Omer Bartov, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the Holocaust and genocide studies, has said Israel is guilty of “genocide, ethnic-cleansing and annexation” in Gaza. Bartov added that the United States is “totally complicit”. He said Israel faces “a terrible future” and if it does not consciously change it could “implode”.
A full transcript of his interview to The Wire is below.
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Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to a special interview for The Wire. October 7th marks one year of the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Today, we look back and ask, have the last 365 days changed the way we perceive Israel, and have they changed the way the once-forgotten Palestinian people are viewed?
During this period, Israel has been accused of genocide, has that label stuck? Conversely, the Palestine issue has been forcefully placed on the international agenda, but will that make a difference?
And what about Iran, Hezbollah and the axis of resistance? What sort of denouement do they face as this first year of war ends?
My guest is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University in America, Omar Bartov.
Professor Bartov, it’s one year since the Israel-Hamas war began, and during those 12 months, you’ve done two famous newspaper essays on how you view the situation in Israel.
In November, writing for the New York Times, you said, “There is no proof that genocide is [currently] taking place in Gaza.”
But in August, writing for The Guardian, you said, “It was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions … 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.”
Can you start by explaining what’s convinced you? A former IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldier and a historian of the Holocaust, that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza?
Omer Bartov: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on your program. Look, what I wrote in November last year was that there were already indications of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity, but I was not yet convinced that genocide was occurring. And in many ways, what I wrote was a warning that if these actions continue, then things may deteriorate and become genocidal actions or genocide.
And between that time in November last year, and more or less May of this year, things have continued. And by May 8 this year, when the IDF decided against advice from the United States to also go into Rafah, the last place where the IDF had not reached yet, and had done that by saying that it would evacuate the civilian populations, the civilians there, about a million people – which it did, it appeared to me that things had changed and that one could see a pattern that had existed from the very beginning.
That population was moved to the beach area in southwestern Gaza, and the IDF by then had moved those populations or displaced those populations several times. So, in fact, the majority of civilians in Gaza had been displaced over and over again. Their infrastructure had been destroyed.
And by then it appeared that there had been a systematic attempt to destroy universities, schools, mosques, museums and residential areas to an extent that it would be impossible for the population, even if allowed to do so, to return there.
And so, by May, I felt that there was a clear pattern developing that whereby, I would say, the IDF was acting in a way that conformed to announcements that had been made at the beginning of the war by people with executive authority, both politicians and the top echelons of the military, that Gaza would be entirely destroyed, flattened and so forth.
Now, genocide, as you know, is a crime that is very hard to prove because you have to show both intention and that that intention is to destroy a particular group, a national ethnic group, or religious group, as such. And it takes a fair amount of evidence to be able to show that link between the intention and the actions.
I think that by late spring and summer this year, that pattern had finally been established.
KT: So, the big change between November when you wrote for the New York Times, and August when you wrote for The Guardian, is that what you suspected and feared, but hoped would not happen in November, had become an undeniable reality by August.
OB: Correct, that by the summer, and in fact by late spring already, it became clear that the main intention was to make the Gaza Strip entirely uninhabitable for its own population.
There’s a question, where would that population go? Right now, the majority of the population is in the area called Al-Mawasi, which is along the beach area in the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip.
There are about two to three hundred thousand civilians in the northern third of the Gaza Strip, which is separated from the rest now by a road, the so-called Netzarim Corridor. And there’s increasing talk in Israel right now on squeezing those two to three hundred thousand civilians out of that area, and making that area into the first area – where the city of Gaza is, or was, because it’s been entirely flattened – into the first area that would be entirely clear of Palestinians, and there are already settlers waiting to move in there.
So, this appears to be potentially the first phase of entirely emptying part of the Gaza Strip – they’ve built two big army camps there – and then to allow settlers to move in.
In that sense, it’s a combination of, I would say, genocidal actions, ethnic cleansing and annexation of the Gaza Strip.
KT: I’ll just repeat that for the audience, because I think that last sentence is so important. What you saw and what you’ve concluded is a combination of genocidal action and ethnic cleansing, and bringing in settlers to replace the original inhabitants.
Now, in your August article for The Guardian, you also wrote about a meeting at Ben Gurion University in June, which was interrupted by a group of students, many of whom had been soldiers and who had fought in Gaza.
Of those young people, you write, “the young men and women I spoke with that day were filled with rage, because I think they felt betrayed by everyone around them.” You say, “they felt betrayed by the media, by senior commanders, by politicians, by intellectuals and leftists, by the US government, but also by anti-Semitic students protesting against Israel in Western universities.” You say, “they seemed fearful and insecure and confused.”
Tell me a little bit more about the mood of these people, because I presume they are the future of Israel.
OB: Yes, so, let me start by saying that these students who were protesting my lecture and made it impossible for me to deliver that lecture and later agreed to sit down and speak with me, they’re activists in extreme right-wing organisations in Israel.
So, on the one hand, you would say they’re not representative of the majority. But their opinions appear to me to reflect much of what there is in a much larger swath of the Israeli population.
You know, they felt betrayed. Much of how they felt, interestingly, does not reflect reality, of course.
So, starting with the demonstrations on American campuses, those were called anti-Semitic in the Israeli media and in a fair amount of the American media, but they were not. So, anti-Semitism was used basically as an argument to shut people down.
The Israeli media is largely supportive on a large scale of Israeli operations. Politicians, even much … people who identified with the opposition, are speaking in favour of Israeli operations, even as they oppose the government. And even demonstrators on the streets are not against the war as such, but rather want a ceasefire only so as to return the hostages.
So, in a sense they feel betrayed, but they’re not actually betrayed. That is, actually, their opinions reflect general public opinion in Israel.
So, what is it about them? What they feel is, I think, they felt towards me that I had accused them of genocide. And they came in saying, ‘we are not murderers. We are decent human beings. We have behaved properly. And if we brought destruction to Gaza, which we have, there is no other choice but to do so.’
And so, they are in a state of confusion, of denial of the very acts that they are committing and perceiving more than most people in the public, because most people are not in the Gaza Strip, of course, not fighting there. And they know that they’re badly led, politically and militarily. They know that if they get killed – and hundreds of them have been killed – that they will be buried with, you know, the usual ceremony and forgotten right away.
And they ultimately know that this war is not going to end. They feel, I think, that their own leadership is conducting a forever war, of which they would be the sharp end.
And finally, I would say, what I fear most of those people is that they will become the political soldiers of the emerging politics in Israel. That is, these are people being brutalised and trained in war. They have extreme opinions. They care not a hoot about democracy or human rights or anything of that sort – certainly not for Arabs, but not even that much for Israeli Jewish citizens.
And they can become the militias of the now new forces that are emerging on a large scale in Israel under such ministers as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who represent a kind of fascist, populist, Jewish supremacist political force in Israel.
KT: You know, of this, you say the following. You write that these young students reminded you of the German Students’ Union of 1930, which was taken over by the Nazis. You end that part of the essay with the following words: “I left that meeting filled with trepidation and foreboding.” What precisely were you worried about? What were your fears? Could you spell them out?
OB: You know, I told the students at that meeting the story of the German Students’ Union. I don’t think they quite got the analogy, but what I told them was the German Students’ Union was taken over voluntarily by people who were members of the National Socialists – the Nazi party – in Germany, three years before Hitler came to power in 1930. And they felt that they’d been betrayed. They’d been betrayed in World War I. Germany was stabbed in the back, as the saying went, by the socialists and the Jews. They had no chances of progress because of the Great Depression, the unemployment, political turmoil.
And they believed that Hitler would make Germany great again. And he did, in a sense. That is, he became chancellor in 1933. Unemployment disappeared. Germany became respected by the world. And then it went to fight World War II. And in World War II, it killed millions of people, not only Jews, but millions of others. And finally, Germany was destroyed.
And I said to them, ‘I suspect that the few students who were still alive by then, because most of them had gone to war and had been killed, might have thought back to 1930 and thought that they had made a mistake.’
Now, what I fear in Israel is that we are seeing this process, that we’re seeing a process whereby – and I’m not making an analogy with Nazism as such. I’m just looking at the historical process.
I fear that what we’re seeing is that more and more people, especially young people, are veering in that direction where Israel will go into a forever war, will change dramatically inside as well as in its relationship to its environment, will go through a decade or two of a great deal of political extremism and violence. And at the end of that, because it cannot win this kind of struggle over the long run, the people who facilitated this process – those would still be alive – will regret it. I probably won’t live to see that. But that is what I fear most.
KT: You know, I know that Israeli society – and you mentioned this in a sense in one of your answers a moment ago. Israeli society almost as a whole, with the exception of people like Gideon Levy, have accepted or even supported what their government and what their country is doing in Gaza.
But I want to ask you specifically, what is the impact on the soldiers themselves? They are, unfortunately, the perpetrators of this horror. Are they all like the students at Ben Gurion University? Or are there some who are filled with repulsion and a sense of guilt for what they’re being required to do?
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OB: Look, it’s a difficult question, because of course, we don’t exactly know, right? Most of the soldiers don’t get a chance to talk. Part of what I felt with the soldiers that I spoke with, ironically, was that although they came to stop my speech, I then sat down and talked with them and I seem to have been one of the only people who actually spoke with them.
So I think that most soldiers don’t really get a chance to air their views, because there’s a kind of atmosphere in the country, where, as I heard just recently from one person, about a friend who was sitting with her grandchildren, who serve in the military, and they were saying, ‘You know, we could tell you what we have seen and what we have done,’ and she said to them, ‘I’m not sure I want to know.’
So it’s very hard to tell how the soldiers feel. It’s clear to me – most of the army are reserve soldiers. And it’s clear to me that there’s a large, different kinds of opinions, obviously. But the differences are not about the cardinal issues, that is, they still believe that they have to destroy Hamas in Gaza.
And one has to say that after a year of fighting, a large modern army with aircraft, tanks, artillery, has not been able to stop Hamas, has not been able to free the hostages. And now it’s getting involved in another war, which is an unwinnable war, in Lebanon.
And so while I think – there is a sense of patriotism, there’s a sense of urgency, there’s a sense of fear and insecurity that the soldiers are supposed to take care of. At the same time, I do think that people are also confused as to what is the ultimate goal of all this. And it has not been articulated by the government.
KT: Your Guardian essay, Professor Bartov, ends with a very powerful question. And I want to read it out although I’m aware that in a sense, you’ve almost adjusted yourself a moment ago. But it’s so powerful that I think the audience should hear it.
You write, “will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant and increasingly racist aspects of its vision, as it is embraced there by so many of its Jewish citizens?”
And I think in other words, what you’re asking, is can Israel ever become the country envisaged in Israel’s own Declaration of Independence, which talked about complete equality of social and political rights for all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex, and faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations?
What’s the answer to your own question?
OB: Well, so there’s one part of it is sort of a counterfactual history and one is looking forward. The counterfactual part of it is, as I ask in the article, what would have happened had Israel, having issued the Declaration of Independence, would have then written a constitution, which it actually had committed itself to doing? And the constitution would have been based on those principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence.
But that constitution was never written. And it wasn’t written for a whole variety of reasons, but largely because of the inner contradictions of Israel itself. And so what became … originally what Zionism was, which was a movement of the national liberation of Jews oppressed and persecuted, mostly in Europe, but also in the Middle East, became a state ideology. And that state ideology is what led us to this situation right now.
What is the chance of Israel not going in that direction? I don’t see the forces from within to stop this direction, which I’m afraid could, as I indicated, then change the nature of the state, actually make it into a full-blown apartheid state that could last for another two, three decades. The only thing that can change it is massive outside pressure. And the most important pressure would come from the United States.
I’m afraid I don’t see that happening at the moment for reasons that have to do more with internal American policies than with a clear analysis of what is happening in the Middle East.
KT: We certainly don’t have massive pressure from the United States government or from any real, meaningful, strong government in Europe. But we do have a fair amount of growing pressure from young students, particularly in university campuses. Over the last year, Israel’s image and standing in the world, in the eyes of these young students, in the eyes of the young generation in America and Europe, has not just sharply fallen, it’s almost collapsed.
And this is what I want to ask you. Can it recover without Israel actually changing direction? Or is Israel always going to be viewed differently hereafter?
OB: Well, it will not recover without a major change in Israeli policy. And most importantly, vis-a-vis the Palestinians. The core of the issue is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians. All the other issues can be resolved. And there is, or there was, goodwill within the region for an agreement with Israel. But Israel has refused to address the main issue that you have seven million Jews bossing it over seven million Palestinians.
So, it won’t change. I think that if Israel continues in this direction, it will become increasingly isolated politically, in public opinion, even from growing parts of the Jewish community in Europe and the United States.
But that will take a long time. And there won’t be enough, I would say, incentive for countries such as the United States or Germany or Britain – those that really have an impact on Israel – to change their own policies. Or if they do, it will take a very long time. So, Israel’s image will remain tarnished and become increasingly tarnished unless there is a complete change in the political paradigm. That could bring about a change. And that change could be quick. But I just don’t see it happening.
KT: So, it’s not a very happy future that Israel looks down the road towards?
OB: It’s a terrible future. And it’s a future that not all Israelis, or I would even say not most Israelis, would like to see. But there is no clear opposition and no leadership in Israel to go against it.
I think that future of a kind of general apartheid state, with apartheid creeping into the Green Line itself, into Israel proper itself, and an erosion in democracy, is probably supported only by about 30% of the population. But the people on the ground there, in part because of the shock of October 7, of the massacre, and then of course, also of the incompetence of the authorities to protect them, their sense of insecurity. The majority can’t get its act together.
But it also has to do with the fact that Israel had normalised over decades, the occupation of the Palestinians. And most Jews in Israel cannot conceive of the politics behind that, cannot think politically.
And so what … you’re seeing on the ground is those who really know what they want. And they are a minority, but they’re an influential minority, and they happen to be in government. Those who really know what they want will accomplish that, because the majority has been generally paralysed by fear, by confusion, by trauma. And by the time that majority wakes up, it will be too late.
KT: Professor Bartov, let’s at this moment shift focus and address the second issue I raised in my introduction. Over the last year, has the way the world perceives the Palestinian people and their seven-decade-old quest for a state changed? Has Hamas lifted an earlier veil of forgetfulness, a sort of shroud that covered the Palestinian problem, and placed this issue on the international agenda?
OB: Yes, look, I mean, the Hamas attack of October 7, whose nature I certainly cannot condone because it included the massacre of somewhere around 800 or 900 Israeli civilians, was done with the intention of bringing back the Palestinian issue to the table, because it had been entirely shoved under the rug by the Israeli government and by international opinion. Hardly anybody was talking about the Palestinian issue. So it has succeeded in doing that.
Whether that will last, that’s another question, and I’m not entirely sure. Even right now, if you look at events right now, most of the talk has shifted now to what is happening in Lebanon, to potential crisis between Israel and Iran.
And the Palestinians suffer from a similar issue to that of the Israelis, only they’re much, much weaker. That is, they have a terrible dearth of leadership, of any vision that is beyond something like Hamas.
And Hamas, in many ways, is a mirror image of the extremists on the Jewish side, on the Israeli side. Hamas wants an Islamic Palestinian state from the Jordan to the sea, and the right-wing extremists in Israel want a Halakhic – Jewish theocratic – state from the river to the sea. It’s the same image, they’re very similar.
And both groups are a minority. They represent only a minority of the population, but the rest of the Palestinians also find it difficult, and obviously they’re living under much harsher conditions than Israeli Jews, to provide people who will have a different vision.
So I’m afraid that I’m not sure that this will happen, if my fear of this kind of an apartheid state that will emerge and survive for two-three decades, if I’m right about that, then yes, in the long run, obviously, public opinion will end up on the side of the Palestinians. But if we take the example of South Africa, this will take a very long time, and we will still need an internal, new internal leadership to lead those people across the sea, because otherwise, the world itself is not going to spend the kind of political and intellectual capital that is needed without momentum from within.
KT: Let me raise this issue a little differently, Professor Bartov. Today in the land Israel controls, as you said yourself, 50% of the population is Palestinian, two million of whom are supposedly Israeli citizens, though of distinctly second-class status. And as you yourself said, many people call Israel increasingly, in fact, an apartheid state.
But if it’s going to continue the way it is for another two or possibly three decades, which is what you fear, you’re also saying that there is no real future or hope for the Palestinian people. Fifty percent of the population will remain as they are for another 20, 30 years, possibly.
OB: Yes, and if that happens, this will be an increasingly isolated, impoverished, violent state. And the people who will suffer most will be the Palestinians. But also the Jewish population will increasingly suffer from this impoverishment, isolation … a fair number of the intellectual elites and technological elites will leave the country.
I think that if you want to sort of contemplate what would happen after that, my own sense is that it will eventually implode, that it won’t be able to survive in the long run. And then there are those who think that ultimately it will become a kind of civil rights struggle, because the people who have no rights in the country, together with people who will have increasingly limited rights, that is the Palestinians and the Jews, will start struggling against that regime of oppression and apartheid. And then maybe something else will emerge.
But I think, of course, that’s a very dire kind of forecast. And one hopes that this could be avoided. But again, it could be avoided only if there is outside leadership willing to take the risk and to push through by changing this entire political paradigm. It can be done. It’s not impossible. You could find the people among Palestinians and Jews to support that. But it cannot be done without massive pressure.
Karan: I now understand why you use that very evocative phrase. You said Israel faces a terrible future. You said it looks as if eventually it will implode.
The Americans and the Europeans believe that one way out, and I’m sure there are people in Israel who share the same belief too, is a two-state solution. But with 700,000 settlers in the West Bank, and bearing in mind that Netanyahu wants to control Gaza with a puppet Palestinian government, is a two-state solution at all possible? Or is it too late for that?
OB: So yeah, this is one of the main questions, of course, because we can talk about a paradigm change, but changing into what? How do seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews share that territory? And it’s not a very large territory. I don’t know how many Israel’s can fit into the subcontinent of India, for instance. So that is the main question.
Now, the two-state solution, the traditional two-state solution, is dead. There’s no way that that will happen. And for a long time, it served as a kind of fig leaf for much of the Israeli left that was saying, ‘well, eventually we’ll have a two-state solution’ and meanwhile, the settlement project was going on. And by now, as you say, there are hundreds of thousands of settlers, and an attempt to remove them will create a civil war in Israel.
Now, I’ve been involved with a movement that has tried to square the circle. And I will say, it’s not going to happen from one day to the next, but I think it is a hopeful vision. And that is a vision of a confederacy, of a confederate system. Now, that was actually already talked about in the 1920s and ‘30s. But the whole idea disappeared after the war of 1948.
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The idea is that there would be two states, and they would be more or less along the lines of the ‘67 border. But the difference would be that there would be two categories of people, there would be citizenship and residence. And the states would make a distinction between the two. And you can also think a little bit about the EU as a model for that structure.
So, you could be a Jew living in Palestine, as a settler, if you decide to remain in Palestine as a settler, you would be allowed to be a resident there, but you would be a citizen of the Jewish state.
And you could be a Palestinian living in Houston, Texas, or in Nablus, and you would want to live in Haifa, maybe because your family came from there. And you would be able to live there as a resident, but you would be a citizen of Palestine, and you would vote for a Palestinian parliament.
Now, that means that the borders would be open rather than filled with fences and walls and minefields, that there would be a roof government over these two autonomous entities. And of course, you would have to control the numbers, you wouldn’t be able to have millions of people moving from one side to the other, just as you can’t envision five million Frenchmen suddenly deciding to live in Berlin. But if the numbers are not big, it works quite well.
I think that would solve the main question of how do both groups have the two most important things for them, which is a right of self-determination and a right of return. People could return to these respective states and would have the possibility of residing also in the other state. And the borders would not be borders of separation, but open borders that would hopefully begin also a process of building confidence between the two groups. That’s the vision.
KT: Would I be right in saying it’s a vision that has a long, hard, arduous road ahead of it?
OB: Yes, but it’s one that can actually be implemented. And before the war, before October 7, there was growing support for that both among Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank. So, it actually was seeing a sort of interesting …
The important thing about this plan is that it has been thought out together by Jews and Palestinians. Many of the previous Israeli left-wing plans were Jews speaking with themselves. This one was really an attempt to forge something together – it’s called A Land for All. One can Google it and find the details. A Land For All. This was planned by Palestinians and Israeli Jews together.
It’s crucial to have, to my mind, to have a horizon of hope, to have some idea for the future, even if we agree that right now the chances of it being implemented are quite slim.
KT: Professor Bartov, the truth is, as we look at the situation today, particularly today, it’s not just Hamas alone that Israel faces an unrelenting foe in. It’s also Hezbollah and it’s also Iran. Let’s talk briefly about both of them, one by one.
By killing Hassan Nasrallah, and maybe some, seven, by some counts, 12, other top Hezbollah commanders, has Israel inflicted a fateful blow on Hezbollah, or does Hezbollah remain unvanquished, and is it actually impossible to obliterate an idea and an ideology?
OB: Well, first of all, it’s impossible to obliterate an idea or an ideology. You can marginalise it, and that has happened many times in the past. You can make it increasingly irrelevant, but you can’t destroy it with bombs.
Israel has, in fact, given a tremendous blow to Hezbollah. I think that’s quite clear. But the organisation is still there. It is still fighting. An Israeli ground war in Lebanon is likely to end up like all its previous ground wars in Lebanon. It cannot win, and one thing that it may accomplish to its own detriment is to destabilise Lebanon as a state. Destabilising Lebanon as a state will not pay any dividends to Israel at all, and even if Hezbollah is gone, there will be another organisation.
So this is not a war that can be won. However, one has to take into account that Hezbollah has no claims on the Jewish state. Hezbollah itself was a creation of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. So, if you apply politics to this, when Nasrallah was alive, he kept saying, ‘We will stop firing when you stop firing in Gaza.’ And Israel said, ‘No no, you stop firing, and we’ll do whatever we like in Gaza – it’s none of your business.’ That is a policy that cannot work.
So if Israel had a political vision – and the Israeli government has no political vision, it refuses to talk about politics – then I think, instead of raining now, more and more bombs on Lebanon, it could actually work to stabilise Lebanon and marginalise the more extreme forces within it.
KT: Once again, what’s missing is that vision.
OB: Correct.
KT: What about Iran, Professor Bartov? After Tuesday’s missile attack on Israel, Netanyahu has promised to pay back Iran. Clearly, the fighting is likely to get worse, and it seems to be happening day by day. And we could even end up with a full fledged Middle East war.
But do you believe Israel will use this opportunity to take out Iran’s nuclear installations, or maybe its gas and oil installations, and thus hope to finish off the Iranian threat once and for all, or at least sizeably diminish it?
OB: Well, look, I mean, I think what Netanyahu wants to do, and … a fair number of indications, he wants to have a conflict with Iran, obviously not a full scale war, but he wants a conflict with Iran. He wants to bring the United States into it. He may see it as a possibility of finally resolving this whole issue of a nuclear Iran with American involvement. And partly, he wants that also because he thinks that that will have an effect on the elections in the United States, will weaken the Democrats who really do not want any of this at all, and will bring about the election of Trump, which he thinks would be good for him. I’m not actually sure it will be, but that’s what he thinks.
What Israel will do right now is anybody’s guess. I don’t even know that they have decided what to do yet. Probably they won’t start with the nuclear facilities, but they may, I have no idea.
Again, the idea that Netanyahu has been selling now for years and years, that Iran wants to destroy the state of Israel, is nonsense. That’s not a policy goal for Iran.
But the the Arab world, the Arab Muslim world, is worried about Iran becoming increasingly influential in the region, becoming the major power broker in the region. And that was part of the reason that the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia wanted to reach a deal with the United States and Israel, to marginalise Iran, and they could have done that. It was in the works. There was only one small thing, and we go back always to the same issue.
It was what happens to the Palestinians. Can Israel put its own house in order? And the Israeli government wanted to do the exact opposite. The Israeli government wanted to fix the regional issue so that it doesn’t have to deal with its own local problem.
As long as this is not resolved, all of the other elements will remain unstable. And it’s very hard to know where this will end up.
KT: It all comes back each and every way you look at it to the Palestinian issue, the Palestinian problem, and Netanyahu’s refusal or at least reluctance to tackle it effectively.
OB: Absolutely.
KT: Finally, and this is my last issue, Professor Bartov, the United States. There’s no doubt that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza would not be able to continue without the support it gets from Washington, both politically and certainly militarily. So if Israel is increasingly guilty of genocide, and you certainly believe it’s guilty of genocidal action and ethnic cleansing, how complicit is Washington?
OB: The short answer is it’s totally complicit. President Biden could have, I strongly believe, could have in November or December last year said to Netanyahu, ‘There has to be a ceasefire now. And then we’re going to talk about a larger political resolution of this whole crisis.’ And he could have said to Netanyahu, ‘You have two weeks for a ceasefire. And if you don’t do that, you’re on your own.’
What does that mean? It would mean that the IDF would not have been able to continue operations for more than two or three weeks. It simply does not have the reserves and munitions and spare parts to continue. The IDF operates on lifeline from the United States supplying immense amounts of munitions on a daily basis, all these rockets, all these missiles that are being used to shoot down other missiles, all of this has to come from somewhere. Israel cannot produce that tank shells, artillery shells and so forth.
Now, the US has not done it for domestic reasons. The Democrats are afraid of losing support, both from Jewish voters and from large sectors of the sort of fundamentalist wing of Christians in the United States.
But I think it was a mistake, because I think that in the long run, what has happened is that the US lost control over events. And by now, it’s impossible for it to act before the elections. And that has actually weakened domestic support for the Democrats because of this failure.
Will this change? I’m afraid I don’t quite see that happening. If Harris is elected, my sense is the rhetoric may change a little bit, they may be a little bit more critical of Israel, a little bit more supportive of Palestinians. But the fundamentals, I do not believe will change.
And if Trump is elected, then it’s anybody’s guess what he will do. But I don’t think it’ll be good for Palestinians.
KT: And the sad corollary to what you’re saying is that Biden’s legacy will be, when history is written, the man who could have stopped the war, but either failed or refused to do so.
OB: Absolutely. And, you know, so I can understand that he has Zionist sentiments. He is of a generation of American leaders who had very strong connections with Israel. But politically, it was a major mistake.
And I’ll say just this, that changing the political paradigm in the Middle East is in the United States’ national interest, as it is in the national interest of Israel. What a stronger and more clear-headed American leadership should have said, is that it is acting in the interest of its own nation, and in the national interest of Israel, despite that it’s faulty, it’s wrong, and by now its criminal, leadership. But it could not make itself say that, and therefore it facilitated what are crimes that will remain now in history, however this is resolved, a huge stain on American policy, and obviously also on Israeli policy.
Karan: Professor Bartov, thank you very much for that very insightful view about Israel, the situation at the moment. And of course, as we ended about America. I’m extremely grateful for the time you’ve given me. Take care, stay safe.
OB: Thank you very much.
Transcribed by Manya Singh.
