Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, gave an interview to “Democracy Now!” on July 17, in which, among other things, he highlighted the indifference of the Israeli population to the genocide that their government is perpetrating in Gaza. “What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it’s done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza,” he observed. “In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television.”
Furthermore, “I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it. And that goes back both to the inability to see anything on their own TVs and, in response to October 7th, a sense that after that—and that’s a widespread sense in Israel—after that, there is no way of finding any solution with the Palestinians, and the only way to deal with that issue is to eradicate it,” he said.
Bartov otherwise covers ground that he wrote about on July 15 in his op-ed in the New York Times, including an extensive discussion on the divide between genocide scholars such as himself, who are slowly coming to the conclusion that Israel is, indeed, commiting genocide in Gaza, and those specializing in the Holocaust. The tragedy, he told “Democracy Now!” is that “most Holocaust scholars and all of the institutions that I know that are dedicated to commemorating and researching the Holocaust have refused to say anything. And some, again, a minority of Holocaust scholars, have come out and claimed that genocide scholars speaking about genocide in Gaza are anti-Semitic, that this is an anti-Semitic argument. And that use of the term ‘anti-Semitism,’ which, as you know, of course, and we spoke about, was also a tool to silence any protest last spring on American campuses, this abuse of the term is now creating a rift between Holocaust scholars and genocide scholars.”
