A Brown University history professor and Holocaust scholar asserted that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza during a talk hosted by Georgetown University Nov. 11.
The speaker, Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), published an op-ed in the New York Times in November 2023 defending Israel’s actions before recanting in an August essay in The Guardian, in which he explained his belief that Israel’s actions in Gaza fall under the definition of genocide. His talk, titled “Gaza and the Question of Genocide,” discussed why he changed his mind.
The United Nations defines genocide as an act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Perpetrators of genocide may try to accomplish this by killing or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Military and political conflict in the region has been ongoing since before the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, which Palestinians characterize as an occupation that led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. The most recent escalation occurred on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and other militant groups attacked Israel, killing about 1,250 people.
The Israeli response to the attacks has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and displaced more than 85% of Gazans. Those who remain in Gaza experience a shortage of food, water and access to healthcare.
Bartov said he believes the crisis constitutes genocide because he feels the IDF’s attacks have made Gaza unlivable.
“I wrote about this in August in The Guardian and I said that I had changed my mind and, to me, this appears now as a genocidal operation,” Bartov said during the event. “Why genocidal? Because it’s making the entire area uninhabitable for the Palestinian population.”
“It is very hard in international law to prove genocide,” Bartov added. “There are multiple reasons but the most important of which is you need to show both the intent to destroy the group and that the intent is being implemented.”
Bartov said the IDF’s forced evacuation of Palestinians from Northern Gaza to Rafah, a city in the south of Gaza, convinced him that Israel was acting in more than self-defense.
“What we are seeing and all the evidence that was building up, is not at all an operation whose goal was to free the hostages and not at all an operation whose goal was to destroy Hamas, neither of which was accomplished and still has not been accomplished,” Bartov said. “It is something else.”
Bartov’s talk was the ninth event in the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU)’s Gaza Lecture Series, which began in January 2024 and brings speakers from a variety of disciplines to examine topics ranging from urbanism to Israeli politics to genocide.
One of the issues Bartov discussed is the long-standing controversy over Israeli settlements in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory. The first settlements were built in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, a 1967 conflict that culminated in Israeli forces seizing territory in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. According to a European Union report, as of 2023, upward of 700,000 Israelis lived in settlements located in occupied territory.
Bartov said Israel’s actions in Gaza are politically motivated to displace Gazans in favor of building settlements, as members of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government have released settlement plans.
“What they’re doing right now is not fighting an enemy,” Bartov said. “What they’re doing right now is accomplishing a political goal that is not entirely publicly expressed.”
“The plan is, as I understand it, they are implementing the political agenda of the settler movement and the Jewish power of the people to empty that area,” Bartov said.
ACMCU Director Nader Hashemi said educators have a duty to provide students with speakers like Bartov during times of crisis.
“By putting on these lecture series and inviting people of the caliber of Omer Bartov, we’re really addressing an issue that is front and center of our world today, that everyone is talking about,” Hashemi told The Hoya. “People are, I think, still trying to understand what can be done or should be done.”
“During moments like this, when you have a global crisis that involves the United States, there is an educational responsibility that we have as educators to educate people on programming that matters,” Hashemi said.
Bartov predicted that barring any unforeseen circumstances, Israel will likely take full control of the West Bank and Gaza.
“The most likely scenario as I see it, and in that sense it may not matter at all which administration we have in the United States, is the fighting will gradually settle down,” Bartov said at the event. “It won’t stop entirely and Israel will establish a full-blown apartheid regime in the West Bank and Gaza which will — and is already — seep into Israel proper.”
Marium Ihsan (CAS ’28), who attended the lecture, said Bartov’s perspective reminded her that staying educated is important.
“I think the one thing that really stood out to me was that it’s all about your own effort that you put in to educate yourself and to bring yourself out of ignorance,” Ihsan told The Hoya. “Because even for someone who was raised under a Zionist regime, he was able to change his perspective based on the evidence and the information that he had in front of him and he made that effort for himself. For other people to do that is very important.”
“No matter what your upbringing is, or no matter what information or media you consume, there’s always different viewpoints and different experiences out there and we sort of have this responsibility to educate ourselves,” Ihsan added.
Hashemi said he hopes speakers like Bartov inspire students to mobilize for change and build a better future.
“We’re hoping that the education that we provide then motivates students to organize and mobilize students in other generations at different times in the United States,” Hashemi said. “We’re hoping that this lecture series will inform students with the facts so they can also mobilize and be inspired by previous generations of students who took on these global questions that were moral questions and ethical questions, and to fight for a better world.”