Rachel O’Donoghue
Algemeiner, July 21, 2025
“Bartov’s case, in short, relies on selective quoting and distortion.”
“I’m a genocide scholar,” proclaims the headline of Omer Bartov’s recent guest essay in The New York Times. And therefore, he assures us, “I know it when I see it.”
Except this isn’t the first time that Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, has thought he saw genocide, or something like it, in Israel’s actions toward the Palestinians.
In fact, it’s not even the first time since last year.
Although Bartov opens the piece by saying that “a month after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023,” the situation “did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide,” a quick review of his public record suggests he had been laying the groundwork for this accusation long before the war in Gaza began.
July 2025 wasn’t some dramatic moral epiphany he revealed to readers of The New York Times. Bartov had already publicly declared Israel’s actions a genocide back in December 2024 in an interview with the fringe website Democracy Now! His NYT op-ed is simply a polished retread of that declaration.
In the Times piece, Bartov writes:
By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah […] to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. ….SOURCE