Shelly Schreter: Partial Analyses Don’t Help
Omer Bartov’s article in the NY Times (“I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”, July 15, 2025) raised hackles because he is a serious scholar of genocide and the Holocaust, an Israeli who served in the IDF, and a respected Ivy League academic (Brown U.). His claim that the Gaza campaign constitutes genocide is easier to discount when voiced by Hamas apologists, much harder to reject when coming from “one of our own”. He cannot be accused of anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism. Some may try, but it won’t stick.
It is useless to engage in “whataboutism”, i.e. countering his claim by pointing to clearly genocidal conflicts in the Middle East, Africa or Asia. Applying double standards to Israel is hardly new. Exposing it offers no valid cover for Israeli actions. Atrocities elsewhere provide no license for Israel in its wars.
Arguing about numbers and the ratio of combatant to non-combatant casualties is legitimate, but misses the point. We know that Hamas statistics are fraudulent, but to insist that Israeli actions have resulted in the deaths of “only” X thousand women, children and elderly, rather than Y thousand, is obscene.
What does Prof. Bartov miss? The need to assess unsparingly the full responsibility for the awful war in Gaza and its perpetuation. This requires unmasking the false claims of victimhood. so prevalent in our times, based on myths of helplessness and lack of agency. The goal of these claims is to evade and obscure one’s own responsibility for exercising agency, making conscious decisions, and for their consequences, through shifting responsibility entirely to the enemy. Both sides in Gaza deploy these weapons of psychological warfare. Both lie about having no alternative to their chosen courses of action, when both absolutely do, in their efforts to win sympathy among Western observers, in governments, on campuses, in the media (mass and social), and in opinion polls.
The Israel Government plausibly contends that it cannot tolerate a heavily-armed, genocidal enemy on its southern border, and therefore has to remove its military and governance capabilities through conquest: Hamas can no longer rule Gaza. But that point was reached many months ago, and could have been translated into an end to the war, a return of all hostages, and exile of the Hamas leadership abroad, with the governance of Gaza being taken over by a consortium of the amenable Arab states, very likely reinforced by the addition of Saudi Arabia.
Why wasn’t it? Two reasons. One is that this would have opened the door to a process leading eventually, if all went well, to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In no scenario could this occur smoothly or speedily, but in any case, the ideological makeup of the current Israeli government renders it a non-starter.
Second, the extreme right-wing parties in the Government, bolstered by a significant portion of the Likud ruling party, have made clear that they will bring down the Government if any such policy were adopted or even seriously considered. I am not speculating here about Mr. Netanyahu’s personal motives, nor about the explicit expansionist agenda of Messrs. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, since the two stated motives account sufficiently for the Government’s decisions to date.
Controversially, the Israel Government pleads lack of choice. Following the atrocity of October 7th, it had to neutralize Hamas (true, but not possible through military means alone); it had to remain in office for as long as required to achieve that goal (very convenient); and it had to defer a national commission of inquiry into October 7th until after the war in Gaza (even more convenient). Any skeptic doubting that narrative would be branded an anti-Semite.
For its part, Hamas made victimhood the center of its worldview and the rationale for its policies which have destroyed Gaza and so many Palestinian – and Israeli – lives. Not only does Hamas have full agency, it could have taken Gaza in a completely different direction of peaceful development. And it could end this war overnight by agreeing to return all hostages and leave Gaza to the governance of other Arabs and Palestinians.
It declines to do so, because it is not at heart a Palestinian national movement but rather an Islamic fundamentalist one, with the destruction of Israel and slaughter of its Jewish population as its entire jihadist raison d’etre. In the apocalyptic Hamas perspective, victory consists in holding out against the evil Israeli oppressor for as long as possible, without concern for the cost in Palestinian lives and property. In fact, the more death and destruction caused by the war, the better to devastate Israel’s image and hasten its ultimate demise.
The tragic complementarity of these two false narratives is striking. The removal of the two leaderships in this all-destructive horror show will be a huge liberation for both sides, dependent of course on who replaces them. As always, the powerful influence of the extremism of one side validates that on the other. The reality in Israel-Palestine is intensely inter-actional and inter-dependent.
Prof. Bartov’s analysis focuses only on one side and thereby neglects this essential truth. Righteous indignation will not get us far, especially when applied to only one half of the equation. Goodwill actors and friends on both sides need to reinforce the moderate forces in each, and emphatically to oppose the pernicious efforts of the extremists urging their respective peoples into the abyss of endless bloody conflict.
