It Was Always Genocide

The NY Times published a “Guest Essay” today by Omer Bartov called I’m a Genocide Scholar. I know It When I See It. I guess he just wasn’t looking before. The article is full of factual content about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, but it comes across as, first and foremost, an attempt to salvage Israel’s plummeting reputation.

In the very first paragraph Bartov dismisses accusations of genocide from early on as “the cries of Israel’s fiercest critics”, seeming to imply that they were premature in their identification of the genocide because of an irrational hatred of Israel.

It’s safe to assume the Israeli historian and genocide/Holocaust scholar Raz Segal is one of the “fiercest critics” he had in mind. It’s true that Segal has been a fierce critic of Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies, but when he published A Textbook Case of Genocide on October 13th, 2023, he said it was motivated primarily by the mass evacuation of a million Palestinians from Northern Gaza to Rafah in the south. It is no wonder that he doesn’t mention Segal by name until near the end of the article.

Strangely, Bartov was also moved to start taking accusations of genocide seriously when Israel evacuated about a million Palestinians, but for him it was about the evacuation of the Palestinians in Rafah in May, 2024, a majority of whom had been displaced to that region nearly eight months earlier.

It isn’t that strange that this renowned scholar of genocide and the Holocaust took as long as he did to recognize what was happening when in his own words “this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could”. I wonder how many lives might have been saved if he (and many other scholars) resisted a little less.

He then goes on to say that he’s not alone in his relatively newfound determination that Israel is committing genocide, citing Francesca Albanese, Amnesty International, and the South African case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Never mind that Francesca Albanese published Anatomy of a Genocide in March (several months before his epiphany), and the ICJ issued its ruling about the plausibility of genocide in Gaza two months earlier, in January.

The casualty statistics he cites later in the article are the bare minimum being reported anywhere, and he doesn’t even suggest, as the vast majority of reputable sources do, that those numbers may be gross underestimates. He mentions that an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, then a few sentences later says “at least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes.” Again, not even a nod to that being on its face an obvious underestimate.

Later he laments that “To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust, and no institution dedicated to researching and commemorating it” has warned that Israel may be on a genocidal rampage. Presumably they are just better at fighting the good fight of “resisting as long as they can” than he was.

But midway through the article comes the fulcrum of his concern: “⁠How will Israel’s future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust?” (emphasis mine).

Of course the morality of the nation-state of Israel, a Jewish supremacist state founded on the ideology of Zionism (which developed years before the Holocaust) and from the very start intent on replacing the indigenous Palestinians, has been contested since its formation in 1948. That a scholar of Bartov’s education would even suggest otherwise betrays extraordinary intellectual dishonesty.

In his great book of the same name, Omar El Akkad said “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”. The argument being that there would eventually come a time when Israel’s ongoing campaign to rid Palestine of Palestinians (ongoing since 1948) would lose the camouflage of ‘self-defense’, and “the Jewish state” would then lose its facade of moral superiority. Then everyone, if you ask them, will have always been against it.