Omer Bartov, Brown University Professor, Blames Israel For Hamas Attacks

A mad world, my masters! Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, has publicly denounced Israel as being responsible for the attacks carried out by Hamas on October 7. It’s a charge that no sensible person could possibly believe, but Omer Bartov has proved equal to the task. Hamas savages on that day, remember, committed every sort of atrocity they could think of. They beheaded babies, burned children alive, raped, tortured, and murdered girls, gouged out the eyes and cut off the genitalia of men and sliced off the breasts of women, murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, played with decapitated heads. More on Bartov’s grotesque shifting of the blame onto Israel can be found here: “‘Genocidal Intent’: Brown University Holocaust Professor Blames Israel for Hamas Terrorism,” by Alec Schemmel, Washington Free Beacon, December 6, 2023:

A professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University is blaming Israel for Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist assault and arguing that the Jewish state holds “a clear intention of ethnic cleansing” in its retaliatory war against Hamas.

What “ethnic cleansing” is that? Has a single Palestinian in Gaza ever been forced out of the Strip by Israel? No, not one. For that matter, has Israel forced any Palestinians to leave Judea and Samaria? The answer, again, is No. Israel is not engaged in ethnic cleaning anywhere. In fact, by offering employment to 20,000 Gazans, Israel hoped to help the Strip’s inhabitants economically. They have been receiving wages in Israel that are between three and ten times the size of the wages they would receive from Palestinian employers inside Gaza, assuming that they could find any work in a place where nearly half the adult population is unemployed, thanks to the corruption and mismanagement of resources by Hamas. Furthermore, in the past, Israel has successfully urged Qatar to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Palestinians in Gaza. How does any of that amount to “ethnic cleansing”? In 1967, when Israel took over Gaza from Egypt, the population was 400,000. By 2005, when Israel pulled out, the population of Gaza had risen to 1.3 million, that is, it had more than tripled. Does that bespeak “ethnic cleansing”?

Omer Bartov in a Nov. 10 interview with left-wing journalist Amy Goodman said Israel is operating with “genocidal intent” and aiming to use the war in Gaza to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, citing comments in which Israeli leaders referred to the terror group’s fighters as “human animals.” Weeks later, on Nov. 29, Bartov in an op-ed blamed Hamas’s terror assault on Israel and said the Jewish state should have expected the attack.

Omer Bartov thinks that a single comment made by a justifiably enraged cabinet minister, who said that those Hamas operatives who committed those atrocities on October 7 were “human animals,” is a call for “genocide.” Nonsense. The perfectly understandable cri de coeur came from Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant. He was commenting not on every Palestinian, but only on the Hamas operatives who behaved, he said, as “human animals” (“we are fighting human animals”). There was no “genocidal intent,” and Bartov surely knows that the IDF goes out of its way to save the lives of civilians. In this war, it first managed to persuade nearly 90% of the inhabitants of northern Gaza to leave for the south, letting them know that the north would soon be the area of the heaviest fighting. And then the IDF did more. Whenever it was about to target a civilian structure, it first alerted inhabitants of those apartment buildings, schools, mosques, and so on, that they should leave those buildings. The IDF did this using a variety of methods: leafletting (it dropped 1.5 million leaflets to persuade people in northern Gaza to move south of the Wadi Gaza), emailing, telephoning, and use of the “knock-on-the-roof” technique. If Israel had “genocidal intent” as Bartov insists, surely it would not be making such efforts to save the lives of civilians, efforts which also alert Hamas operatives as to what places the IDF will soon be targeting, and allow many of them to escape.

“If you keep over 2 million people under siege for 16 years, cramped in a narrow strip of land, without enough work, proper sanitation, food, water, energy and education, with no hope or future prospects, you cannot but expect outbreaks of ever more desperate and brutal violence,” wrote Bartov, who joined Brown’s faculty in 2000….

“Siege under 16 years”? Nonsense. Every single Israeli has been out of Gaza since 2005. The “siege” he speaks of is the attempt since 2007 by Israel to keep “dual-use” goods — those which have a clear military as well as civilian use — out of the hands of the terror group Hamas, which declares in its charter that its goal is the destruction of the Jewish state, and the annihilation of all of its Jewish inhabitants. The “siege” Bartov refers to does not affect food or medicine or most consumer goods. What it does block are such items as cement, steel rods, and pipes, all of which can be used to build that extraordinary network of tunnels — more than 300 miles of them — that Hamas has built under Gaza.These tunnels are places where Hamas can hide its vast stores of weaponry, and its operatives, and allow both men and weapons to be moved around underground without being detected. Israel does not impose a total ban on such goods; it monitors the amounts going in, to make sure those amounts correspond to the needs of civilian building projects that are going on above ground, whose progress can be monitored by drones. That list of banned items has too many exceptions to constitute a real, Leningrad-style“siege.”