BARTOV, Omer

I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It . ( Article in New York Times, July 15, 2025 )

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For the last year, the I.D.F. [ Israeli Defense Force ] has not been fighting an organized military body … Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing.

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A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. … The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again.

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To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institution dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide.

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This silence has made a mockery of the slogan ‘Never again,’ transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.

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( this denial will prevent ) Holocaust Museums from conveying the broader, universal lessons of the Holocaust—including “the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law … and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance.

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the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the 20th century.

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