The Israeli academic Omer Bartov may be the most prominent scholar currently making genocide accusations against Israel. His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong, will no doubt enhance his reputation in this regard.
Since 1989, Bartov has been on the faculty at Brown University, where, he says, he is a historian specializing in Holocaust and genocide studies. But as his book shows, since joining American academia, he has become more of a propagandist, displaying the anti-Israel bias typical of today’s college campuses.
For example, adopting the popular jargon of that milieu, he writes that the Jewish state amounts to “a settler-colonial takeover of land and resources from the indigenous Palestinian population.” He views the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 as “indigenous resistance,” arguing that it “cannot be understood without taking into account the larger historical context” and “the growing despair of the population in the Gaza Strip.”
Having spent part of his career studying the indoctrination of Nazi soldiers, Bartov can’t resist comparing the IDF to the German Wehrmacht. He also likens the current Israeli government to the Zealots of Masada who “had no interest in politics or compromise” and by their intransigence “sent the Jews into 2,000 years of exile in the name of their insane, profoundly un-Jewish messianic faith.”
Like many of his colleagues in the American academy, Bartov has become an apologist for the bigoted protests that followed Oct. 7. In Israel: What Went Wrong, he makes the unsupported claim that antisemitism “has been shown to be rarely present in the multiple protests by students and others around the world.” Somehow, he manages to ignore the harassment of Jewish students that accompanies those protests at nearly every elite college and university, and the fact that many Jewish students feel forced to hide their identities.
Bartov claims, “The vast majority of the protestors in the United States have not condoned the crimes of Hamas but rather condemned the ongoing massive destruction of Gaza by the IDF using American-made aircraft and bombs.” But he must know that Columbia University protesters—to cite just one example—issued a statement expressing “full solidarity with Palestinian resistance,” claiming that Hamas fighters had “launched a counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor.” Bartov also conveniently ignores the fact that campus protests began immediately after the Hamas attack, before Israel had even begun to respond.
The core of Bartov’s book is his claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This is where his intellectual dishonesty reaches an extreme.
The crime of genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention, an international treaty passed by the U.N. General Assembly on Nov. 9, 1948. The U.N. officials who drafted the Convention wanted the definition to be precise. Thus, it requires intent, which is the crucial element of any crime.
The Convention limits the crime of genocide to “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” In other words, there is no crime unless the perpetrators target their victims because of their membership in a specific group.
Moreover, the issue of intent matters more than the number of deaths. As U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie pointed out in early discussions of what became the Genocide Convention, “The infliction of losses, even heavy losses, on the civilian population in the course of [war], does not as a rule constitute genocide.”
Bartov takes wartime rhetoric by the most radical members of the Israeli government as evidence of genocidal intent. For example, he cites statements by Israeli officials dehumanizing the Hamas fighters who attacked Israel on Oct. 7. However, as a group of scholars has written in Haaretz, “Dehumanizing terrorists who raped women, decapitated babies, tortured their victims, shot and burned them alive … is not evidence of genocidal intent but a reflection of the limits of language to describe behavior that truly seems inhuman.”
In addition, Israel’s conduct of the war proves that it has no genocidal intent or indeed any intent to harm civilians at all.
Contrary to Bartov’s view, the actual definition of genocide does matter.
As the urban warfare expert John Spencer has written in Newsweek, “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history, above and beyond what international law requires.” Those measures include thousands of direct phone calls, millions of warning texts, millions of voice mails, millions of air-dropped fliers, “roof knocking,” drones with speakers, evacuation corridors and humanitarian zones.
Spencer wrote, “The IDF has telegraphed almost every move ahead of time so civilians can relocate, nearly always ceding the element of surprise.” As a result, he argued, the number of civilian deaths in Gaza, as compared to those of combatants, has been “historically low for modern urban warfare.”
In sum, the precautions taken by the IDF, and its success in minimizing civilian casualties, hardly indicate an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
None of this is a problem for Bartov. Whether Israel’s conduct meets the actual definition of genocide is of no interest. As the scholar Sabrina Soffer reported, “During a lecture on mass atrocities in April 2025, when discussing the Israel-Hamas War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [Bartov] deliberately stretched and blurred the definition of genocide, while acknowledging that it is indeed a legal term. Bartov also suggested that he insists on using the term ‘genocide’ in debates not because it is legally accurate but because it is rhetorically necessary.”
Soffer said, “Bartov also claimed that the integrity of legal standards was superseded by the need to persuade a broader audience by using language that raises awareness.” Thus, although he holds himself out as a “scholar of genocide,” Bartov purposely ignores the definition of genocide agreed to by the international community.
Contrary to Bartov’s view, however, the actual definition of genocide does matter; and it matters above all that the definition not be twisted to accommodate a political agenda.
Notwithstanding the anti-Israel bias that dominates American college campuses, Bartov has not escaped academic criticism. For example, the historian Jeffrey Herf, an expert on Nazi ideology and the Holocaust, argues that when it comes to genocide, Bartov writes as a polemicist, not a historian.
As Herf noted, the main evidence Bartov offers for his accusation of genocide “is angry—and selectively quoted—statements about the inhumanity of the Hamas killers on Oct. 7 made by Israeli leaders.” But Bartov fails to offer and cannot “offer any official statement by the prime minister or official government spokesman that it intends to ‘destroy the Palestinian people,’ because there are no such statements. Israel declared war to defeat Hamas, a fact Bartov represses.”
Moreover, said Herf, Bartov “refuses to address the reality that Hamas posed an existential threat to Israel’s existence, and that [Israel] was thus fighting for its very survival.” Bartov, Herf asserted, writes “as though Israel faces no threats to its existence that are not the fault of its own unjust policies.”
“This, too,” Herf said, “is the anger of a polemicist, not a practitioner of the historian’s craft.” He added, “Bartov, without access to Israeli archives and having made no serious examination of the public record of Israeli decision-making, confidently asserts the existence of a ‘deliberately pursued policy.’ There is no reason to take this conclusion seriously. Here again, Bartov has abandoned the historian’s craft in favor of polemics.”
One hopes that Israel: What Went Wrong will fade into well-deserved obscurity. Sadly, that is unlikely.
Rather, Herf predicts, “Bartov’s tome is likely to contribute to the ongoing effort to make hatred of Israel respectable in the faculty lounge, the editorial office, the think tank and in many political parties.” It will add “to the global campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel.”
When that happens, Herf rightly noted, “it will not be the first time that a very bad book has an outsized impact on public and published opinion.”
