NEWS
Gaza and the word "genocide": what third-party bodies have actually determined, and why a genocide scholar's voice carries weight
June 2026 — Omer Bartov, «Israel: What Went Wrong?»
The facts
Omer Bartov — professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, Israeli-American, an Israeli army veteran — has publicly changed his position on Gaza. In November 2023 he judged war crimes and crimes against humanity "very likely" but found "no proof of genocide"; by July 2025 he had reached the opposite conclusion. In his book "Israel: What Went Wrong?" (2026) he argues the military campaign aims to make Gaza uninhabitable for its population. His is not an isolated voice: in September 2025 the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded, in a formal report, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (more than 60,000 documented Palestinian deaths). Israel rejects these characterisations.
Legal comment
Public debate conflates determinations of very different legal weight; isolating them is what makes the analysis unassailable. The International Court of Justice, in January 2024 (South Africa v. Israel), ordered provisional measures finding it "plausible" that rights under the Genocide Convention were at risk: this is not a judgment on the merits, which is ongoing. The International Criminal Court, in November 2024, issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity — not for genocide. The UN Commission of Inquiry (September 2025), by contrast, made a formal determination of genocide, as did Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in their own reports.
Implications
The question "is everyone lying?" is rhetorically powerful but logically weak: it is an argument from authority. The legally serious question is different: faced with formal, converging determinations by independent third-party bodies, the burden shifts onto those who reject them wholesale. Bartov — himself a scholar of the Shoah — recalls that genocides are not only military facts: they live on the consent, indifference and silence of broad sectors of society. To criticise the conduct of the Netanyahu government is not to deny Israel's right to exist, nor to absolve Hamas, nor to erase the victims of 7 October: it is to refuse to let a historical trauma become a permanent licence. The duty to look begins here.
Sources: New York Times · Democracy Now! · Al Jazeera · The Forward
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