Omer Bartov

The last real war that Israel has fought against enemy armies, who is that enemy?

These are the Palestinians who obviously do not represent an existential threat to Israel.

So that creates a mentality in Israel which, as I describe in the book, is both very aggressive and very fragile.

There's always a fear that something like another Holocaust would happen.

And when Hamas attacks on October 7th and murders 800 civilians brutally,

a vast massacre, immediately this is described as the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust.

Hamas are being described as Nazis.

And the population in Israel, large parts of it, and that's not only the right, but many, as you say, educated people, people who've traveled abroad, who see themselves as, you know, cosmopolitan,

cannot believe that this is what happened to them.

And there's a powerful urge just to eradicate those savages who somehow managed to take over parts of Israel and murder so many civilians.

Yes, so first of all, if you make that proportionate comparison, you'd have to do it also with the vast numbers of Palestinian civilians who have been killed, which goes well beyond 70,000.

At a minimum, a figure that even the IDF has concluded is correct, despite previous denials by the Israeli government.

You know, I wrote about this in early November 2023 in an op-ed in the New York Times.

And I said, by then, about 10,000 people had already been killed in Gaza, mostly civilians.

And I wrote that there was good evidence that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed, and that if this were not to be stopped right now, it could become genocide.

And of course, it was not stopped.

And even then, of course, there were those who said, if you say anything like that about Israel, that must be anti-Semitic rather than just relying on the facts.

So I'm afraid that, as we know now, and that's, of course, in Ireland, in your country, but in many other countries, including in the United States, people have concluded, large parts of the population have concluded that what Israel is doing, whether we call it genocide or merely genocide,

crimes against humanity and war crimes is criminal and that Israel has to be stopped.

And those who try to deny it by saying that it's anti-Semitism are just trying to delegitimize observers who are simply looking at the facts.