Omer Bartov

But the Palestinians had no place to go to because most of Gaza is either the coast or

or the borders with Israel, and a small strip of land which borders Egypt, and Egypt did not open its borders.

So as has happened in many genocides in the past, going back to 1904 to the genocide in Namibia, when people can't leave, when those who want to expel them are pushing them to leave, and they won't or have no place to go to, then it becomes genocide, and that's what's happened in Gaza.

Yes, I mean, some people have called me anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew or all kinds of terminology, but that's just rhetoric.

That actually means absolutely nothing.

What is important is, and what I try to do in the book, is to talk about the facts as I understand them and to explain them as best I can.

And I was quite reluctant to use the term genocide for what was happening in Gaza, in part because this term has been often used more as an allegation rather than in trying to see whether the events on the ground in any particular place conform to the genocide convention, the definition of genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention, which is the only definition

definition of the matters under international law.

And I reluctantly had to conclude that what Israel was doing was systematic obliteration of Gaza, whose goal was to destroy the Palestinians as a national group in whole or in part as such, very much in conformity with the 1948 definition.

Yes, you know, this is one of the things that really has baffled me, and that was the reason for my writing this book, because the Israel that I grew up in and the army that I served for four years in, including in the war of 1973, were very different from what Israeli society and the Israeli military are like today.

And I'd say, you know, there are two elements here.

One is that, as I mentioned before, after 1967, Israel became a 50-50 state.

50% of the people under Israeli control, under one kind of regime or another, are Palestinians, and 50% are Jews, but only the Jews have full democratic rights, although even those are being eroded as we speak.

And that process of 59 years of occupying another people has had a dehumanizing effect.

First of all, dehumanizing those you rule over, because that's what justifies bossing it over other people.

And secondly, it dehumanizes those who do that.

And the second element that has been important, that has come up a lot since October 7th, is that the Holocaust, which initially was a bit embarrassing in the years that I was growing up in Israel, it was a somewhat embarrassing event for the Zionist worldview because it really, at the time, people spoke about the Jews having gone like sheep to the slaughter, and Zionism was about creating...

a militant fighting group, one that would never go down without fighting.

By the 1980s, that changes, and the Holocaust becomes something else that they see now as an imminent danger to Israeli existence, and Auschwitz is lurking behind the corner.

And who can actually present that danger, considering that the IDF becomes, after 1973, the only real war group