It is a long article.
“These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country.”
“Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.”
A German army propaganda leaflet issued in June 1941 “paints a … nightmarish picture of Red Army political officers, which many soldiers soon perceived as a reflection of reality:
‘Anyone who has ever looked at the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are like. Here there is no need for theoretical expressions. We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the embodiment of the satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity … [They] would have brought an end to all meaningful life, had this eruption not been dammed at the last moment.’
“Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Israelis to ‘remember what Amalek has done to you’, alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek’s ‘men and women, children and infants’. In a radio interview, he said about Hamas: ‘I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals’.”
“It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth, which attributed Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason.”
“I told them the story of how, in 1930, the German student union was democratically taken over by the Nazis. The students of that time felt betrayed by the loss of the first world war, the loss of opportunity because of the economic crisis, and the loss of land and prestige in the wake of the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles. They wanted to make Germany great again, and Hitler seemed able to fulfil that promise.”
“On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.
I no longer believe that. 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.”
***
As a historian of genocide, Omer Bartov gives the impression that he believed in Oslo, and had it not for the assassination of Isaac Rabin, ‘peace’ would have ensued. This flies in the face of all historical facts and serious historical and sociological analysis.
Noticeable too is that Bartov ignores that the Israeli state has been able to engage in ‘genocidal actions’ because it can. The massive state violence perpetrated by the IDF is enabled by major imperialist powers. Confining the source of violence to dehumanising the other, indifference, indoctrination, etc. blurs power relations and even gives the impression of something inevitable originating in some long experience of victimhood or ‘human nature’: People or the majority of the population are just prone to indoctrination. Power, financial, geopolitical and military and power dynamics, have to be present to allow for violence – state violence in this case.
Comments