students that you teach? What does it mean to you?
Omer Bartov: I teach right now on the Holocaust and the Nakba, and I have a large number of students. I have Muslim students, I have Jewish students, I have Palestinian students, Pakistani, regular American students. I think that they have different opinions. They're open-minded, they want to know. They're not worried. When they come to class initially, they're uncomfortable with each other, and they don't know what's going to happen.
As they're exposed to more readings and to more knowledge, they open up, and they just want to understand. I think that's the great thing about a university, and that's what this current atmosphere that exists, that tries to control teaching, that tries to tell you what you can teach or what you can't teach, is destructive of education, quite a part of understanding this particular event.
I don't have great faith in universities right now, and university administrations right now. They are cowering, and faculty have never been known to be the most courageous people in the world. I worry about it. More students want to come to this class because they feel a need to understand, and there's very little on offer because so many faculty are afraid of teaching about Israel/Palestine. They're afraid of being condemned as anti-Semitic. I frankly don't give a damn what people think.
David Remnick: I think you've got that pretty covered, though, on the anti-Semitic end by being an Israeli Jew. Is that a shield against that kind of attack?
Omer Bartov: I don't know because my administration tells me that they get hundreds of emails telling them to fire me, that I'm in the pay of Hamas and Qatar, and that I'm an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew at the same time.
David Remnick: I'm afraid I get the same. I'm afraid I get the same when I write from there. Let's get to the word Zionism.
Omer Bartov: I grew up in a Zionist home, and I did everything that a good Zionist Israeli, which is very different from Zionist American does.
David Remnick: Tell the listeners what that meant to you.
Omer Bartov: My existence in Israel was self-evident. I had no questions about it. I was born into it. I ran barefoot on the sand. I spoke Hebrew as my first language. It was my home, it was my place. I did the things that you were supposed to do. I went to the army. I did everything as a good Israeli. I didn't even think of myself truly, neither as a Jew nor as a Zionist. I was an Israeli young man.
David Remnick: Did you have some conception somewhere in the back of your mind? We discussed this earlier that the discussion about this was very scant, that had your mother, for example, stayed in Poland a bit longer, she would have ended up in Auschwitz. That Zionism, at a certain point, and we'll talk about it in terms of the Palestinians in a second, was that this was the last refuge available because it's not as if the rest of the world was welcoming Jewish refugees, including this country, by the way.
Omer Bartov: Look, when I was growing up, this was all very abstract. I knew all these arguments. Having received the education that I had, I could not understand why Jews were living anywhere else. It's not only about those who got out at the last time or didn't from Europe. I could not understand why Jews were living in America. I went to Germany, and I was asking German Jews, "Why are you living here? You should live in Israel." To me, it was completely self-evident.
The more the deeper understanding. When I was writing about my mother's hometown, I truly realized that had my grandfather not made a decision in 1935 to take his three children and his wife, and move to Palestine, and he was dishonest, I would not have been born because I know exactly what happened to those who stayed behind. Yes, of course, it was an argument that we, my generation, internalized.
As I write in the book, we all belong to mutilated families, and we knew it vaguely, but we also took our-- One has to understand that we took our existence as self-evident, like all children do. The question of why are we here and what did it take to make this our place? How much violence was involved in making us be born as a self-evident consequence of that act, that came later.
We were basically-- my generation was raised in two denials, two fundamental denials, fundamental to Zionism. One was the Shlilat ha-Galut, as it's called in Hebrew, the negation of the Diaspora. The other was the negation of the Nakba. The word, of course, didn't even exist at the time, or not for us, but that we never asked what was there just before we were born, what happened to all those people? Why were they gone? Why were there now Jews from Morocco living in homes that had belonged to Arabs? What was this house, the sheikh's house called?
David Remnick: There was also a period-- and I know you were in transition in your own life. There was also a period in the '80s and into the '90s when there were a lot of people that would consider themselves liberal Zionists who were becoming or were already quite aware of the Nakba of Palestinian nationalism alongside of Zionism of Israelism. We're very hopeful about call it a deal, call it an accommodation, call it a two-state solution, all of which seems incredibly naive or quaint or misbegotten in the rearview mirror.
There was this period, the title of your book is Israel: What Went Wrong? We are a long way from the psychology and some of the political realities of 20-odd years ago, before the second intifada. Do you think it's possible for Israel to change its course profoundly enough so that you would think of it in a different way?
Omer Bartov: Look, first of all, I don't think it was naive. I think it was realistic at the time. Yes, I knew many of those new historians, Ilan Pappe, who is an old friend with whom we shared a room in Oxford--
David Remnick: Benny Morris, who's gone to the other political side.
Omer Bartov: Benny Morris went to the dark side. Yes. It was, in many ways, the last moment of realism as opposed to messianism, which is what has taken over Israel now. It was not naive, it was the best way to go. It culminated with the assassination of Rabin. I remember it well because I was sitting there, and holding my six-month-old daughter and crying, and I didn't even like Rabin. It wasn't that he-- He was the last hope, and he could have accomplished something because of his own record, because of his standing in Israeli society. I thought this is over for a generation. I was wrong because it's more than a generation now, and things are only going the wrong way.
What went wrong is-- I try to answer that in the book. You can go back to 1948. One of the things that went deeply wrong is that Israel never had a constitution, and that Zionism became a state ideology, it became something else. It kept transforming itself into what it is today, which is an insupportable ideology of extremism, of militarism, of racism, and eventually of genocide. Anyone who supports it becomes complicit in the acts of that particular political ideology.
David Remnick: You think Zionism is not reformable?
Omer Bartov: Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is. The state of Israel has to be reinvented, and it cannot be reinvented according to this ethno nationalist principle that has taken hold of it. It was always there, of course. Zionism is an ethnonational ideology, but ethnonational states have reformed themselves over time, and Israel has gone-
David Remnick: For example?
Omer Bartov: -the other way. Well, you look at the states of the interwar period. Poland, for instance, was an anti-Semitic, racist country, went through a lot of drama. Poland today, despite the fact that it does have also strong ethno nationalists, is a very different country from what it was at the time. Israel, as a society, there has to be a society of all its citizens. As it was said at the time, in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, Eretz Kol Ezracheha, a country of all its citizens. That was the big hope for Palestinians, too. That was when Hamas was less powerful, that was when the messianic national religious were less powerful. They took over.
David Remnick: I think for what you're describing to happen, a lot more has to happen than just that Bibi Netanyahu is not on the political scene.
Omer Bartov: Absolutely.
David Remnick: What has to happen?
Omer Bartov: It is important to be rid of Netanyahu. As I write in the book, I don't think that Israel and the Palestinians right now have the dynamic, the internal dynamic to move forward beyond that. There are forces in Israel, there are forces among Palestinians. There are wonderful people, creative people, hopeful people, but they cannot rise to the top without pressure from the outside.
What Israel needs right now is shock therapy. Despite all the horrors that it has inflicted on others and has also experienced itself since October 7th, it has not still come to identify the limits of its own power, because those limits are in Washington, D.C., and it's there that those limits have to be set. It's only then that some forces in Israel will start generating a new way of thinking about Israeli society.
David Remnick: 60% of Americans now have a negative view of Israel, according to Pew. How will that affect the situation that you're describing?
Omer Bartov: For one thing, it says something quite good about American society that Americans have actually responded to the reality on the ground. I think there is growing criticism of American support for these Israeli policies, both on the American left and on the American right. I would say, however, that some of the forces that are coming now to the fore within the American right, within the MAGA movement, are also anti-Semitic. What they're speaking about is the control that Israel has or the Jews have on American policies, and that's why they want to pull away from Israel.
I think for Israel, that would be good because I think Israel needs to be liberated from that dependence on American power. I think for American society and for American Jewry, that's a very bad thing because there is a rise of real, not alleged, antisemitism of the left, which is mostly an invention of supporters of Israel, but actual antisemitism from the Tucker Carlsons of the world, who are a rising force right now.
David Remnick: Professor Bartov, thank you so much.
Omer Bartov: Thank you.
David Remnick: Omer Bartov is a professor at Brown University. Israel: What Went Wrong? has just been published.
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