DECEMBER 18, 2023
What distinguishes war from genocide? When does state violence tip over from horrific yet legally sanctioned displays of military force into “the crime of all crimes,” according to both international law and the popular imagination?
This question has been much on Omer Bartov’s mind in recent months. A professor at Brown University and a leading historian of the Holocaust, the Israeli-born Bartov has devoted his scholarly career to studying acts of mass murder. This has made his expertise much sought after as the war between Israel and Hamas continues to escalate to heretofore unseen levels of bloodshed and destruction. As the war progresses, each side has accused the other of committing, or intending to commit, genocide.
Supporters of Israel have called Hamas a “genocidal organization” and the October 7 attack on Israel a “genocidal massacre.” Critics of Israel, meanwhile, say that the Israeli government’s rhetoric about Palestinians clearly signals genocidal intentions, and that Israeli military actions already undertaken in Gaza constitute a “textbook case of genocide.”
Bartov waded into this debate in mid-November with a widely read essay in The New York Times. He cautioned that, while Israel’s military actions in Gaza did not yet constitute a genocide, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had demonstrated “genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action.” He went on to distinguish between ethnic cleansing, which “aims to remove a population from a territory, often violently,” and genocide, which “aims at destroying that population wherever it is.” He noted the dehumanizing rhetoric employed by Netanyahu and members of his government, including references to Palestinians as “human animals.” And he ended by exhorting the United States and the international Jewish community to “stand up and raise our voices, before Israel’s leadership plunges it and its neighbors into the abyss.”
In subsequent weeks, Bartov has continued to sound the alarm. He has spoken out against the misuse of Holocaust memory to bolster support for the state of Israel and cautioned about the potential for Israeli actions in Gaza to turn into ethnic cleaning of Palestinians or worse. Bartov’s worries stem in large part from his understanding of how the Israeli military operates in a densely inhabited environment like Gaza. “To preserve the lives of Israeli troops, you move in with artillery, with aerial bombardments, with tanks, and with bulldozers, and you flatten the area, so that the infantry, when it arrives, is less vulnerable to this kind of urban warfare. The difference in the current conflict is that the Israeli Army is moving populations out of the way on a vast scale, larger than anything Israel has done before,” said Bartov. With an estimated 1.9 million people displaced (out of a total population of about 2.3 million), “people are getting congested into a smaller and smaller area while the places where they had lived are being destroyed.”
That, according to Bartov, “is beginning to look like ethnic cleansing,” which itself has been, historically, a steppingstone to genocide. He felt that it was critical to issue early warnings against these policies — not so much because he thought the Israeli government would heed them but because, in his view, the U.S. government remains the only power capable of checking Israel’s actions. So far, he does not think that the White House “has been as forceful as, by now, I think it must be.”
Bartov’s concern with the Jewish past, and with Israel’s present, began at home. Both of his parents studied history at Hebrew University with Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Ben-Zion Dinur. Bartov’s father, Hanoch, was a noted novelist, journalist, and playwright. After serving in Europe with the Palestine Brigade during the World War II and fighting in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 (during which he was falsely declared dead three times), Hanoch moved with his wife to a kibbutz in central Israel, where Bartov was born in 1954. Eighteen months later, deciding that this remote farming collective “was not the best atmosphere” from which to join the generation of rising Israeli writers, Hanoch moved the family to Tel Aviv.
Hanoch encouraged his son’s interest in writing, though he preferred that Bartov “write history rather than fiction.” In the end, Bartov did both: Early in his academic career, when he was a young professor in Israel in the 1980s, Bartov wrote two novels in Hebrew, and he recently published a third in English (The Butterfly and the Axe, January 2023). It is as an academic, however, that he has distinguished himself. Bartov’s first passion was modern military history. His interest intensified during his service in the Israeli Army. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he patrolled the Jordan River. The following year, Bartov spent time with a unit deep in what is now Syrian territory. “It was a kind of World War I landscape: getting shelled all day and rebuilding positions by night, with a sprinkling of people getting wounded and killed.”
When Bartov arrived at Oxford University in the late 1970s to study military history, his experience in the army made him question much of what he read in memoirs written by German generals, in which they largely absolved the Wehrmacht — the Nazi “defense forces” — of involvement in genocide and other war crimes. “I realized that there was some kind of big lie going on that German society had accepted after the war and didn’t want to talk about it,” Bartov said. “It was a really deeply repressed aspect of the Third Reich, unlike the Holocaust, which [by the late 1970s] was already being talked about.” He made it his “mission” to clarify and bring to light the role that the Wehrmacht had played in the genocide. “I think that way about many things,” he said of his dedication to this cause. “I need a sort of ax to grind, so to speak.”
In the resulting monograph, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (1985), he argued that German soldiers fought their Soviet opponents fanatically, not simply out of esprit de corps, as many of them argued later, but because of a sincere belief in Nazi ideology, which convinced them that they were fighting to save civilization against a “Judeo-Bolshevik” foe intent on its destruction. In Germany, the book helped to provoke a vigorous debate over the degree to which the regular army rank and file — and not just the SS — were responsible for wartime atrocities.
While The Eastern Front was controversial in Germany, it helped open doors for Bartov in America. In 1988, he was offered a three-year fellowship at Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. The move came at an opportune time. To help make ends meet as a young professor in Israel, Bartov had started translating “trashy novels” into Hebrew. Now, he had unlimited time to research and write.
In Israel, Bartov had resisted the Holocaust as an academic topic. “As long as I was there, I really didn’t think that one could write about the Holocaust as a professional historian,” he said. “It was too close. I knew a lot of people who survived or were children of survivors. I grew up in a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors. But also because it was so political. Everyone had an opinion about it. And opinions, as is often the case in Israel, were often not dependent on facts.”
In the years that followed, Bartov published three books that dealt with the Holocaust and with the links between war and genocide: Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (1996); Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (2000), and Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (2003). At a certain point, however, Bartov started to become “unhappy” with the field of Holocaust studies, and with an approach that had more to do with memory and representation and less with the “raw material of history — with documentation.” “My sense was that people had internalized a particular understanding of the Holocaust as a kind of industrial killing,” he remembered. “There was a tendency to write about the Holocaust very much through the eyes of perpetrators, based on the documents they had produced. And that created a kind of detachment from the event itself. You need to know how genocide is created by state and bureaucracy. But I felt that we were losing sight of what it was all about. Ultimately, genocide is about coming [to a place] and killing people.”
In 1995, Bartov had a conversation that would determine the shape of his career for over 20 years. While visiting his parents in Israel, he asked his mother to tell him about her hometown of Buczacz (now in western Ukraine, but it was part of Poland until 1939). Bartov knew Buczacz mostly “from fiction,” as the backdrop for many short stories by the Israeli writer S.Y. Agnon. But his mother knew the place intimately. After his initial question, she spoke uninterruptedly for an hour and a half about the town she was raised in and left for Palestine at the age of 11.It was only then that Bartov “realized this was the first time she had spoken about her childhood. I realized she had it all, ready to be told.” He began to imagine “writing a local history of the Holocaust,” one that would shift focus from the bureaucratic technologies of mass murder to the lived experiences of the people who survived (and didn’t survive) the catastrophe.
From this one discussion at his mother’s kitchen table, Bartov embarked on a 25-year odyssey to write a microhistory of the Holocaust, and of gentile-Jewish relations more generally, in one Eastern Galician town, a project which eventually resulted in his 2018 book, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. In the course of this research, which required immersing himself in Polish and Ukrainian written sources and oral testimonies as well as copious evidence culled from postwar German trials, Bartov came to believe that “the shtetl is a myth.” Eastern European towns like Buczacz “were actually mixed towns, not purely Jewish.” Moreover, his work on Buczacz revealed “that the Germans knew the people that they killed intimately,” from years of occupation which preceded the slaughter.
Much of the violence of the Holocaust happened not in sealed-off death camps but in communities just like Buczacz, shaped by tensions between neighbors of different ethnic and religious backgrounds as well as between occupiers and the occupied. According to Bartov, “this totally changes our idea of what the Holocaust was like as an experience.” Recapturing this local dimension of the Holocaust makes it easier to compare to other genocides. Industrialized death camps like Treblinka were a relatively novel invention of the Nazi regime, but communal massacres have been a constant throughout history. As Bartov writes in his most recent collection of essays Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine (2023), “the intimacy of recognition and violence, familiarity and hostility” is a feature we can find not just in Buczacz but in “Rwanda, Bosnia, and numerous other sites of communal violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.” In his eyes, the unsettling intimacy of such bloodletting is likewise “part and parcel of the Israel-Palestine conundrum.”
Having thoroughly explored the past of his mother’s place of origin, Bartov recently turned his attention to his own home: Israel. For the past year, he has been interviewing Israelis of his own generation — born between the late 1940s and early 1960s — for a book he hopes will serve as a “personal political” history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Bartov and his contemporaries were the first generation of Israelis to grow up in the country after independence, children who often “knew nothing about the part of the world” their parents and grandparents came from.
In the process, Bartov has been considering the connections between the two histories, “the world my mother came from, and the world that I grew up in.” When he visited western Ukraine for the first time in 2003, Bartov saw remnants of the centuries-long Jewish presence, “cemeteries and broken-down synagogues,” most often completely abandoned. He asked himself what Ukrainians thought about “these tombstones, inscribed in a script they can’t read.” The ruins reminded him of his own childhood: He and his friends “used to play in what remained of Palestinian villages, in cemeteries and houses.” What did they think about it at the time? No one spoke about it, Bartov recalled. “We knew that there had been Arabs there, and that they were gone, but that was all there was to say about it.” The denial of the past that he could see in West Ukraine, literally written into the landscape, was something he and his generation of Israelis had experienced as well.
Looking at the present situation in Gaza, Bartov is disturbed by the parallels to the events that accompanied the declaration of Israel’s statehood. His “biggest fear” is “another Nakba”: the Arabic name for the violent displacement of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in 1948. He is also concerned about the growing extremism on both sides of the conflict. In his eyes, the leadership on both sides have come to resemble one another in their rhetoric and worldviews. “The people in the government now, and the people in Hamas, have very similar worldviews,” he told me. “They want to empty the land of the other group. And that is terrifying.”
If Israel continues on its current course, with its present government, Bartov fears that future generations of Israelis will inherit an “authoritarian, Sparta-like” country, its sense of national identity fundamentally “based on bloodshed.” He would like to think that history, accurately understood and used as a vehicle for empathy instead of a rhetorical prop, can help to fashion a path away from the precipice. One only hopes that it isn’t already too late.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-historian-of-genocide-sounds-the-alarm
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