Sometimes Scholars are Wrong: Dr. Omar Bartov’s Genocide Accusation

Dr. Jack Sigman January 15, 2025 Guests and Blogs Comments Off on Sometimes Scholars are Wrong: Dr. Omar Bartov’s Genocide Accusation

Being a scholar does not mean always being right. In a class on genocide at Florida Gulf Coast University, the professor, a well-known Holocaust scholar, attributed a quote about the inferiority of native Americans to President Woodrow Wilson instead of its true author, President Teddy Roosevelt. In my application to Gratz College, I submitted a paper wherein I called Leo Kuper the father of the genocide concept when I meant to say he was the father of the concept of the political use of genocide (they accepted me anyway after grilling me about that faux pas). Perhaps the best-known example of a prominent scholar being wrong and almost destroying his reputation was Dr. Bernard Lewis’ insistence that what happened to the Armenians in Turkey during World War I was not a genocide.

Currently, an eminent scholar is making the tabloid (Democracy Now, Busboys & Poets in Washington DC) media rounds, wrongly attempting to convince the America public that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. That scholar is Dr. Omar Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, one of the eminent Holocaust scholars of my generation, and described by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as being “considered one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide.”

For me, the highlight of Dr. Bartov’s career was his scholastic battle with Dr. Martin Shaw, another illustrious genocide scholar, wherein Dr. Shaw was trying to convince Dr. Bartov that Israel was born out of the genocide of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Both claimed victory but for me, Dr. Shaw’s victory was hollow and Dr. Bartov proved decisively that no genocide occurred.

In November 2023, Dr. Bartov wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times (NYT) wherein he believed that while, in his opinion, Israel was committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, it had not reached the point to which genocide might be a credibly discussed. Of course, Dr. Bartov was relying on information provided by Hamas as there was no other available source. This was certainly a cautious scholarly approach to the complex situation of Urban warfare wherein one side is a singular ethnicity, and the vast majority of the dying are of that singular ethnicity. With that, Dr. Bartov did warn that the conflict could become genocidal, as can all conflicts between ethnic groups.

Then Dr. Bartov changed his mind. Again, relying solely of the information provided by Hamas and reviewing the statements made by Israeli officials hours and a few days after 10/7, and that the physical destruction of Gaza, even without the 10 to 20 fold increase in the number of civilian fatalities that such destruction would cause if genocide were the goal, made the genocide accusation credible.
However, in his NYT Op-ed, he had already decided that the statements by Israeli politicians proved intent, but it did not matter because there was no genocide occurring, just the threat.

So, what changed? Likely public opinion swayed by college protests, the fabricated data from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and the opinions of many second-tier genocide scholars (I am likely third-tier). Possibly the shunning by close family members. Possibly the opinion that the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza have suffered enough. Or a belief that the hostages will not be freed through military means and the only way to achieve a ceasefire is to shame Israel into one. Of course, considering Dr. Bartov’s article in the Guardian back in August 2024 when he made the absurd comparison of the mindset of the young men and women of the IDF, equating it to the mindset of the young men of Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht, fortified with propaganda, just prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, something definitely changed in Dr. Bartov’s mindset

However, none of that matters when deciding if genocide has occurred or is occurring. For that, we have the UN definition, the law, the intent of the law’s authors, and the precedents set by the International Criminal Tribunal over the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruling on Srebrenica and the ruling on Bosnia and the UN Panel of Experts regarding genocide in Darfur.

The UN defines genocide as the denial of the right to life of a people as murder is denial of the life of a person. Murder, not killing, not collateral damage, not human shields. Shooting to kill someone because of what they are, not for what they are doing. Not accidental killing.

The law requires intent and destruction of the people, in whole, or in part. The authors understood, as the US understands in its genocide law, that in part means in substantial part. The authors could not agree on how to write that so that it was not ambiguous and just gave up.

The ICTY ruled the Serbian activity in Srebrenica was a genocide because 20% of the population was executed in cold blood (8000 out of 40000), the majority of women of child bearing age were raped (according to custom, the children born as a result are considered Serbs just as in the Armenian Genocide, the children resulting from the Armenian woman raped by the Turks are considered Turks), and exiling the survivors constituted genocide over that geographic area. However, over Bosnia as a whole, that the killing of 200,000 (the estimated number at the time) Bosnian civilians out of a population of 4 million was not substantial and thus not a genocide.

The opinion of the UN experts regarding Darfur is even simpler. Because the Darfurans living in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum, were not killed or even arrested because of their identity, genocide was not occurring in Darfur.

We may never know why Dr. Bartov has chosen to ignore these facts and legal precedents and make this false accusation against Israel. But he did. And he is wrong. Just as Dr. Lewis was wrong when he decided Turkey’s actions against the Armenians was not genocide, despite the evidence to the contrary.