Right now, Israel is engaged in genocidal actions in Gaza,’ says Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University
Actions of Israeli soldiers reflect ‘very much the kind of mentality that I identified among German soldiers in World War II,’
Occupied West Bank is also facing ‘a situation of creeping ethnic cleansing … carried out by settlers’ with the backing of the Israeli government and military, says Bartov
“Over time, you could see that actions by the IDF (Israel Defense 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,”
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.”
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,”
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.
“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,”
“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.”
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