Omer Bartov: “Israel suffers from a serious disease of euphoria of power”
The leading Israeli-American Holocaust historian warns of potential genocide in Gaza, explains why the “euphoria of power” was the “root” of October 7th and why anti-Semitism will diminish should the Palestinian issue be resolved.
This interview was first published in Popaganda -in Greek- on 10 November 2023 (You can read it here)
When he was a child, many people in his neighbourhood had almost always had their sleeves rolled down. They were newcomers. When they rolled them up at the beach, the numbers on their arms were revealed, a lifelong mark of the Nazi horror. So, he grew up with people who were the remnants of that population. Holocaust survivors. At the same time, he was playing cops and robbers with his friends in the remnants of another civilization, in the empty village of Shech Monis, from where the Arabs had been kicked out. It took him many years, he tells me, to process that and understand what they were born into.
Omer Bartov then came to be a leading Holocaust historian and an expert in Genocides.
In his early research and books, he effectively deconstructed what after World War II became a popular view, that Wehrmacht soldiers were just following orders. He proved that Wehrmacht was a deeply Nazi institution with a decisive role in the Holocaust. There would be many more books, top distinctions and awards.
Omer Bartov, a Holocaust and Genocide Studies professor at Brown University today and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2005, says now that Israel is suffering from a “euphoria of power,” that’s why they believed they could hide the Palestinian issue under the carpet. He explains how he ended up warning of the threat of genocide and “shouting out” there would be no democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under an Apartheid regime. He also remembers his father, an awarded author and journalist, a strong Zionist who despised people like Netanyahu and the extremist settlers because he saw them as completely destroying what Jewish tradition and religion are all about: humanism.
We talked on Zoom on 3 November, while the Israeli assault on Gaza was continuing unabated and Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu was stating that a ceasefire would mean surrendering to Hamas.
“Israel calls upon its right to defend itself. How far does this right go, according to International Law?” I ask Professor Bartov.
“…In terms of what Israel is doing right now, according to its own statements, its goal is to dismantle the rule of Hamas”, he says. “So that’s one side of it. And how do you get there? That’s not so simple. The other side of it is that Israeli political and military leaders have made statements that are not actually consistent with that. That is, they’ve made statements that call for the destruction of Gaza, for flattening of Gaza, that call for, in some cases, ethnic cleansing of Gaza, of removing all the population from Gaza. There are settler leaders in Israel, some of whom are represented in the government of course, who are talking about basically settling Gaza after it’s emptied of its population.
These statements -which have a degree of popular support in Israel, partly ideological and partly in response to what happened on October 7th- can be deemed as genocidal statements, calling for a destruction of an entire population, or statements calling for ethnic cleansing. And that’s entirely illegitimate by any degree of international law.
So, I think one can legitimately argue that after the attack of October 7th, Israel not only has the right to defend itself, but has the right to say that regime in Gaza is no longer one that Israel can accept. But then, it has to follow up with a political proposal. Wars that are conducted without a political goal become wars of destruction. That’s the way it works. And that is illegitimate.
As for the conduct of the war right now, all of this apart, it raises serious concerns already of war crimes and potentially of crimes against humanity. And those are crimes that are not acceptable, even if the war that you’re conducting is seen as legitimate.
So, you can go to a legitimate war of defense, but conducted by illegal means. And that’s not acceptable.”
A whole people, “under the carpet”
On 15 October, Omer Bartov along with more than 800 scholars and practitioners of International Law, Conflict and Genocide, signed a watershed public statement warning of potential genocide in Gaza.
“Long before that, already in June 2023, I was interviewed by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and I said that Israel suffers from a serious disease of euphoria of power. What I meant by that was that Israel made a policy decision a long time ago, certainly under the numerous Netanyahu administrations, that it could handle the conflict with the Palestinians, meaning that it could ignore any Palestinian desire for a political settlement. It could ignore the political side of the issue and do other things: Settle the West Bank, enclose the Gaza Strip with the siege, and if possible, find all kinds of other political arrangements with other Arab states, and therefore sweep the entire Palestinian issue under the carpet. And that was the policy.”
Professor Bartov will later tell me he thinks that possibly the timing of Hamas’s attack –which “should be labeled both a crime against humanity and a war crime”- had to do with the possibility, “that was already sort of almost done, of an arrangement between the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, which would have entirely marginalised the Palestinian issue. And that, of course, was the interest of the Israeli government. And to continue the settlement and eventual annexation of the West Bank.”
He emphasises that “what is ironic is that Prime Minister Netanyahu, for years, had decided to strengthen Hamas at the cost of the Palestinian Authority, so that he could say that a solution was impossible with Gaza, because it’s ruled by Hamas — and Hamas does not really want any solution, it does want the destruction of the State of Israel and one of the spokespeople just reiterated that. And to say that you can’t really deal with the Palestinian Authority, because it’s so weak and corrupt, which is exactly the way Israel wants it to be. And so he created the situation that now blew up in his face, not only in his face, unfortunately, but in the face of the entire country, both Jews and Palestinians.”
“If this is not Apartheid, I don’t know what is”
Two months before the attack, on 4 August 2023, while Netanyahu was trying to restrict the Supreme Court’s power to annul government decisions when they don’t conform with the Constitution, professor Bartov participated in crafting an open letter under the title “The Elephant in the Room,” which is currently signed by 2,858 academics, priests and public figures in Israel, Palestine and elsewhere. “There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid…” they stated.
“The Netanyahu government was trying to erode democracy. In Greece, you have quite recent memories of how easily democracy can be dismantled. Not far from you, there is a number of countries who have done that quite successfully. He was following that model, and people were protesting against it, but they did not want to talk about the occupation. And we said the occupation is the elephant in the room, and it’s going to come one way or the other.”
You had stated in an interview that this letter was signed by Israeli academics who would have earlier refused to connect the occupation with apartheid — some of them are self-described as Zionists. How did they come to change their mind?
“…the vast majority of the people who signed it are Zionists, including myself. I’m not an anti-Zionist. I was born and grew up in the state of Israel and I believe that it has a right to exist and I think it’s good that there is a state of Israel. I just don’t think that it should have the kind of government and policies that it does.
Some people changed their minds when they signed the statement before October 7th because of the radical policies of this government… Since that government was put into place by Netanyahu it became increasingly violent.
One has to remember that right now although most of the violence is occurring in Gaza, there is daily violence on the West Bank. There is an ongoing attempt to ethnically cleanse the West Bank by settlers who are helped by the military. They’re either protected or there is actual involvement by the military. Sometimes it’s people in the military but who are in their civilian clothes when they’re on leave from the military, but they are still carrying their guns, this just happened recently.
…So, people signed it because they realised -again before October 7th, people tend to forget it- that this is a very extremist violent government that was implementing a regime of apartheid in the West Bank where over half a million Jews live in within a population of about three million Palestinians under two totally different legal systems: One which privileges totally the Jews who can vote and have services and all that and one which gives almost no rights at all to the Palestinian population. If that is not apartheid then I don’t know what is.”
So, the recent statement who warns on the threat of genocide came in the wake of everything that came before, Omer Bartov says. Because the “logic” the Israeli government and military follow “is one that if you cannot perceive some kind of political goal to a war and you fight a war against a very densely populated area, which is ruled by a force, which is largely a guerrilla force, the eventual result has to be vast civilian casualties, or a stop to that fighting. It will include also vast military losses, of course, and they’re growing. But the logic of that will eventually be what can only be perceived as genocide.”
He thinks Netanyahu, albeit having extreme views, did not intend to be involved in genocide because he has never liked risking too much. However, in his effort to hold on to power (“because otherwise he’s afraid he will go to jail because he’s corrupt to the hilt and there are many many court cases against him”), in the last election campaign “he went into coalition with the most extreme politicians in the country — and these are very very extreme people. They’re racist, they’re fascist, they’re against democracy, anti-liberal, they have a sort of messianic view of things. And he put them in key positions in government.”
Professor Bartov talks about the Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, “a very extreme settler”, and the Minister of Police and Internal Order, Ben-Gvir, who associated himself with Kahane “who was a well-known racist, fascist that even the Supreme Court declared someone who could not be elected to the Knesset because he was so radical. That’s the kind of people who are now in his government.”
So, he created a coalition –the professor says- with these “very extremist, fascist elements and the ultra-orthodox who care only really about money for their own schools… they’re very corrupt but they don’t care about the rest of the politics. That was the core of the beginning of the crisis in Israel which began of course before the attack by Hamas. That was a constitutional crisis…” Neanayhu had a supportive Parliament, so only the Supreme Court could put limits to his policies.
He has the sense that the vast majority of the public now wants Nenanyahu gone. Now, the rest of the coalition, also the army leaders feel that they basically failed. “This was a huge military failure as well. They now want to smash and burn and kill so as to either justify themselves or from Netanyahu’s point of view to stay in power.
And the only thing that will stop that is pressure, and the only real pressure that can come is from the United States. I’m hoping that that’s what the United States is doing.”
Pressure for a ceasefire?
“I very much support the ceasefire. But I think that can’t be the end of it. What there has to be is a reconceptualisation of Israel’s relationship with Palestinians.” Otherwise, even if there is a ceasefire, “there will be more violence next month, next year, and in the coming years, with an erosion of democracy in Israel and a change in Israeli society, very much to a very radical right, fascist right in many ways, apartheid in the West Bank, and a constant suffering of Palestinians with massive death toll. That is what has to be prevented, and it can only be prevented by changing the politics itself.”
“Should the Palestinian issue be resolved, anti-Semitism will diminish”
Just before the interview, I was reading that incidents of anti-Semitism have skyrocketed in Europe. I was wondering, even if Israel eliminates Hamas, would Israeli people’s sense of security be restored?
Omer Bartov verifies that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe and the USA. “As a historian, for me, it’s a little ironic, because the State of Israel was created as an answer to nationalism, ethno-nationalism, and to anti-Semitism. And it became, over time, both an ethno-national state itself and one that mistreats its own minorities, and occupies other groups, and the state that is now the main cause of anti-Semitism around the world.
Again, that’s not to condone anti-Semitism. I think that the two issues you raised have the same cause, in the sense that, yes, Israelis will not simply start feeling secure if Hamas is removed, and then Gaza is enclosed again in this kind of cage. And obviously, other elements, Islamist, jihadist elements, will come into Gaza, will be supported by other sources, by Iran and others, and under a different name, not Hamas, will continue violence against Israeli civilians, and will have the popular support there.
Because what does an organization like Hamas thrive on? It thrives on poverty, on hopelessness, on desperation. And if you continue that, then you have the manpower to continue all these attacks, including brutalization of young men, of the type that we saw attacking these kibbutzim and towns in the Western Negev.
I think that if Israel chose a different path, that could also have an effect, not only on the sense of security in Israel vis-à-vis its Palestinian population… And you have to remember, there are 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living in a territory controlled in one way or another by Israel (It’s equal numbers, when I was growing up, there were two and a half, three million Jews). Some are Israeli citizens, some are occupied, some are in Gaza. If you deal with it politically, if you find some solution, then the root of much -not all- of the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish animus will diminish. Much of this anger against Israel now, which is also then fueling all kind of anti-Semitic elements, will diminish.
And I ’ll give you one example that I keep thinking about. During the Oslo Accords, in the early 1990s, before Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic, there were moments of great hope, and one wonderful sign of that was what was happening in Gaza. Hamas (which in many ways was an invention of Arik Sharon, of Israeli rule in Gaza, that said we better work with Islamists rather than with the PLO, because these people are just a social organization — and then, of course, they became the monster they are now) was weakening and the PLO was strengthening, the PLO that was on the verge of an agreement with Israel.
There were plans for an airport; there were plans for a seaport. There was money going to Gaza, and there was this idea, Gaza will become the Hong Kong of the Middle East. Now, none of that happened. All of this was destroyed. The second Intifada came, and it was, you know, it changed the political scene in Israel as well.
But there was a moment of hope. And when there is hope, the extremists on all sides have to go back to the holes that they came from. But if you keep pushing and killing and torturing, and destroying, then you give an opening to those extremists.”
“It worries me that those who critisise Israel are being intimidated”
While I am listening to professor Bartov, I can’t stop wondering if they have also accused him -who has offered an immense service to humanity and the Jewish people with his work- of “anti-Semitism” because he criticises Israeli policies.
“Well, I suspect that some people think that,” he says. “I had some people from Israel, including from an institution that I’m associated with, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Research Institute in Jerusalem, expressing very deep disappointment in me for having signed the precise petition that you mentioned, which warned of genocide, and suggesting that since I don’t live in Israel, I don’t share the suffering of Israelis. Whether people accuse me of anti-Semitism, not to my face…
…Well, members of my family, colleagues and friends, were directly impacted by what happened on October 7th. And I myself feel an emotional turmoil about that, it was absolutely horrendous. But I try to deal with it by thinking as logically and as dispassionately as I can.
What worries me a great deal is that people who speak critically about Israeli policies, including Israeli and Palestinian colleagues of mine at Israeli universities -and I don’t have a position in Israel, I can say whatever I like- are being intimidated by their own university administrations, by their presidents, by the provosts. That I find unacceptable, that is the beginning of the end, both of free speech and of academic freedom. And without that, we go back to the Treason of the Intellectuals, ‘La Trahison des Clerks.’ That worries me much more than if some people express their disappointment in me, I can live with that.”
“There is a huge amount of abuse of the memory of the Holocaust”
Since October 7th, the Holocaust has entered the public debate. American president Biden said that the Jews haven’t suffered such an attack since the Holocaust. Netanyahu stated that Hamas are “the new Nazis.” And Israel’s UN representative put the yellow star budge on his jacket, protesting what he said was lack of formal condemnation of the Hamas attack.
How would you comment on the use of the Holocaust in such a context?
He thinks Biden, despite various criticisms, has behaved up to now in a “really admirable”, “very measured” way, in the face of this crisis. Indeed, he says, this was one of the greatest single slaughters of Jews, although maybe not since the Holocaust as possibly “up to 1500 Jews were killed in Poland, in pogroms after the war.”
However, describing this as a pogrom “is completely off the point.” “A pogrom is an attack by a majority population or mob on a minority. This is not the case in Israel. The pogroms occurred at a time when Jews had no police of their own, no military of their own, no government of their own. In Israel, they have all of those. So it was a terrorist attack. But it was not a pogrom.” He thinks some characterise this as pogrom to imply it was triggered by anti-Semitism and thus legitimise any response against its perpetrators on the grounds that “you cannot reason with anti-Semites.”
Professor Bartov will mention that during the Hamas attack, people felt helpless, as they “were hiding for 12 hours before the military showed up.” He knows also because members of his family were at kibbutz Be’eri, “in which over 100 people were murdered, and a number of people kidnapped.” The fact that they were being “suddenly exposed to an external enemy force without any protection whatsoever, something that Israelis never expected to happen to them, that brought back all these vicarious memories of the Holocaust of Jews being persecuted. And you can understand it, although of course in reality it has no basis whatsoever.”
Generally though, “there is a huge amount of abuse of the memory of the Holocaust, and particularly by Israeli politicians. And I don’t even want to talk about this so-called gesture by the Israeli ambassador to the UN, which is completely demeaning to the memory of the Holocaust and is absolutely just despicable. But there is a more general use of the Holocaust in Israel that started already in the 1980s. It has a long history. Menachem Begin spoke about Arafat when he was in Beirut, saying he’s like Hitler in his bunker. And Netanyahu has done it over and over again.
And again, the reason for doing that is to legitimise your own otherwise illegitimate policies. That is, you present the other side as people who are completely beyond the pale of politics, of morality. They are like the Nazis. Once you persuade people that that’s what they are, you can do whatever you like against them… And sadly, I must say, the Israeli president, this sort of centrist and relatively mild-mannered individual, came out after October 7th, saying that you can’t make a distinction between Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. If you say that Hamas are Nazis (which they’re not, they are a very extreme organization, but they’re jihadists), but if you make an analogy between them and the rest of the population, then you have license to do whatever you like against that population — in your mind, not according to international law, of course. And so, this abuse of the memory of the Holocaust is politically driven.”
“Judeo-Nazis”
Omer Bartov’s father was born in Israel before the Holocaust, from parents who were Polish migrants. His mother migrated to the country from Ukraine in 1935. Professor Bartov was growing up when Holocaust survivors had arrived in the country. What stories influenced him most?
He is writing about that in his latest book «Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First Person History in Times of Crisis», he says. His father served in World War II in the Jewish Brigade “and subsequently became a rather well-known writer and journalist in Israel, a very strong Zionist and a very harsh critic of Netanyahu to his last day. He died when he was 90 years old and I remember him talking about Netanyahu saying Netanyahu is an anti-Zionist. The way he understood it was that Netanyahu is destroying what he believed was the Zionist project.” When his father received the Israel Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Israel, “he refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand. He just marched right past him and he said this prize was not given to me by him but by the state…
…He always stressed very importantly that he was first of all a Jew and only then an Israeli, although he was secular… He believed in a commitment to Jewish identity, to Jewish history and saw people like Netanyahu and these extremist settlers who parade in religious clothes and claim to pray and all that as completely destroying the humanity of what Jewish tradition and religion are all about; as really what philosopher Leibowitz called Judeo-Nazis, which is a really difficult term to use, but that’s the way he saw them.”
His mother was talking of a beautiful childhood in multi-cultural (Polish then, Ukrainian today) city of Buczacz. “Now of course they left in 1935. Everything changed within a few years. The rest of my family, those who stayed behind, was all murdered. The entire family was wiped out, and we don’t even know how. I mean I know more or less how, but I haven’t found any records of the precise manner…”
Professor Bartov talks to me on how he was growing up next to the people with their “sleeves rolled down,” Holocaust survivors. And for playing cops and robbers with his friends in that empty village they called Shech Monis. “And where was the population? Well it was, you know, kicked out. We knew as children that it used to be Arab, but we didn’t really ask any questions. We took it for granted that once there were Arabs there and now we are here.
And more and more people were coming from Poland in the 1950s and 60s because the communist government in Poland was also anti-Semitic, the so-called Gomulka immigration. So the empty spaces left by the Palestinians who were kicked out were filled up either by Jews coming from Poland or by Jews coming from Morocco.
And so all of this was part of our making, right? This memory of the Holocaust and the people who came from Europe and the empty spaces of the Nakba, of the expulsion of the Palestinians. And I think for me, but also for many other members of my generation, it took many, many years to try to process that and to understand where we came from and what we were born into.”
“It’s not only Hamas, it’s also the extreme Israeli leadership which should be removed”
Before October 7th, Omer Bartov spent three months in Israel, interviewing people of his generation who grew up in the country, Jews and Palestinians - Israeli citizens. “What struck me were two major things. One was that the vast majority of the people I spoke with had a very strong connection to the place… And the second was that this is a generation that grew up with traumatised parents in homes where trauma was always present, although often not expressed, whether it was from the Holocaust or because of the Nakba.”
Professor Bartov realised “there is so much in common. And the way to understand what people have in common is to listen to them empathetically, not to correct them, not to tell them what’s true and what’s not, what I believe and you don’t believe, but just to listen to them… And I still believe, perhaps now even more than ever, that this place is one that can be shared by people… They can live there together, but they have to stand up and get rid of the fanatics, the ideologues and the political exploiters that have been conducting their lives for them and shedding their blood for their own interests. That’s very difficult to do.”
He will emphasise during our conversation: “In Israel, in the United States, there’s a lot of talk, and I can understand it, about the need to remove Hamas. Hamas, of course, is not just a political, military organization. It’s also a social organization. It’s not so easy to remove.
But one also has to remove Israeli leadership, not through violence, through political means. One has to start seeing things differently. And it starts with removing this really corrupt and also incompetent, as well as extreme leadership in Israel now.”
How do you think all this would end?
“Right now, I think that there are two possible directions. One is that this violence will lead to even greater extremism, may destroy whatever was left of Israeli democracy altogether, and will bring more and more fanaticism into Palestinian areas, both in the West Bank and Gaza.
And the other is the opposite, that people will finally understand that there is no path of just more bloodshed and suffering. And we’ll start thinking, what is the alternative? And the alternative is always there. You just have to choose it. And the path to it is difficult, but hardly impossible.”
What does the 1973 War and October 7th 2023 have in common?
Can one retain any optimism as long as Israel is suffering from the “euphoria of power”?
“When I talked earlier about this disease of euphoria of power, this, of course, happened before. And I experienced it myself. So, on the 6th of October, 1973, 50 years minus one day from the Hamas attack, Israel was attacked by the Egyptian and Syrian armies, and I was then a young soldier. And even before that war, when I was a teenager, we would parade and say, you have to stop the occupation, occupation corrupts. This was the occupation that began in ’67 when I was 13 years old.
That war, the war of ’73 was preventable. It didn’t have to happen. Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, was actually putting out peace fillers to the Israeli government of Golda Meir. But at the time, the Minister of Defense, especially Moshe Dayan, the legendary guy with the patch on his eye, said it’s better to have Sharm el-Sheikh (southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula) without peace, than to have peace without Sharm el-Sheikh. That is [he meant] we don’t need peace. We are powerful enough to keep whatever we took. And then came the war.
And after the war, in 1977, Israel made a peace agreement with Egypt, gave Egypt back the Sinai Peninsula. But that came at the price of 3,000 Israeli soldiers killed and 10,000 wounded, maimed, and far larger numbers of Egyptian and Syrian soldiers. And all of that was because of a feeling that we don’t have to negotiate because we’re powerful enough. We don’t have to give up anything. And that is the deep root of what happened on October 7. The deep root is that Israel refused to negotiate, to actually think about a political solution. If you don’t do that, you will end up ultimately with violence. You cannot oppress people forever. They will rise up against you, often in horrible ways. It’s true. But they will not accept it.”
Humanity doesn’t learn much from history, do we, professor?
“Yes. Or we repeat them until we learn. If you look at Europe, it didn’t learn from World War I. And so, we got World War II. But after World War II, until at least recently, Europeans learned to live with each other. Not always happily, Germans complain about Greeks and Greeks complain about Germans. But they learned to live together.
And then people forget. And then history comes back, which is what happened with Russia and Ukraine, right?…
In Israel people tend to talk about the lessons of the Holocaust. The lessons of the Holocaust are not that you should exert violence against anyone who disagrees with you. The lessons of the Holocaust are… that the way to prevent genocide is to treat other people with the dignity, the human dignity they deserve. That’s a difficult lesson to draw, but the only true one.”
