Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American scholar and Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, reviews the definition of genocide as established within the Genocide Convention of 1948 as he analyses the trajectory of events in Gaza from 7 October 2023 to the Spring 2024 when the IDF moved into Rafah and proceeded systematically destroy Gaza with the goal of making it unhinhabitable for its population. Noting that the Knesset used 7 October as an opportunity to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, he observes that Israel’s actions proved unsuccessful since there was no place to push the Palestinians. This is the moment, Bartov observes, when the situation devolved into genocide, resembling many other genocides throughout the 20th century, which began as ethnic cleansing but ended up as the mass killing of populations. Declaring that by July 2025, a consensus had been formed among the majority of genocide scholars and experts in international law, he expresses astonishment at the fact that legacy media have still not begun to employ the term “genocide” to describe what is now an agreed fact by international experts. Historicising how ethnic cleansing often turns into genocide, Bartov offers examples from the Germans’ ethnic cleansing turned genocide of the Herero in what is present-day Namibia, the Armenian genocide by Türkiye, where vast numbers of Armenians were pushed into the Syrian desert and perished, to the coextensive labour and extermination camps of the Nazis during World War II. Addressing the reality that many Israelis and Jews, when they hear the word “genocide,” they think of the Holocaust, Bartov criticises this mentality since the Holocaust has become a central theme within Israeli national identity since the 1980s. He contends that Israelis view the Holocaust as “not only something that happened in the past, it is something that can happen any moment. That we are always under existential threat…And that threat is represented by the Palestinians.” Bartov explains that this genocide is, in part, a reaction to fear within the core of Israeli identity that has resulted in Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians, largely because Israelis view Palestinians as their existential threat.
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