Israeli & Palestinian war crimes? Yes. Genocide? Maybe. A talk with Omer Bartov
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Hi, and welcome to the Turbulent World with me James M. Dorsey, as your host.
Words matter. No more so than in
legal settings.
Genocide is the word most
associated with Israel's more than one-month-long assault on Gaza.
In response to the October 7 Hamas
attack against Israel, in which at least 1,200, mostly civilian, Israelis were
killed.
Genocide and Holocaust scholars,
including those who believe that Israel has and is committing war crimes in its
assault are divided about whether Israeli actions amount to genocide.
Even so, they warn that Israeli
actions could lead to genocide, if it not already has.
What is certain is that optics
streaming out of Gaza of the destruction and the plight of innocent Palestinian
civilians, including large numbers of children and babies, explain the popular
use of the term genocide when discussing the Israeli assault.
To get some proper definitions and
put things in perspective. I am joined today by Professor Omar Bartov, a
world-renowned genocide and Holocaust scholar at Brown University in Rhode
Island.
Omer Bartov, welcome to the show,
and thank you for taking the time.
Omer Bartov (00:01:36):
Thank you for having me.
James M.
Dorsey (00:01:39):
Perhaps, we can start on a
personal note. I'm curious about what got you interested in genocide studies.
Obviously, the ethics of the
conduct of war are not purely theory to you. You were born in Israel and served
in the Israeli military during the 1973 Middle East War, which caught, like
October 7, Israel off guard.
Omer Bartov (00:02:03):
Yes, you're right. I have a
longstanding interest in this issue. It began really with my interest in war
crimes as a teenager. I was very interested in military history and then as you
said, I served in the army. I ended up being an officer, a company commander,
and I kept also reading on war.
And what I became interested in
was the tension between the kind of aura that the German military, the Wehrmacht
had in World War II as an excellent fighting force and the crimes that it
claimed had been committed in the rear behind the backs of the heroic soldiers
of the Wehrmacht. And I became skeptical about that, particularly the war in
the Soviet Union. And so, my first research was really to see whether the army,
the German army of that time and the veterans and the generals who came out of
that army were telling the truth about the fact that the crimes were committed
by the SS, by the Gestapo, but never by the honorable German army.
(00:03:19):
And obviously that was not the
case. So, I spent several years digging through German archives and discovered
that the German army, A, participated heavily in war crimes, which is not
surprising considering that close to 30 million Soviet soldiers and civilians
were murdered during that war.
And B, that these soldiers were
heavily indoctrinated. So, they were not participating in war crimes only
because war is terrible, which it is, but also because they'd been
indoctrinated into believing that they were fighting sub-humans.
So that was the beginning of my
interest in this question.
It actually started, as I said,
with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide because the German
military was involved in the genocide of the Jews, not as the main organizer,
but as the facilitator of mass murder of Jews.
And from there I started studying
genocide more generally and ended up also studying the Holocaust more
specifically.
Now of course, I grew up in Israel.
In my childhood we were surrounded by Holocaust survivors. There were many
people you could see with numbers tattooed on their forearms. There were many
of my friends, whose parents were traumatized, who would scream at night from
nightmares. I mean, this was part of the scene in which you grew up.
(00:05:04):
But as I realized later on, we
also were growing up in a country I was born in the 50s that had just also
ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population that had lived in the
neighborhoods in which we were growing up.
And so that kind of realization of
everything that had happened to members of my generation shortly before I was
born, the Holocaust and the trauma of that and the creation of the state of
Israel, much of it on the ruins of what had been Palestinian civilization, I
think it formed much of my own interest since then until to this day.
James M.
Dorsey (00:05:53):
I want to come back to some of the
things you just said, but let's start off with trying to get some definitions.
If I understand the law correctly, intent is a key factor in determining
whether actions amount to genocide. I think it would be helpful if you could
define what constitutes intent and what the legal differences are between
genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
Omer Bartov (00:06:20):
Right. So, it is important to make
these distinctions. War crimes which are defined in the 1949 Geneva conventions
and subsequent protocols as serious violations of the laws and customs of war
in international armed conflict, which means war between states against both
combattants and civilians.
So these are crimes that are
committed within the context of war against soldiers and civilians, Crimes
against humanity for which there's no direct convention are defined in the Rome
statute, which then established the International Criminal Court.
The term (genocide) was already
used of course in Nuremberg, the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945. But the definition
in the Rome statute defines crimes against humanity as extermination of or
other mass crimes against any civilian population. And that does not have to be
at a time of war and also does not call for direct intent. It's just mass
killing of civilians.
(00:07:35):
The crime of genocide is a
particularly, somewhat bizarre convention, and it's important to understand
exactly what it says.
So, the crime of genocide is
defined and was defined in 1948 by the UN as the intent to destroy in whole or
in part a national, ethical, racial, or religious group as such.
So, that means that in order to
identify genocide, you need two elements.
One element is intent that you can
identify the organization or the state carrying out genocide intent to do that.
It's not just a byproduct of something else that it is doing such as war.
And secondly that the crime is
committed against the group as such. And that's very important. That is that
you're not killing people as only as individuals or doing anything else to
them, such as depriving them of food or so forth, but that you are doing it
with the intent of destroying the group that they belong to.
And your intention is to make that
group disappear, be destroyed, whether by killing or by other means.
And often because genocide has
been called the crime of crimes, it's supposed to be the worst crime that any
state can perpetrate.
There is a tendency to use that
word, which was coined in 1943/44, to use it against anything that we find
abhorrent.
But in fact, in international law,
it has a particular definition. And it doesn't mean that crimes against
humanity are any better or worse than genocide. It just means that they're
defined differently.
James M.
Dorsey (00:09:42):
I just wanted drill down on one
thing. Is there a legal definition of destroy?
Omer Bartov (00:09:50):
Well, according to the UN
resolution of 1948, the intent to destroy, there's a long list of how you go
about doing that. But what it means is to destroy the group as such.
Hypothetically that means that you don't necessarily have to kill anyone
because if you, for instance, remove the children of that group from the group
and you hand them over to be adopted by another group and you raise them as
members of another ethnic national religious group and they have no idea of who
they would've been otherwise, that could constitute genocide.
And that's actually how the term
was used in the case of Australia and Canada where children were taking away
from indigenous populations, it can also be depriving a group of the sources of
its existence.
So, if you move it to another
place, if you say do what happened in the genocide of the Herrero in German Southwest
Africa in 1904. When the German military was called in by the white settlers, the
German settlers, who said there's an uprising of the Herrero and the Nama
people and the military comes in there and says to the population, “You have to
go to the desert, you have to go to the Kalahari desert. We are not going to
allow you to stay here anymore because you constitute the danger to our own
people’.
(00:11:25):
And at the same time, the army
also takes care to plug in all the watering holes in the desert. Then, although
you may not be killing them, you're sending them to certain death and therefore
you are destroying that group as such.
And it's important to understand
that because you asked about the relationship between ethnic cleansing and
genocide, and that's where we find that somewhat of a gray zone.
Ethnic cleansing as such is not
defined in international law. It comes under crimes against humanity, under a
list of potential crimes against humanity.
But what it actually is, is the
removal of a group from a territory that you don't want them in because you
want your own group to be there.
Whereas genocide of course is the
attempt to destroy a group wherever it is. But in reality, as we could see in
the genocide of the Herrero in 1904, the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, the
genocide of the Jews, in fact as well, the original goal was to remove the
population from an area where you did not want them to be it.
And then under particular
circumstances, you either move them to an area where they would die or you
decide, which the Nazis did well, ‘we have no place to move them to. So, the
most humane policy,’ as some Nazis said, ‘is to kill them.’
James M.
Dorsey (00:13:05):
Right. What I'd like to do is see
how this applies to both Israel and Hamas and start off with Hamas. And there I
really have two sets of questions.
One is early on, you said defined
it spoke about wars of war crimes in terms of a war between two states. The
question of course, is Hamas a state or is it a non-state actor, even though it
does run a government in Gaza?
And the other question is the
group's charter which is widely cited as evidence that it is a genocidal
organization.
Hamas’ original charter adopted in
1988 called for the killing of Jews based on a saying attributed to Prophet
Muhammad. Hamas adopted a new charter in 2017 that dropped the call to kill
Jews. Even so the new charter calls for Israel to be replaced by a Palestinian
state in all of historic Palestine, but allows for the creation of a
Palestinian state alongside Israel as an interim step. Would that be enough to
qualify amass as a genocidal organization?
Omer Bartov (00:14:24):
So, these are two important
questions.
I think by large, and I'm not a
lawyer, I'm not an international lawyer, my impression is that by and large,
because Hamas was elected to power in Gaza, because it is the hegemon in Gaza,
it runs most of the institutes in fact.
Now, of course, there's a big mess
there right now, but (Hamas) did run most of the institutions in Gaza, law
enforcement schools, religious life and so forth, whether people liked it or
not, and has also a large armed organization, it could be seen as something
resembling a government of a state. And from that point of view, I think that
whatever it does can be considered, let's say the October 7th attack, can be
considered as something that it carried out. It took responsibility over that
something carried out by a government of a particular entity, a kind of state.
(00:15:44):
And under that you, I think, would
not have much trouble defining that as a war crime attack on large numbers of
civilians.
You could also define it likely as
crimes against humanity because of the large numbers and the nature of the
killing, which was particularly atrocious.
And then you come to the second
question. The second question is, is Hamas an organization that actually wants
to destroy the state of Israel?
And you are right that the
original charter actually lifts whole parts out of the protocols of the elders
of Zion, which is a fabrication originally carried out by the Russian secret
police before World War I or the turn of the 19th century, and is kind of
antisemitic canard.
And then it also cites from the
Quran, the most sort of anti-Jewish elements there, and is both an antisemitic
document, I mean just hair-raising document, and talks about the destruction of
the state. The revised version 2017 as far as I know, does not say that it
replaces the previous charter.
(00:17:14):
It's an adaptation of the charter
to political conditions that existed at the time.
And it has removed the antisemitic
elements there, and it actually speaks about the fact that it is not against
Jews, it is against Israel quite explicitly, and it also agrees, as you say,
for to an interim solution of two states.
And it does it in large part so as
to be in conformity with the Palestinian Authority. This is part of the
political game there, but at the core, I think Hamas actually wants to destroy
the state of Israel.
And what we have seen since
October 7th is that a number of leaders of Hamas have said publicly on
television that the October 7th attack will be repeated again and again, that
they will do that because that's the only way to deal with the Zionist entity, destroy
the state of Israel.
So, does that make them a
genocidal organization? I think one can make the case for that.
(00:18:34):
It's a little bit of a stretch,
but I think what could make the case, and if that is true, then one could say,
as I would understand it, the attack of October 7th was at least a genocidal
attack.
So, obviously it did not aim at
killing all Jews in Israel because it was not capable of doing that, but done
under the general heading of the Hamas conception of what Hamas wants to do to
create an Islamic Palestinian state in all of Palestine.
Perhaps it takes you into
particularly difficult words though, if you expand that to all kinds of
ideologies that exist now on the other side, that is in Israel, and we can talk
about that and that's why I'm a little cautious applying that category to
Hamas.
James M.
Dorsey (00:19:36):
Indeed. That's my next question
was going to be, which is to look at the case of Israel, where to the best of
my knowledge, there is no official document laying out an adopted government
policy that would qualify as evidence of intent to commit genocide.
There are however numerous
statements by senior officials and military officers that could qualify as
signaling intent. Would that constitute evidence? And more generally what
qualifies as evidence?
Omer Bartov (00:20:08):
So, as I said before, when you try
to see whether genocide is taking place or may be in the offering, you need two
things.
By and large, you need statements
of intent, and then you need to show that that intent is being implemented,
that there is an implementation of policy.
Israeli leaders, political
leaders, including the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, and other
cabinet ministers have made statements that show an intent to destroy,
approved, flatten, remove Hamas, but they often slide from speaking about Hamas
to speaking about Gaza.
And we have to remember that the
vast majority of the population of Gaza actually are refugees or descendants of
refugees from what was mandatory Palestine, often from communities that are
just or used to be just across the fence from where the Gaza Strip is.
So, statements of intent have been
made. One has to add to that, that there have been other statements and those
other statements coming largely from military leaders insisting that what
they're doing is trying to dismantle Hamas as a military organization.
(00:21:47):
They're taking great care not to harm
the civilian population, but because Hamas is in highly congested areas and has
allegedly place its headquarters under hospitals, it's missiles, it's schools
or kindergartens and so forth, it has no choice but to also harm civilians. And
it says that that's the responsibility of Hamas. So, you have two different
types of statements.
If you look more closely still at
the implementation of policy, I would say you have two elements here.
One is you have a clear, I would
say, and I'm not the only one who's saying it, disproportionality between the
military goals as they are articulated by the Israeli military and the number
of civilians that are being killed. We have now well over 12,000. That's the
estimate of civilians killed. There may be more, I mean, some people of course
argue that we can't trust Hamas figures, but on the other hand, there are
probably hundreds if not thousands of people buried under the debris, and many
of them are children.
(00:23:13):
The population of Gaza is about 50
per cent of the population under 18.
So, first of all, you have vast
disproportionality. It's not clear that Israel has really managed to dismantle
Hamas as a fighting organization. Maybe it did it in the city of Gaza, but
certainly not in the entire Strip. And the numbers of losses are huge.
And when you talk about
disproportionality, you're talking about both the immediate military goal and
then the larger goal. What is actually your goal in killing so many people? Why
are you doing it? And here the Israeli government has not articulated that
clearly, and we can get back to what that means.
The second element is very
important to look at is that part of the Israeli military operation is based on
removing the population of the northern part of Gaza to the southern part of
Gaza. And so about a million people have been dislocated from northern Gaza to
the southern Gaza Strip where they're living under dire conditions, lacking all
sufficient infrastructure for long-term survival, and with the approach of
winter now things are going to get much, much worse very quickly.
(00:24:41):
Meanwhile, Gaza has been flattened
as Israeli political and military leaders said they would. They have, and if
you listen to the Israeli media, people are talking about that with glee. There
have been reports from the ground in Israel where you see the city of Gaza is
flattened. There's just no houses are standing there.
So, even if the people who were
removed from that area are allowed to go back, they have nothing to go back to.
And right now, in the last two days, the Israeli army has also ordered people
in the eastern part of the southern Strip to move to its western part because
now they want to have military operations there.
So, they are constricting them
increasingly into smaller and smaller territory. Now, I'll add one last thing
to this, and that's really coming out just in the last few days. There is more
and more talk in Israel by various people related to the government of
relocating the population as a humanitarian act.
(00:25:54):
So just as the army was saying,
it's humanitarian policy is to move people out of the area of operations so
that they don't get killed. Now, various spokespeople, many of them connected
to the Kohelet organization, which were the people who launched the judicial
overhaul that everybody was excited about or mad about before the war.
Now they're saying we should
relocate them perhaps to the Sinai Peninsula, perhaps to the Negev, and
ultimately maybe they should just be distributed as refugees. They're in any
case, refugees to other countries. And then we'll have the Gaza Strip to
ourselves and we'll be able to settle it again as we had done before Israel had
moved out to the Gaza Strip.
These kind of actions show a
particular intent of ethnic cleansing that could also very easily become
genocidal actions, that is of causing mass death to the population, removing it
from the area where it lives, and then attempting to destroy its own identity
by moving it elsewhere, dispersing it around the world.
James M.
Dorsey (00:27:19):
You've said that there's no proof
that Israeli operations in Gaza amount to genocide but could qualify as war
crimes or crimes against humanity, and that there is still time to prevent the
Gaza war from evolving into genocide. Would Israeli actions like the cutting
off of the supply of essentials for human life like food, the attacks on the
hospitals, what you just mentioned, the unsafe moving of civilian populations,
if not transferring them beyond the borders of the territory they live in and
collective punishment constitute evidence?
Omer Bartov (00:27:57):
So, we are right now in a kind of
gray zone because even what you're citing that I said, I said that over a week
ago and things have been changing, I think that there is growing evidence of
war crimes, there's growing evidence of crimes against humanity, and if the
policies that I just outlined are allowed to be implemented, then that could
constitute genocide.
They have not been implemented
fully yet. That is the population of Gaza is still there. What its fate will
be, we don't know. And I must add another element to it, which to my mind will
make the difference between, or at least one difference, between this sliding
toward genocide and not. And that is that the Israeli government has not
articulated what its policy for the day after is, and the day after here is
crucial. At some point the fighting will stop.
(00:29:12):
We don't know yet whether there
may be a ceasefire, but a ceasefire doesn't mean that the fighting will stop.
In 1948, there were various cease
fires and then the fighting resumed, but at some point the fighting will come
to an end.
What will happen then if you look
at those kind of plans that are being floated now in the Israeli media by all
kinds of spokespeople for the government, although the government has not set
that itself?
Then there are two options here.
One is that the Israeli government will want to continue what existed before
just without Hamas. That is to remove Hamas and then to put a big and better
fence around the Gaza Strip, better than the one that they quite easily
overcame and say, we are not responsible for those people. They can rot there.
We don't care. And then continue implementing its policy on the West Bank,
which is partly, I think, cleansing, partly annexation and massive settlement.
(00:30:18):
I don't know whether that would be
possible, but that's one possibility. That will mean that Gaza will remain the
same thing and things will happen over and over again.
The other option is a political
option if we don't think about actually removing the population, as I said,
which could constitute genocide.
The other option would be a
political settlement, the beginning of a political negotiations and settlement
between an Israeli political leadership and a Palestinian political leadership.
That means that both the Israeli political leadership has to be replaced, and I
think it will be replaced.
It's totally discredited and a
Palestinian political leadership will be replaced. And Hamas I think is also
totally discredited, and the Palestinian Authority is extremely weak and
unpopular and would also have to be, the leadership would have to be changed.
And there are potential leaders,
although they're mostly in jail, but they're in Israeli jail, so it's not very
difficult to release them. That would create a different paradigm.
And creating that different
paradigm could be the difference between sliding into an increasingly genocidal
policy to sliding into or moving into something that could see some silver
lining at the end of all this killing. I don't know if that is possible.
It seems like there's pressure on
Israel to move in that direction. I don't think the pressure is sufficient, but
I think that that's, in many ways, the only means by which we could prevent
this from becoming even worse and potentially a genocidal situation.
James M.
Dorsey (00:32:16):
I want to come back to the day
after in a second, but I'd like to sort of first just clarify something which
is you essentially have a situation in which the siege of Gaza for all
practical matters, so no food coming in, water, electricity, fuel is essentially
robbing the territory from the essentials of life. Now, clearly there've been
today some development with a minimal amount of fuel being allowed into Gaza,
but nonetheless, doesn't that or does that in itself constitute intent if
you're starving people of food, of water, potable water, electricity, fuel, and
so on?
Omer Bartov (00:33:22):
Yes, look, I mean, it's a
complicated situation first because this is a sort of moving target, as you
said, and I think that the Israeli military and the political authorities are
trying to balance things more or less in a way that they put increasing pressure
on the population on the one hand, but that they're not seen as entirely
starving it of resources.
So, they're sort of trying to find
a balance, and that is clearly the reason that they've allowed fuel in today.
They're even saying that there is
another element that in the laws of war blockade, the siege is not entirely
impermissible.
So, even if we look at it as a war
crime, there are conditions under which if you look at, say, the British
blockade of Germany and World War I, there's a difference between a blockade or
a siege, that could be defined as military strategy and one that is not
allowed.
(00:34:45):
And I think that at this point,
Israel and they have a phalanx of lawyers who constantly look at what they're
doing. The Israeli army is constantly working with lawyers, which is sort of
interesting on its own. They're trying to possession themselves just on this
sort of margin between war crime and a non-war crime.
So, I'm skeptical about that being
right now defined as a war crime as opposed to indiscriminate bombing and
destruction, which I think would be easier to be defined as such.
But if you move from the category
of war crimes to one of genocide, then making the lives of people in a
particular territory impossible, that is creating conditions that no longer
allow life over time, then you could start, as I said, combined with relocation
or ethnic cleansing or removal of population, you are creating conditions by
the actual removing of the population and congesting them in one area.
Then you are beginning to move
into a situation that is clearly pre-genocidal and could easily flip to the
other side.
And that's where only political
intervention can stop that. It can't just be part of military strategy. There
has to be a political horizon as to what happens next, and it can move into
ways, but right now it's stuck, and as long as it's stuck, then the dying will
only increase and the closer we come to something that we could identify as
genocide.
James M.
Dorsey (00:36:53):
I want to come back to that in one
minute. One last question in this direction, though you're no doubt familiar
with the lawsuit against President Joe Biden, the Secretary of State, Anthony
Blinken and Secretary of Defense, Austin Lloyd, filed by the Center for
Constitutional Rights.
The complaint of asserts that they
are complicit in genocide committed by Israel. In the lawsuit, William Schabas,
a prominent genocide and legal scholar, cites Israeli government statements,
deadly military assault, and a total siege, as signs of genocide
Genocide, and Holocaust Scholars,
John Cox, Victoria Sanford, and Barry Trachtenberg cite as evidence a
comparison of Israeli intentions and actions with other genocides in recent
history.
What is your assessment of that?
Omer Bartov (00:37:45):
Look, I mean, these are all people
that I greatly admire, and I've read Schabs, and they are people who are much
better versed than I am in international law.
So, I don't want to debate the law
with them. They know it better than I do. I can only say that my own feeling is
that while there have been statements made by the Prime Minister, by the chief
of staff, also highly dehumanizing statements, we haven't talked about that
speaking about Hamas or Gazans as human animals and so forth.
James M.
Dorsey (00:38:28):
Or the statement by Isaac Herzog
the president, there are no innocent Gazans.
Omer Bartov (00:38:34):
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Which is
especially extraordinary coming from Herzog who we used to think of him as
being a much more moderate politician in Israel.
So, despite those statements, my
own sense, and I may be wrong in this, and I've said that those statements show
intent, but my own sense is that the current policy of the government and of
the military is not to destroy the civilian population of Gaza.
That is that it may happen and
then their statements will be used against them as they should, but that their
own policy right now is not that, but it's evolving in that direction. And
that's why I was speaking about the relocation, these ideas for the next phase,
what is the next phase of this war?
But I don't think that right now
there are people in government or at the top military echelons saying, we
basically have to get rid of this group altogether in one way or another.
(00:40:00):
The statements have an effect.
They have an effect on the soldiers on the ground, a brutalizing effect on the
soldiers on the ground. They're giving license to soldiers by talking about the
population in those terms.
And as I say, if the policies move
in the direction of an actual attempt to remove the population from Gaza, then
those statements that were made will be seen as an intention to destroy
Palestinians as such as a group.
I don't think that that up to now
has been the policy. I think many of these statements were made sort of in the
heat of the moment, in rage, also because the army, and that's a very important
element, the army on all echelons feels humiliated. It feels that it lost its
honor, and people on the ground are talking about it in those terms. We have to
restore our honor as well as deterrence.
(00:41:08):
And so they use that kind of
language. But the situation on the ground, what they're doing and the way
they're talking combined, I think can devolve into genocide.
So we are and have been
increasingly on the brink and in the long run, people like Schabas may be shown
to have been correct.
I tend to believe that this can
actually be stopped. Also, I'm not sure that the right policy is to sue Biden
and Blinken.
I think the way I see it, I hope
that Biden and Blinken and the Secretary of Defense and other people will
actually steer Israel in a different direction, not just by persuasion, but by
real pressure.
And the US right now has an
immense ability for pressure in Israel because all those politicians who just
before the war in Israel were saying the US should mind its own business and we
want to change our legal system and so forth, within days, Israel became
dependent on immediate, urgent supplies of military hardware to Israel.
And that is huge leverage, and
they could do it publicly or they could do it privately, but they're obviously
not doing enough of that. And I would much rather they did that than trying to
defend themselves of whether they are complicit in genocide or not actually
carrying out actions that would prevent things from getting worse.
James M.
Dorsey (00:42:57):
In fact, if one looks at the 2021
war in Gaza, in many ways Biden pursued the same strategy, the bear hug if you
wish, but finally on the 10th day of the war had to come out publicly and make
very clear what he wanted from the Israelis and Hamas, but in this case
primarily the Israelis. A day later they declared a ceasefire.
Omer Bartov (00:43:28):
Yeah, and look, I mean it's
different now because the scale is completely different. The scale is
unprecedented on both sides, and one has to take that into account. I mean,
about a thousand civilians murdered in Israel and Israeli towns taken over Hamas,
that has not happened, yowns taken over. It's not happened since 1948. Our
settlements and this number of Jewish victims, civilians has not happened since
1945, and the shockwaves in Israel are huge. The sense of pain and mourning is
enormous. I hear it all the time.
And on the other hand, the number
of civilians that Israel has killed now in the Gaza Strip is also unprecedented
compared to all its previous actions there, which were often horrific on their
own. I mean, in 2014, about 500 children died from Israeli Arab bombardment,
and that I thought was clearly a war. Crime was never adjudicated as such. And
now we are talking about 4 or 5,000 possibly children alone.
So, the scale has exploded and
action is needed, and it has to come from the US government. There's no one
else who can actually immediately bring about a change in policy, but they have
to make that decision, and they obviously have not made it here.
James M.
Dorsey (00:45:16):
Before we go back to the day
after. I'd like to follow up in terms of the Israeli military. One gets the
impression that attitudes towards Palestinians among the rank and file of the
Israeli military have hardened even before this war erupted. It's apparent in
the frequent failure of the military to intervene when vigilante civilians
attack Palestinians on the West Bank, or soldiers planting Israeli flags on
mosques and homes when raiding West Bank refugee camps, towns, and villages. I
wonder how much of this has to do with the rise of officers like we saw in 2014
with then Colonel, now brigadier general, Ofer Winter, who as commander of the Givati
Brigade declared that the Gaza War is a religious war and therefore there's
been this hardenng in attitudes within the Israeli military.
Omer Bartov (00:46:18):
Yeah, look, I mean the Israeli
military is a very different animal from what it was when I served in it in the
1970s. It's really something very different, and it's different on a number of
levels, I would say.
First of all, there is what you
identify, the army is becoming more and more religious. More and more people
serving in the Army are people who come from religious background, and they
don't come from the ultra-orthodox, they come from the national religious
movement more and more from among the settlers.
And, not because they are more
religious as Jews, but because they come from particular yeshivot (religious seminars),
particular religious leaders, religious mentors who are very extreme
politically and who have a completely different view of what Israel is about,
and what its mission is. They are not particularly interested in democracy and
liberalism, in pluralism or anything of that sort.
(00:47:37):
The most extreme representatives
of that kind of movement are right now in the Israeli government and (Finance
Minister Bezalel) Smotrich and (Nation Security Minister Itamar) Ben-Gvir.
These people talk about Jewish supremacy. There's no way to speak otherwise
about it. That's how they speak themselves. They speak of a total and complete
right of Israel to all of Israel, to all of the land of Israel, which they
don't like defining. But often what they mean is it certainly includes Gaza. It
of course includes the West Bank. It may include also parts of Lebanon. It can
include lands across the Jordan. They have no borders to that because that's a
sort of vague notion of what the land of Israel is. So, this is one thing that
has moved into the military.
Another important element is that
the Israeli military now is really divided socially. Fewer people serve in the
military proportionately than served when I was in the Israeli army in the
1970s, and large parts of those who do go to serve in the military, serve in
intelligence and air force, the intelligence is huge. It didn't pan out to be
as effective as one would've hoped, but it's huge. And the Air Force is
Israel's basically what the Germans called Wunderwaffe, the wonder weapon.
That's really where Israel is
completely superior to its neighbors. But the rest, those who go to be infantry,
to be in the armored unit, they come from particular parts of the country. They
don't come from the better educated groups. They don't come from the center,
from Tel Aviv and Haifa. They come from the so-called periphery. And so you
also have a social divide within the army itself. Those people who support the
more right-wing elements in Israeli society happen to also be serving in those
units.
(00:49:54):
And the last thing, and maybe the
most important is that the Israeli army for the last 56 years has been largely
the infantry units. Those people who are on the ground, the grunts have been
spending much of the last 56 years as policemen. They police the occupation.
You have generations of young men and women, who what they do in their military
service with all their fancy uniform and all that and high sophisticated guns,
is they break into people's homes at four in the morning to enforce occupation.
They stand in roadblocks and stop ambulances from heading to ambulances. They
harass old women and children. This is what they've been doing.
And so that process brutalizes
people, it brutalizes the occupier, and it brutalizes the occupied. And in that
sense, we could see that when I was in the army, I remember just before I went
to the army, we already then in the early 1970s were demonstrating and saying,
occupation corrupt.
And that occupation had begun only
in 1967 when I was 13 years old. You have now young Israelis who have no memory
of that at all. Their memory is of them basically bossing it over another
population, that population, in their own minds without even any ideology,
because of the realities on the ground are inferior to them. They can do
whatever they want to them, which is why partly that attack by Hamas has been
so traumatic because those people who, yeah, they could lob rockets at us every
once in a while, but were seen as basically no match.
(00:51:43):
I mean, we can destroy them
without any problems. We put a few of these mostly females soldiers in these
observation towers over the defense, and we can catch them, no problem at all.
Suddenly they came in thousands, and the Israeli army took hours and hours and
hours to get there and then to get control over the situation. That was the
humiliation, the sense of shame that is in the Israeli army. Now, if you want
to understand its psychology, it has to do also with the fact that turns out we
are not that superior. Turns out they can actually fight back, and therefore
what we need to do is to show them who has monopoly of power and flatten them.
And on that, I'm afraid right now there's a huge consensus in Israel that's not
just this government. It can change, it can flip, but right now what I hear
coming from Israel is, they have to learn that they can never do that again to
us.
James M.
Dorsey (00:52:57):
I want to come back finally to the
day after and the implications that has in terms of preventing a genocide. My
reading of the situation is bleak.
One, we don't know that Hamas will
be destroyed in this, but even if it's destroyed, what Hamas stands for many
Palestinians is armed resistance. And that notion is becoming more popular
certainly in the West Bank. I mean, we don't know what effect on Hamas'
standing the war in Gaza will have inside Gaza, whether that will reinforce
people's feeling or sympathy for armed struggle and maybe reverse what was a
decline in popularity for Hamas prior to the war.
But, also, you spoke about what
all these various statements that Israeli leaders have made. The notion of
transferring the population, turning them into migrants spread across the globe
is a notion that goes far beyond the government. If you look at someone like
Bar-am, I think it's Ram Bar-am who's contending now for leadership of the
opposition party. He has advocated distributing Gazans across the globe.
And clearly the Palestine Authority
in its current constellation is not really a legitimate contender.
The likelihood that Israel would
release leaders like Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prisons so that a new
Palestinian leadership could emerge given the breadth of sentiment across
Israel, irrespective of supportive of the government or not, is next to zero,
which basically means there is no exit plan.
(00:55:26):
Arab states aren't interested in
putting boots on the ground there.
The Turks are the only ones who've
so far volunteered that for all practical matters, which really leaves you with
a situation in which you either get total anarchy or the Israelis even against
their own will have to take over the daily administration.
Omer Bartov (00:55:47):
Yes, look, I mean, none of this is
simple, and as I said, we really don't know yet where things are heading. I
think that it's quite possible that things will turn out as you just outlined,
there's a high possibility of that.
I believe that there's another way
of looking at this. And two months before the October 7th attacks, colleagues
of mine and I issued a statement that was signed by about 2,500 senior scholars
and religious leaders and so forth. It was called the Elephant in the Room.
And we then warned at the time
that even the protest movement against Netanyahu's, so-called judicial overhaul
at the time, was refusing to face the elephant in the room, which was the
occupation. And that in fact, what the government was doing even then was an
attempt to perpetuate the occupation, to sweep the Palestinian issue under the
carpet, and to eventually annex large parts of the West Bank.
(00:57:08):
The fact of the matter is, okay,
so that of course exploded in our faces on October 7th, this attempt to say,
well, we can deal with the Arab states, with the world and all that, and
everybody will forget about the Palestinians.
But the fact of the matter is that
there's 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians in areas under Israeli
control. Most of these people are not going anywhere. They're there to stay.
The Jews are and the Palestinians are.
Now, you could envision, and I
know that there are people in Israel who are envisioning it, somehow to remove
them all, to somehow get rid of 2.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 3 million
Palestinians in the West Bank, and maybe also the 2 million Palestinians who
are Israeli citizens, somehow wake up tomorrow morning and they'll be gone.
And I think that there are people
among Palestinians, probably not a few, who also would like to wake up one
morning and see that all the Jews are gone, they've gone back to where they
came from or somehow they've disappeared, but nobody is going anywhere and
because nobody's going anywhere, the question is, do those two groups continue
slaughter each other or do they not? Do they finally understand that they have
to share that land?
And if they come to that
understanding that they cannot make the other group disappear, not in mind, not
in spirit, they're there, then they have to find some way to live together.
And there are actually ideas as to
how to do that. It's not a pie in the sky. The problem is that radical
politicians on both sides, or radical and incompetent in most cases have
always, whenever there was a possibility that something would change, immediately
started using the most radical elements on the other side to make it appear
impossible.
You probably remember that in the
early nineties when the Oslo Accord was sort of being debated, people thought
about Gaza as the Great Promise. Gaza would have an international airport and
seaport and money would flow in, and it would be the Dubai of the Middle East
or Hong Kong of the Middle East or something like that.
(00:59:36):
And Hamas became very weak because
Hamas thrives on insecurity, on desperation, on poverty, just like extreme
extremists in Israel. And in fact, if you look at the heads of Hamas and you
look at the Netanyahu coalition partners, they are mirror images of each other.
They're both thinking of the same thing. They want to be rid of the other side
and have it all, and they're sort of messianic in their worldview.
But you could think about it
differently. And I believe that most people in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the
Galilee, in Tel Aviv would rather have a better future for their children and
not think that their children would have to again engage in all these kind of
wars that we're seeing right now. And there are plans for that, and they're
good plans, but you need a new political leadership. And here people have to
stand up.
(01:00:39):
People do have a responsibility,
both Palestinians, and it's much more difficult for Palestinians and Israeli
Jews, and it's less difficult for them to stand up and to remove those corrupt
extreme leaders and find for themselves better leaders.
And they can be helped in doing
that by first of all, the American administration, but also by Americans, not
least American Jews, who would actually put pressure on their own
constituencies, on their own government to steer Israel in a direction that is
better for it, which is a direction of compromise.
And Israel, which says that
Palestinians understand only the language of power is a country that
understands only the language of power, and it's time to exert some of that on
the current government.
James M.
Dorsey (01:01:35):
Omer, on that note, this has been
a very incisive conversation, and we could go on for hours, but unfortunately
time is not our friend. I wish we had more time to follow through, but we'll
certainly have another opportunity. Nevertheless, thank you for taking the time
and all the best.
Omer Bartov (01:01:55):
Thank you very much for having me.
James M.
Dorsey (01:01:59):
The Turbulent World with
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Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Honorary
Fellow at Singapore’s Middle East Institute-NUS, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at
Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World
with James M. Dorsey.
Thank you for joining me today. I
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