Is it genocide?

Omer Bartov on the destruction of Gaza

Genocide is defined, per the United Nations Convention, as committing any of five criminal acts “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

The five crimes are 1) killing members of the group; 2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and 5) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In our boiling political climate, the term genocide is also a rhetorical weapon to attack your opponents or stun bystanders out of their collective coma. It is the crime of crimes – considered worse than all other categories of atrocities such as crimes against humanity. Genocide immediately brings to mind Nazis and gas chambers.

Although the term is often misused and abused – and those wielding it like a cudgel may embrace loathsome positions of their own – thinking people must still consider the possibility that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza rather than acting solely in self-defense following the Hamas onslaught on Oct. 7, 2023.

Moshe Dayan’s enduring admonishment

Studying history allows us to discover the continuities and fissures within a society. We may burrow deep into the layers of events, ideas, and attitudes that form, calcify, and crack over the decades – revealing shifts in the ways people think of themselves and their nation. We may not like what we learn.

Historian Omer Bartov, a Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, shared his disturbing discoveries in a searching, sobering essay for The Guardian about his recent trip to Israel – the country of his birth and for which he fought in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Bartov was my guest on Tuesday’s episode of History As It Happens.

Most Israeli Jews today, across the political spectrum, have become inured to the suffering of Palestinians, ignoring their legitimate grievances, Bartov contends. This is a disheartening departure from the attitudes of Israeli citizens and leaders of earlier generations. As Bartov writes, the war hero Moshe Dayan recognized that Palestinians who had been permanently expelled from the Jewish state in 1948 had legitimate reasons to rage.

At a funeral for a Jew murdered by Arab guerrillas who crossed into Israel from Gaza in 1956 – just months before Israel would attack Egypt in the Suez Crisis – Dayan intoned (as cited in Bartov’s essay):

“Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.”

However, as Bartov reminds us, Dayan said Israel could never let the sword fall from its hands. The Arabs’ anger meant war forever.

“Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.” (Dayan did eventually let down his sword; he supported peace with Egypt after 1973).

Today Israelis remain committed to wielding the sword but have lost sight of their enemy’s humanity, Bartov said in our conversation. Palestinians collectively, not only Hamas specifically, are dehumanized in Israeli politics and culture, thereby conditioning the youngest Israeli generations to kill without conscience.

“That is what I encountered when I was in Israel. The inability of the Israeli public, including people who identify with the liberal part of society, to sympathize, to empathize, to understand why Palestinians have so much rage against Israel,” Bartov said.

“There are two layers to this,” he went on. “One is the immediate one, and that is October 7. It was a ghastly massacre of 900 civilians by Hamas fighters and others, killing children and old people, cases of rape, and taking hostage 250 people. That, of course, makes it very difficult for Israelis to think of Palestinians in any other way but as murderers. But there is a much deeper layer to this. It didn’t start on October 7. The deeper layer is that Israel has been occupying millions of Palestinians for most of its existence. And that has created a process of dehumanization of Palestinians. People don’t think of them as having any rights. They think of them as an occupied population very much in the way that any colonial power thinks of the people it colonizes. You dehumanize them and thereby dehumanize yourself.”

Bartov’s remarks bring to mind two classic works on the brutalizing effect colonialism has on perpetrators and victims alike (Israel’s occupation from 1967 and de facto annexation of the West Bank is tantamount to settler colonialism). The classic studies are The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi and Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire.

Is it genocide?

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is charging neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his dismissed defense minister Yoav Gallant with crimes of genocide. The International Court of Justice, meanwhile, is weighing South Africa’s genocide case against the state of Israel; the ICC charges individuals only.

The ICC did not charge the commander-in-chief of Hamas’s military wing, Diab Ibrahim al-Masri (known as Mohammed Deif), who is believed to be dead, with genocide, either. Deif was accused of extermination among a litany of horrendous atrocities under the category of crimes against humanity.

In issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, the ICC is alleging “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” Bartov contends this amounts to genocide – a charge that’s been hard to prove in the decades since the U.N. codified its convention. The problem lies in proving genocidal intent.

“The prosecutor charged Gallant and Netanyahu with what could most easily be proven. There is a pretty good trail to show that the IDF has deprived Palestinians – and has spoken about doing that – of food and medicine. And that has caused tremendous hardship as well as death… to large numbers of Palestinians. Instead of delving into issues that could be more controversial, I think they went for what was most easy to prove,” Bartov said.

Predictably and preposterously, Netanyahu denounced the arrest warrant, comparing it to the nineteenth-century trial of Alfred Dreyfus. But it is unlikely he or Gallant will ever be arrested, let alone stand trial in the Hague. As Bartov relates from his most recent trip to Israel, IDF soldiers who have fought in Gaza post-Oct. 7 have rendered their verdicts: whatever differences they have with their elected leaders, they and their leaders are not war criminals. Bartov fears Israel is destroying itself.

“They appear to be the future political soldiers of another kind of regime in Israel that is now potentially in the making. This kind of political soldier that we saw in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, that carried the fascist regimes that came to power, is the biggest danger to any democracy. These are people who really believe in what they’re doing… they are determined to create a better world. And as they are doing it, they are destroying their own country,” Bartov told me.

A prescient warning from the past

In 2003, the late Tony Judt penned an essay in The New York Review warning that both Israel’s government and the American Jewish community were hurtling toward disaster. Judt’s insights are astounding for their prescience. As Israel empties northern Gaza of Palestinians in advance of Jewish resettlement, having already rendered the enclave uninhabitable with U.S. munitions, it is worth citing Judt at length. Again, this was written more than 20 years ago (emphasis mine):

“Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.

“Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy ‘Samaria,’ ‘Judea,’ and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.

“Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.”

Judt was excoriated for his admittedly utopian proposal of creating a single, binational state where Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights. Among his (non-hysterical) critics was Omer Bartov, whose response to Judt can be read here. Today, more than 20 years later and with hundreds of thousands more Jewish settlers occupying Palestinian lands, Bartov favors “two states, one homeland” as proposed by the organization A Land For All. “The old two-state idea is defunct with 750,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” he says.

Peaceful co-existence seems impossible at the moment. But, as Tony Judt wrote in 2003, things can change. Politics never stops. It is hard to see a better future as I scroll social media feeds displaying videos of flattened neighborhoods and the mangled bodies of Palestinian children. Still, as Judt put it, we are allowed to imagine what might be possible years from now: “Ideas acquire traction over time as part of a process.”

He went on:

“In the first decades of the Israeli state it was officially denied that any Arabs were forced to leave during the War of Independence of 1948–1949; a large part of the moral self-image of Labour Zionism rested upon this ingenuous assertion. Now that mainstream Israeli historians have shown the claim to be false, the fundamental premise in Israel’s dealing with Palestinians has changed.

“Indeed, even the very existence of Palestinians was once hotly disputed. In the later 1960s, at a public meeting in London, I was tartly informed by Golda Meir, Israel’s future prime minister, that I could not speak of “Palestinians” since they did not exist. Who, now, would seriously maintain such a position? Things change.

“The Palestinians themselves—taking their wishes for fact—officially ignored the existence of the State of Israel for decades. Like Israelis, they scorned and abhorred the very premise of a two-state solution—until 1988, when the Palestine National Council finally adopted it. Many American Jews who today accuse me of indulging a binational fantasy and who insist that hard-nosed reality dictates a two-state outcome would not, I suspect, have welcomed such an outcome a few decades back. Most Israelis could not have begun to conceive of a Palestinian state back in the 1970s. Israeli law forbade all contact with Palestinian representatives, and denied the existence of any willing Arab interlocutors. Today, only Benjamin Netanyahu and the zealots continue to reject the very principle of a Palestinian state. Things really do change.”

Note the penultimate sentence in the previous paragraph. Something hasn’t changed. Netanyahu and the religious and nationalist maniacs with whom he shares power still do not accept a Palestinian state. On the contrary, they are perpetrating the destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza.

Criticism of Israel or Zionism cannot be dismissed solely as a function of knee-jerk antisemitism or pro-Hamas allegiances, although some critics undoubtedly embrace such attitudes. A consensus is growing across the political spectrum and the world that Israel has gone way too far in its response to the Hamas atrocities. It is easy to ridicule a college student waving a Palestinian flag; less so when accusations of ethnic cleansing come from former Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon.

A final word about Omer Bartov’s essay in The Guardian concerning the attitudes of Israeli citizens. It’s something a 95-year-old veteran said to IDF troops in a motivational speech before invading Gaza to avenge 10/7. It evokes the worst crimes of the past century. The veteran told the troops “wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children.” As Bartov notes, Israeli President Isaac Herzog did not chide the old man for calling for genocide. Rather, Herzog rewarded him with a certificate of honor.

The Budapest Memorandum and a brighter future for all

If you watch the speeches of U.S. and European leaders from the early to mid-1990s, you will immediately sense the difference with today’s darker mood. Check out the remarks by Presidents Bill Clinton and Leonid Kuchma on the Ukrainian leader’s state visit to Washington in 1994.

Nowadays, democracy is said to be retreating as its defenders battle a “global bloc” of autocracies. Free trade is synonymous with the hollowing out of the middle class – at least in parts of the United States. China seeks to impose a new order on international relations. Nuclear proliferation is the norm. The list of crises goes on and on.

The immediate post-Cold War period had its share of crises, but the future seemed as bright as the summer sun that splashed the White House lawn on the day of Kuchma’s visit. Nuclear arsenals would be dismantled. Free markets and free trade would buttress democratic advances in Eastern Europe, Russia, even China! NATO would welcome anyone. The personal computer and internet would solve poverty. The list of promising dreams went on and on. Still, everyone involved was aware of the difficulties.

Thirty years ago, on Dec. 5-6, 1994, Western political leaders met in Budapest for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Nuclear non-proliferation was a priority. After years of thorny negotiations, the leaders of the U.S., United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum.

The agreement held that Ukraine would rid all the nuclear weapons left on its territory by the collapse of the Soviet Union in exchange for assurances – not guarantees – “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” The Russian political establishment may not have fully accepted Ukrainian independence, ratified in 1991, but here was President Boris Yeltsin assuring the world Russia would never attack its neighbor.

Ukraine’s decision to transfer the nuclear weapons to Russia to be dismantled has since been second-guessed. At the time, however, most Ukrainian political and military leaders saw little benefit to keeping the nukes. Rather than establishing a deterrence against future invasions, the missiles were seen as an expensive hindrance when Ukraine’s economy was in shambles.

Ukraine never legally possessed the arms as they belonged to the USSR, and the newly independent country was under U.S. and European pressure to enter the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear state. Ukraine also lacked command and control of the missile systems. Thus, attempting to hold onto thousands of missiles at enormous cost, at odds with the international consensus on non-proliferation, may have invited foreign interference rather than deter it. For a comprehensive treatment of Ukraine’s decision to denuclearize, read Mariana Budjeryn’s Inheriting the Bomb.

As we know, Ukraine held up its end of the agreement. Russia did not – or, more accurately, Russia under a different leader ultimately trashed Yeltsin’s mid-1990s assurances.

Departure points

In Friday’s episode of History As It Happens, historian Michael Kimmage, the Richard C. Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, says the Budapest deal should be viewed as an important demarcation point in the decades-long story of the ruin of Russian relations with the U.S. and Europe.

“In diplomacy, a memorandum is very far from a treaty, and it is not especially binding, which was not a secret at the time,” Kimmage said. Yet, “there was such a spirit of optimism at the time that the signatories did all of this in good faith. So that’s interesting from a historical vantage point.”

Kimmage continued, “What the Budapest Memorandum signifies is not so much that the West was deeply committed to the security of Ukraine, which it wasn’t in 1994 and didn’t approach until 2022. What it signifies is the end of a particular moment in the post-Cold War period where the top priority of the United States was nuclear non-proliferation… We can go back in time and look at all of these trend lines and marvel at how different that time was from our own.” Boris and Bill were chummy. Biden and Putin? Not so much.

Among the topics Michael Kimmage and I discuss: the underlying, unresolved question of Ukraine’s relationship with Russia from 1991; Yeltsin’s commitment to integration into Europe; misunderstandings of NATO enlargement; and Kimmage’s essay, co-written with Hanna Notte, on how today’s war has expanding global repercussions. You can read the essay in Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, here (no paywall).

The Russia-Ukraine war is a world war, say Kimmage and Notte, because it has disrupted the global food supply while opening the door for non-European powers to get involved – whether by materially supporting Russia or offering peace settlements.

Ukraine’s prospects appear bleak. It has a manpower shortage, leading the White House to pressure Kyiv to expand conscription. War weariness is real. Meanwhile, Russian forces are gaining ground in the Donbas. Future U.S. aid to Ukraine may be imperiled by Trumpian hostility. The Kremlin reportedly is in no mood to talk, either.

President George H. W. Bush once declared “The day of the dictator is over.” Wars of aggression and territorial revision were supposed to have no place in his envisioned “new world order.” Putin is proving otherwise – and he may get away with it, albeit at enormous cost to his country and the world.

What’s next?

Coming up on Tuesday’s episode, we’ll return to the origins of our economic discontent. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! Remember the “New Economy”? Historian Nelson Lichtenstein does.

And next Friday, the situation in Syria with historian Sefa Secen. Why has the civil war suddenly reignited?