Israeli soldiers have repeatedly posted videos to social media boasting and laughing as they wantonly destroy civilian property, including homes, universities and entire neighborhoods. Many of the recordings feature variations of a common refrain as buildings are reduced to rubble and ash: “Flatten everything.”
Amid the mass destruction, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is evaluating Israel’s actions in a case brought by South Africa to determine whether they constitute the “crime of all crimes” under international law: genocide. The court’s deliberations are expected to take years to conclude.
But an interim ruling determined that “at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the (Genocide) Convention.”
Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American Holocaust scholar, said his careful examination of the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza since last October has led him to determine that it is no longer possible to deny that Israel is “engaged in genocidal actions in Gaza.”
“Over time, you could see that actions by the Israel forces were on such a scale of targeted destruction, intentional destruction – of universities, of hospitals, of schools, of mosques, of infrastructure, of housing areas – and the population was being moved from one place to another with the argument that it’s for their own safety,” Bartov, a former Israeli infantry commander who is now the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, told Anadolu.
“And meanwhile, (the population) was being increasingly debilitated by this, and never safe in its ‘safe zones,’ but constantly struck also in the so-called safe zones.”
Rafah invasion a turning point
Bartov penned a New York Times op-ed in early November in which he said it was “very likely” that war crimes and crimes against humanity were being committed by Israel in Gaza, further warning that Israel was in danger of slipping into genocide.
“There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide,” he wrote some nine months ago.
Bartov said that evaluation changed with Israel’s May invasion of Rafah, which was the last remaining city in Gaza that had some level of safety for the roughly 1.5 million civilians who sought shelter there.
“That, to me, meant that there was simply, absolutely, not only no concern for human life or for any humanitarian considerations, but rather that this was an attempt to make life in Gaza impossible for the population, and to debilitate the population to such an extent that it would either just die out, whether from military action or from the many diseases that are there, from deterioration of health on a massive scale, or try to flee as best it can,” he reflected.
Echoes of 1948 Nakba
Bartov said that while it is unclear if the war began with genocidal intent, he has identified parallels with the ongoing war and a series of forced displacements in 1948, when about 750,000 Palestinians were killed or forced from their homes in what is now Israel.
Their homes and oftentimes entire villages were destroyed to complicate any potential return. Palestinians call those events the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.”
“I don’t know that we’ll ever know if there was a plan from the very beginning. I kind of doubt it, because of the general incompetence of the Israeli military and the political authorities that was revealed on Oct. 7 and thereafter. So, I’m not sure there was a plan. There were people who were pushing for that. There were people who were pushing to generally empty Gaza of Gazans, and destroy their ability to come back,” said Bartov.
“The Palestinians were pushed out, 750,000 of them, the vast majority of the population in what became Israel, and then their houses were destroyed, their villages were destroyed, so they wouldn’t be able to come back to them … So that made me realize that this, if it was not a plan, it was a concerted effort from the very beginning, without giving it a name, to create that situation. Now, whether it will succeed or not, it’s still a little bit up in the air,” he added.
Israeli army’s parallels with Nazi military
Bartov’s scholarship has included landmark research into the Nazi military, known as the Wehrmacht, during World War II, specifically its indiscriminate extermination of civilian populations and the indoctrination that precipitated the killings.
That included instilling in the wider population the belief that its “enemies” were subhuman, and that the nation was fighting an existential threat to its existence.
In conversations with Israeli soldiers during a recent two-week visit to the country, Bartov said he found that the troops who had fought in Gaza “have a particular way of seeing reality,” that echoed the mentality he identified among German soldiers in World War II.
“That reality that they see is that they are fighting an insidious, dangerous, genocidal enemy. If that enemy wins, then they would be destroyed. That it is an enemy whose goal is to wipe Israel out. That’s the way they see it,” he explained.
“They perceive themselves very much as victims of this terroristic genocide or homicide or organization, and they believe that what they’re doing is completely right, that they have to do it, and all the damage that they’re inflicting is not because they’re bad.
“They kept saying that to me, ‘We’re not murderers. We are fighting for our country. We're fighting for our survival.’ So, if you have that kind of way of looking at reality, then you block out any sense of empathy with the innocent population, which you yourself are participating in killing and destroying. You don’t see it that way. You see yourself as the victim,” he said.
This, Bartov added, was “very much the kind of mentality that I identified among German soldiers in World War II.”
“Decades after World War II, Germans could not accept, they could accept that the SS (Schutzstaffel) carried out the Holocaust and so forth. But for them to think of the military, which represented every German family in Germany … (as an) army … involved in a genocidal undertaking was impossible, both to the soldiers … and their various relatives,” he said.
Bartov emphasized that his analysis does not mean that Israel’s war in Gaza is equivalent to the Holocaust, saying plainly: “It is not.”
“But right now, Israel is, as … I have to conclude, engaged in genocidal actions in Gaza. That doesn’t have to be like the Holocaust. There were many other cases. The Holocaust was the greatest genocide in history, and it’s very different from what we are seeing now, but that does not take Israel off the hook for its own actions,” he added.
Occupied West Bank facing ‘creeping ethnic cleansing’
The war in Gaza has dominated international headlines for nearly a year. But just 20 miles (34 kilometers) away, the occupied West Bank has seen increasing levels of attacks from Israeli settlers living in Jewish-only settlements that are considered illegal under international law.
Last Thursday night, a mob of armed settlers stormed the Palestinian village of Jit, firing guns and throwing Molotov cocktails as they destroyed civilian property. One resident, identified as Rashid Sedda, was killed in the violence.
It was just the latest in a series of such attacks.
The UN said last week that it has recorded 1,250 settler attacks against Palestinian communities since Oct. 7.
About 10% of the settler attacks led to Palestinian deaths or injuries, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Bartov was adamant that the attacks are indeed “state-sanctioned,” and have “long roots” in the Israeli government following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to form a coalition with members of the far-right, naming Itamar Ben-Gvir as national security minister and settler firebrand Bezalel Smotrich as finance minister.
In addition to his portfolio as finance minister, Netanyahu also named Smotrich, who proudly denies the existence of the Palestinian people, as a minister within the Defense Ministry overseeing the military’s operations in the West Bank.
Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, wields almost unchecked authority over the Israeli police, border guards and other security forces.
“What you have in the West Bank now is a situation of creeping ethnic cleansing, which is being carried out by settlers. It’s not all the settlers, but it’s the radical elements within the settlers. And there are many of them who are outlaws,” said Bartov.
“The army is supposed to control that, but the army, in fact, is complicit in it. Many of the people that you see now, if you look at the footage from these events, who are wearing uniforms, are settlers in uniforms. The settlers have been given uniforms, have been militarized, and they’re supposed to control the non-uniform settlers.
“So, this is now government policy. Of course, the government would not say it is policy, but the policy is to, in the West Bank, create conditions for Palestinians (that are) increasingly impossible.”
The scholar maintained that the settler attacks are the “rotten fruits” that have grown from Netanyahu’s decades-long insistence that the occupation of the West Bank can be “managed.”
“Managing the occupation has totally corrupted the Israeli political system, Israeli morals and ethics, and of course it has done enormous damage to the Palestinians,” said Bartov.
“Without changing that, what you see now are more and more of the rotten fruits of that kind of refusal to confront the fact that Israel is occupying a vast population as large as the Jewish population of the country itself.”