Omer Bartov (born 1954) is an Israeli-American historian."In August 2023, Bartov was one of more than 1,500 U.S., Israeli, Jewish and Palestinian academics and public figures to sign an open letter stating that Israel operates "a regime of apartheid" in the occupied Palestinian territories and calling on U.S. Jewish groups to speak out against the occupation in Palestine.Bartov has said that the thirty-seventh government of Israel brought "a very radical shift", adding, "I am a historian of the 20th century and don't make analogies lightly" before recounting how the movement of fringe politics into the mainstream in Europe led to fascism, and emphasizing: "This is the current moment in Israel. It's terrifying to see it happening."In January 2024, Bartov said that Israel had repeatedly expressed genocidal intent against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war. By August of that year, having visited Israel again in June, Bartov said it "was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions". On April 24, 2025, Bartov said: "It's a misnomer to call it a 'war'. [...] This is an occupation by the IDF designed to take over Gaza. There will, of course, be resistance, but it will be guerrilla resistance." He also noted the violence had escalated beyond Gaza to include the West Bank. In July 2025, Bartov wrote an essay in The New York Times in which he argued that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people and noted that other experts in genocide studies had reached the same conclusion.""Bartov wrote in The Guardian, in August 2024: "By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part', the Palestinian population in Gaza, 'as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group's destruction'""As their institutions have flailed in addressing the relentless Israeli assault on Gaza, and their colleagues have split into irreconcilable camps over whether to describe it as genocide, many scholars have diagnosed a “crisis” in the field of genocide studies. For some, the contradictions inherent in studying genocide from within institutions silent on or even supportive of it have become untenable. In June, Israeli Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov resigned from the editorial board of Yad Vashem Studies, the journal attached to the major Holocaust museum, where he had served for two decades. For editors of a Holocaust journal “to act as if the . . . extraordinary carnage by Israeli troops, including the killing and maiming of thousands of children, is either none of its business or perfectly justified will leave a stain on the journal and on Yad Vashem for generations to come,” he wrote in his resignation letter to the editorial board."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omer_Bartovhttps://jewishcurrents.org/can-genocide-studies-survive-a-genocide-in-gaza
David Ainsworth ● 1d