Omer Bartov

Hi, good morning.

Thanks for having me.

Well, you know, I was born in the mid-1950s in a very different atmosphere.

So Israel was a very small country.

We had, you know, generally socialist inclinations.

The notion was of social justice, first of all, for the Jewish population of Israel.

There was very little talk about the Palestinians in the country.

But there was an idea that the country would be a just country, that it would follow both its own Declaration of Independence, which spoke about it as providing justice as was proclaimed by the prophets in the Old Testament.

and in following some kind of social justice.

And there was still talk of finding some kind of way of sharing the land with its Palestinian population.

This is all before...

the war of 1967, in which Israel, of course, occupied, took over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and in fact came to occupy the very same Palestinians that it had expelled in 1948.

And that began a process of major transformation of what the country was really about.

Yes, so one of the main differences between what happened in 1948 and what has happened since 2023 is that in 1948, Israel, as it was becoming an independent state,

Its goal was to have a Jewish majority state.

And the problem was that in Mandatory Palestine, 60% of the population were Palestinians.

And so the Israeli military, either through intimidation or through a series of massacres, ejected the vast majority of the Palestinian population from what became the state of Israel.

Now, at the time, the borders were open, so many of the Palestinians then fled by land or by sea to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Syria, to Egypt.

And that was clearly a process of ethnic cleansing.

In 2023, 24, 25, the Palestinians, the IDF had the same policy, Israel had the same policy, decided to respond to the attack by Hamas on October 7th by ethically cleansing Gaza.