As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel
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This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree.
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First published in The Guardian on August 13, 2024. A big ‘thank you’ to it for publishing it!
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This is an absolutely extraordinary and deeply touching report. It is as important as it is long - it ought to go viral. Please help spread Omer Bartov's essay; he is a former IDF and genocide historian. Beautifully written too!
Jan Oberg, TFF Director
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…”These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight? In the decades after the second world war, many American sociologists argued that soldiers fight first and foremost for each other, rather than for some bigger ideological goal. But that didn’t quite fit with what I’d experienced as a soldier: we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible.
Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war. What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 1980s understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a “decent” war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide “behind its back”. It took Germans many more years to realise just how complicit their own fathers and grandfathers had been in the Holocaust and the mass murder of many other groups in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to “break the arms and legs” of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path”…
… “another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. 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. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.
Please continue to read the entire essay in The Guardian >>