Factually! with Adam Conover - Genocide Scholar: I Know It When I See It, with Omer Bartov

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

The Palestinian people are being killed en masse, they are being starved, and many are dying of preventable disease. More and more people are beginning to understand that it’s Israel’s intention to eliminate the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. Yet as untold thousands are dying, there are still people who insist that this is not “genocide” despite every bit of evidence to the contrary. This week, Adam speaks with Omer Bartov, a professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, about the genocide in Gaza, why so many people are reticent to label it as such, and how the world is looking at this moment. Find Omer’s book at factuallypod.com/books--Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/2vjj5nrh #CashAppPod.As a Cash App partner, I may earn a commission when you sign up for a Cash App account. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. --SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything.

Hey there. Welcome to factually. I'm Adam Conover. You know, The imagery coming out of Gaza for the past few years has been horrifying. But over the last couple weeks, things have gotten a lot worse. People and especially children there are starving, in many cases, dying due to a lack of food. Just last week, the World Health Organization, along with three other UN organizations,

confirmed definitively that there is famine in Gaza due to levels of extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition and starvation-related deaths, unquote. Over half a million Palestinians are now in immediate and growing danger of death from starvation. And we need to make super clear that this famine is not a natural disaster. There has not been a dust bowl of the cornfields in Gaza or whatever. The starvation, the famine, is a product of the state of Israel's direct actions. The state of Israel has cut humanitarian access to Gaza. 98% of cropland there is damaged or inaccessible, the health system is disintegrating,

and tens of thousands of children and pregnant women are now at risk of starving to death. UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell described conditions there this way. She said, the signs were unmistakable, children with wasted bodies, too weak to cry or eat, babies dying from hunger and preventable disease, parents arriving at clinics with nothing left to feed their children, there is no time to lose. So it's become pretty clear that Israel is not just trying to eliminate Hamas, because if they were just trying to eliminate Hamas, why starve a couple million people?

More and more people around the world are concluding that it looks like Israel is trying to wipe out or get rid of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza. and we have a word for this. The word is genocide, and a lot of people have been loath to use that word. They don't want to throw it around casually or cheapen it or just use it as a term of aspersion. And that's really understandable. But more and more literal scholars of genocide are saying publicly that this is what is happening in Israel and Gaza today. And we have one of those scholars on the show here today to talk about it.

I know that this is a really difficult issue, and I know that the news coming from this part of the world can often feel like it's bombarding us, and there can be a desire or a simple fact that we become numb to it. And we want to think about something else. And you know what? If you want to take a little time and listen to a funny comedy podcast,

you can listen to our episode with the naked gunwriters a couple weeks ago. That's completely fine. Take care of yourself. But I also think that it is critically important as citizens of the United States, states, a country that is supporting materially with weapons and resources, what the state of Israel is doing, that we look clearly at what is happening. So I really encourage you to take a moment and listen to what my guest today has to say. His name is Omar Bartov. He's a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown. And I also strongly suggest you read his recent New York

Times essay. I'm a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it. Now, before we get to that interview, I just want to say really quickly, if you want to support this show, you can do so at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of our show ad-free. We also do a book club over Zoom. For this book club, we are reading Rashid Halides, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, very relevant book to this topic. If you'd like to join us, patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

If you'd like to come see me on the road, I'm doing a big show in Los Angeles on October 5th in New York City on November 15th. also Braya, California, Spokane, Washington, Tacoma, Washington, Oklahoma City, a bunch of other cities as well, Adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this really important conversation with Professor Omer Bartoff. Omer, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about this very difficult and wrenching, horrifying subject with us. First, I just want to talk about your background a little bit.

you're a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies. I actually did not realize that genocide studies was its own field. Tell me a little bit about the work that you've done over your career and what that field is. Well, I've had a long career. So I started off as a Germany story, actually, and I wrote about war crimes carried out by the German army in World War II, especially in the war in the Soviet Union, which was the main theater of war for the German Army. So I wrote about indoctrination, war crimes, and engagement in genocide in the Soviet Union by the German Army, which was a topic, a highly controversial topic when I started writing about it in the 1980s because in Germany there was a general idea that the German army

fought a clean war and the bad things were happening behind the back of the brave German soldiers, but they had nothing to do with it. And that was a method lasted about 40 years, even 50 years after the end of the war. So that's where I started, and then I became more interested in the links between total war, World War I and World War II, between what I called industrial killing in World War I and industrial murder in World War II in the extermination camps and Nazi extermination camps. So this was a topic that I dealt with quite a bit, and it was my way of dealing with genocide, not only the genocide of the Jews, but also other cases of genocide.

This was the time, you know, the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, that was followed by two major genocides in Bosnia and then in Rwanda, 1992 to 95, in Bosnia and Bosnia and 1994. in Rwanda. And then I also became more interested in the sort of the intimate history of genocide, I would say. I wanted to see what it looks like, not from the top, but rather how does it happen in one place? And so I spent a good 20 years studying one town in Eastern Europe. It used to be in Poland. It's now in Ukraine.

happens to be the town that my mother was born in. So it was a Jewish town in which Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews lived for about 400 years. And in World War II, they killed each other. The Ukrainians participated with the Germans in the killing of the Jews and in the ethnic cleansing of the Poles. So I wanted to understand how that happens in one town. Of course, this was one of scores and scores of towns that had a similar kind of history, that they were into ethnic communities for a long time, and then experienced radial of violence in World War I and World War II under Nazi, for Soviet and the Nazi rule, so a vast

amount of ethnic cleansing and genocide. So that was a way of kind of seeing the intimacy of genocide, how people who know each other, who have lived together, whose children went to school together, turn on each other. And it looks very different from when you look at it through, say, Auschwitz and, you know, people being taken on trains to a kind of plant that produces corpses. And that led me in various ways to, so go back to my own. background, I was born and raised in Israel. And, you know, when I was traveling in West Ukraine, where this town is now in many other towns, it used to be East Galicia. So it was a place that had

a long and rich Jewish civilization that had been entirely obliterated and forgotten. And I was wandering around there seeing sort of empty shells of synagogues and abandoned cemeteries and children, you know, Ukrainian children herding goats or cows. there and not knowing anything about what had been there until World War II, I started thinking about my own childhood and growing up in Israel, and I was born in the mid-50s, and thinking that I grew up in a place where many of the people who were around me were Holocaust survivors, and the environment that I was growing up in, was one in which there had been Palestinian villages all around, and the remnants of those villages, cemeteries,

mosques, houses were still there, but the people were gone because they'd been, I think, clean just a few years before I was born. Wow. And there was no memory of that and no talk about it, no language for it. And so that took me in a kind of roundabout way also to become more and more interested in relations between Israelis and Palestinians and all the tragedies leading from 1948 to the present. Yeah, it's a really long tragic history. Before we get into it, I want to ask you, you spoke in your answer of ethnic cleansing and genocide as separate phenomenons. So let's just talk about, let's do, I know you teach a class on genocide or probably multiple classes. So let's just imagine we're in the 101 class, right? What is the basic definition of genocide? And how does it differ from ethnic cleansing? Because I think a lot of times we use those terms loosely, synonymously. Right. So genocide, the definition, of genocide is based on a convention, a genocide convention, for the prevention and punishment

of the crime of genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations by the UN in 1948. And it came into effect in 1951 after a sufficient number of countries signed it. And most countries in the world are signatories to the genocide convention, and that includes all European countries, includes the state of Israel, includes the United States, the United States took about 40 years to join that convention, but it eventually did. Wow. So that particular convention describes genocide as acts carried out with the intent to destroy a particular group, an ethnic, national, religious, or racial group in whole

or in part as such. And that's a very particular definition of that crime, because it speaks about, the attempt to destroy a group, not simply to kill people, but to destroy the group as a group. So the actions that you are carrying out, which themselves could be war crimes and other types of crimes, are done under the heading of a general intent to destroy that group. And the states that are signatories to that convention are obliged by being signatories is to try and prevent that crime before it happens, to try and stop it when it is happening

and to punish those who carry it out once it happens. It also has another interesting aspect to it that it's the only international crime that allows states to interfere in the affairs of other states. States don't like that, right? I mean, sovereign states don't want other states to tell them what to do within their own sovereign borders, even if they're carrying out crimes, whatever they might be,

They don't want to be invaded by another country. But in the case of genocide, that doesn't hold. That is, genocide can be part of an international war, a war between states, but it can also be internal. And states have an obligation to try and to stop it nonetheless and to punish those who carry it out, either in national courts or there's a system in place of international courts, both the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, and since the early 2000s, an international criminal court. The first one is for states, and the second one is for people. And if a state is unable or unwilling to bring to justice its own citizens, then these international courts

kick in. So, for instance, there's now an arrest warrant for the Prime Minister of Israel, or Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Minister of Defense, You have Gallant, from the International Criminal Court, from the ICC. If they come to a signatory state of the Rome Statute, that is the basis of the ICC, they should be arrested and brought to the Hague where that court is. Well, this brings us to our main point,

and the reason we had you on was to discuss whether what Israel is conducting in Gaza and the surrounding area, is this genocide? Does this fit the definition? You wrote a piece pretty soon, I believe, after October 7th, 2023, which was basically, you were horrified by many things, but that you did not yet feel it met the definition of genocide. About a month ago, you had a piece in the New York Times, really notable. It was on the front page of the website saying, yes, you now believe that this is a genocide. So tell us why you feel that is. Yeah, I'll explain that, and I'll just add to that that you also raised the question of ethic cleansing.

Yes. And it's related to this question. So, ethnic cleansing, which is not well defined in international law, it comes under forcible displacement. So it doesn't include the element of ethnicity. But it is defined in, it was defined by one tribunal, the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and is generally understood as the attempt by one ethnic group to remove another ethnic group from a territory that that other ethnic group wants for itself. So it has to do with removal of an ethnic group from a territory, whereas genocide is about targeting that group for

destruction. Historically, these two cases, often these two policies, these two policies, or actions are often related. Because often genocide begins as ethnic cleansing. It's an attempt by one group to remove another group from a territory. But groups usually don't want to leave their homes. People want to stay in their homes. They want their land. They want their home.

Also, some of them can't leave because they may be sick. They may be old. There might be no place for them to go. Exactly. And often there's no place for them to go. And so because of that, often ethnic cleansing becomes genocide because you try to move them, they don't move, you use more and more force, and eventually you kill them.

So that comes to the question of my understanding of what is happening in Gaza and how it's changed. Because I wrote this early op-ed in the New York Times in early November, 2023, and the goal of writing it was to say, look, there's clear evidence by now, by then about 10,000 people had already died in Gaza, right? And I said, there's already evidence that war crimes were committed. I of course said that what Hamas did on October 7th was a war crime and a crime against humanity, both the killing of hundreds of civilians and taking 250 hostages. These are severe crimes. And so there was no question about that. But the IDF's decision then to move

into Gaza first with massive aerial bombing. And then with the ground operation, within four weeks had caused the death of about 10,000 people, the majority of them civilians. So I said, look, there's evidence of war crimes, disproportionate use of force, which is a war crime, forcible displacement, which is a war crime, and crimes against humanity because of the large numbers of civilians who've been killed. I said, there is not yet evidence of genocide. Genocide of statements were made by heads of state, by top officials in Israel, top political and military officials. Like what? Do you have any examples of those statements? Oh, of course. I mean, one of the most notorious statements was made by Yoavgalant by the then Minister of Defense,

who said, Gaza will have no water, will have no food, will have no power, they are human animals, and they will be treated appropriately. That, of course, is, at least means that you are going to use starvation as a tool of war, and that added to that were statements saying Gaza will be destroyed, Gaza will be flattened. There are no uninvolved people in Gaza. That is, everybody is complicit. Netanyahu himself spoke about, to the Israeli public, saying, remember what Amalek did to you. And every Israeli, when they hear that, they know what it means because the injunction in the Bible to the attack by this people of Amalek, this biblical people that attacked the Israelites as they were moving, traveling from Egypt, to the Holy Land, the injunction by the Bible is because they attacked you,

you have to destroy them, man, woman, child, and suckling sheep and cattle. Entirely eradicate them. It's a sort of heavenly genocidal injunction. Wow. And so when you say that, remember Amalek, this is what you're talking about. And there have been, since then, of course, a series of statements. But one could have said at the time, and that's what I was saying in that early article. In November of 2023.

In November of 23, that these were, you know, people were mad, right? I mean, hundreds of Israeli civilians were killed and murdered. And also, it was a fiasco. It was a fiasco for the IDF. It didn't show up. It wasn't prepared for this. It was a political fiasco. And so these were things that could have been, you could have said they were

said in the heat of the moment. And they didn't mean it. It was irresponsible. It's giving them a lot of credit, I think, when they're saying, there are no one involved people and we're going to turn off food and water to an entire population.

But, okay, yeah, they were very upset. Yeah, sure. Exactly. And there are people, in fact, I was speaking with one person this morning who still say that. But, okay, you could have said Maybe these were just irresponsible statements, but they're not a policy.

There's no policy to do that. And then Israel said, well, we actually have war goals, and the official war goals were relatively reasonable. The war goals were to destroy Hamas, which is a terrorist organization that's carried out this horrible massacre and released the hostages. That made sense. So I said, look, I mean, this can become genocide, a question. to watching what the IDF is doing and the massive destruction of property and lives

and has to be stopped before it becomes genocide. Now, no one paid attention, of course. By May of 2024, I became persuaded that the IDF was actually not trying to accomplish those war goals, the official war goals, but was in fact engaged in something else. And that's something else conformed to those early statements, those so-called irisprose responsible statements made at the heat of the moment, because what he was doing, it was doing its best to make Gaza as a whole completely uninhabitable for its population. So when he was moving people, say, from telling people, you have to leave this town because

it's going to become an area of operations, it won't be safe for you here, just move. So people move, and then the IDF moves in and destroys everything. So they have nothing to come back to. And that was then systematically. I reached that conclusion in May, because in May 24, the IDF moved into Rafah. And there were a million people there. Half of the population of Gaza had concentrated there because they had been displaced constantly. And this is the southernmost town of Gaza.

It's on the Egyptian border. And the IDF said, well, we have to move you out because we have to fight. in Rafah. And they moved them to Almawasi to the beach area, which had no infrastructure whatsoever, and then moved into Rafah and demolished it. By August, there was nothing there anymore. And so at that point, I said, look, I mean, this is not what they say it is. If you look back, you see that this is a systematic attempt to make the place uninhabitable and to ethnically cleanse the population, that is to remove the population from Gaza. The point is, as we said before, where are they going to go? They have no place to go to. They are stuck there. And so

every time they move someplace, they're attacked. All the safe zones have been attacked repeatedly. And then they're told to move again. The policy of depriving people of water, clean water, all the water now is polluted of food. What we see now, this starvation crisis, it takes a long time to reach that, right, to reach that point. So all of these policies are meant to debilitate the population, killing large numbers of them, and hoping that you can concentrate them all in the South, and somehow maybe other states will say, well, we have to take them in, look at these people, they have no place to go

back to, that's what Trump said when Netanyahu was visiting the White House a few months ago. Maybe we could just move the Palestinians out, rebuild the place, and then it's a beautiful area. It could be like the river out of the, right? But the people will be gone. And maybe it will let the few of them in if they can afford it, because of course now it'll be all these beautiful hotels. So this is a policy, I believe, whose goal is to ethically cleanse the entire Gaza's trip, but the result of that is a genocidal operation.

And what takes it from ethnic cleansing to genocide? So to say, you must leave a town, then the town is leveled, and then maybe five years later, there's a new Israeli village built on the town. That's the textbook definition of ethnic cleansing. What, in your view, brings it to genocide? When you talk about genocide, as I said, you are speaking about acts carried out with the intent to destroy a particular group, and the Palestinians are a national and an ethnic and a religious group in whole or in part as such.

And how do you do that? So there are actually, in the definition, some elements of how do you bring that about? How do you destroy the group as a group? You don't have to kill everyone. You have to destroy the group. Like the group identity? Yes, yes, exactly. So one is by killing members of the group.

And it's generally understood substantial number of people. By now, we know that the IDF has killed at least 62,000 and wounded some very, very severely, around 160,000. But these are conservative figures. the real figures are probably much higher. So it could go up by now of those who died to 5% of the population. But the rest of the population has been severely debilitated. And especially this is a population of just over 2 million people, half of whom are under the

age of 18. And children have suffered especially badly, both from the trauma of what is going on, from loss of parents, from lack of food, from lack of medical assistance, and therefore whatever happens to them, they will be stunted for the rest of their lives. It will be very hard for them to recover. So the second sort of section of that talks about causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the population, and that has clearly happened. And the third, which is very important, speaks about, and that's exactly what the idea

has been engaged in, and what I've talked about, is deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. And that is exactly what has happened. And there's another section that arguably is quite relevant as well, which is imposing measures intended to prevent births in the group. Now, we know now that, for instance, there's been a rise of 300% in miscarriages, since October 7th, that 20% of children of babies born in Gaza are born either immaturally or underweight and they have no medical facilities to take care of them. So large numbers of

them will die or have died. There's no hospitals anymore. There's no hospitals. We know that Gaza is the capital of the world in terms of child mutilations. That is, they're more amputee children in Gaza per capita than any other place in the world, we know the vast numbers of children have no parents at all. They are alone. They've lost their entire families. So all of this is really destroying the ability of the group also to procreate, to maintain itself physically. So if you take it all together, what genocide can mean is that you do all of that to a population and then you've tried to remove it from its territory. You've destroyed not only their homes.

You've destroyed the schools, their universities, their museums, their hospitals, their archives. They can't reconstitute themselves, not physically, not educationally, and not their own identity and collective memory when you do that. So your goal, you may not succeed, but your goal is to destroy it as a group, so there may be living members of it who might live in South Sudan. negotiating with South Sudan or in Indonesia or in Libya or maybe in Canada, but there will no longer be members of that group. They will be alive, more or less as individuals, but without that group identity. And especially destroying the cultural life of the group, the destruction of

mosques, the destruction of archives, as you say, like the sort of mental, emotional, cultural, literary, all the other elements that make a group a group other than simply being alive on earth, those have also been destroyed. Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is what is typical of genocide. This is what Rafael Lemkin, who was this Jewish-Polish lawyer who started thinking about this type of crime in the 1930s, he was then thinking about the genocide of the Armenians

by the Ottoman Empire during World War I and he was saying we don't have a definition of this kind of crime that is an attempt to destroy the group as a group its whole identity, it's collective memory as you say, it's literature, it's religion, everything and its connection to a place because group identity is often also

a matter of where you are, right? Where your people are buried, where your mosques or churches or synagogues are and so forth. So he tried to come up with that definition. He eventually created the term genocide in 1944 and played a major role in the Genocide Convention, in the UN adopting the Genocide Convention in 1948. And it is, in that sense, very peculiar as a definition because it's about a collective thing. It's not simply crimes against individuals.

It's the attempt to destroy a group. And I should say that many genocides, that we recognize as genocides, have in many ways failed in that. Even the Holocaust, which did kill six million Jews and destroyed, as I said, a whole culture, a Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, Jews still live. There is a Jewish identity. There is a Jewish collective memory. The Nazis failed in completely destroying Jews as a people. people as a tradition, as a culture. But it's, of course, a genocide. And it was the biggest genocide of the modern era. The same with Armenians. There are Armenians. There is an Armenian

culture. But the destruction of the heartland of Armenian culture was successful in that sense. But it did not destroy Armenians as a people. And I'm afraid this is what Israel, under its very extreme right-wing government, is trying to do to the people. of Gaza. I mean, it's evident that that's what they're trying to do, especially because you often hear people apologizing or explaining this on that side, on the ones who are supporting the actions of Israel. They'll say, you hear the argument that there is no Palestinian identity or that there was no Palestinian identity before such and such a year that like the idea of a Palestinian group identity is false. And to me,

that sort of gives away the game. If you're arguing that the people don't exist, that is itself part of the genocide, right? Because you are saying, well, no, those cultural links don't exist. Therefore, you can blow up the library and the mosque and the hospital. To deny the existence of the group as part of making the attempt to make the group not exist. So imagine it's the year 2019. You've just gone to a minor league baseball game with some friends.

You enjoy the fresh air. the low-stakes ball game, and most of all, you enjoy that little bit where the guys in mascot condiment costumes run around the bases. Mustard even wins. That was your favorite. It's a perfect day. That is, until your friends go to pay you back for the tickets. Danielle, Tyrese, and Bethany each owe you $20, but they don't carry cash anymore.

The day ruined. The friendship's over. Mustard forgotten. It sends you off on a dark spiral that you're still stewing about six years later. A spiral that could have been so easily avoided. If I, I mean, you used cash app. Cash app is simply the best way to zap money straight to your friends. It's fast, it's safe, it's so quick to get started,

and there are zero extra hoops to jump through. Just sign up, and before you know it, you'll be seeing minor league baseball whenever you want without the threat of it ruining your friendship with Bethany. Call me, Bethany, I miss you. Cash app does more than you think when it comes to having your back and making sure your money stays your money.

If you direct deposit at least 300 bucks in paychecks each month and use the cash app card for purchases, you can unlock up to $200 in free overdraft coverage. If you overdraft unexpectedly, there are no hidden fees. Manage your money on your terms and take advantage of free overdraft coverage up to $200 on Cash App today. For a limited time only, new Cash App customers can use our exclusive code to earn some additional cash. For real, just download Cash App and use our exclusive referral code, Secure 10 in your program. file, send $5 to a friend within 14 days, and you'll get $10 dropped right into your account. Terms apply, that's money, that's Cash App. CashUp is a financial services

platform, not a bank, banking services provided by Cash Apps, bank partners, prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank member FDIC, instant discounts provided by Cash App, a Block Incorporated brand. Visit Cash.com slash legal slash podcast for full disclosures. Folks, how much of your personal data do you think is online? You know, it's scary to hear, but it's probably a lot more than you think. Our entire world is online, even if you think that your data is safe. And that means all kinds of your information, including email addresses, phone numbers, names of relatives. It all exists out there on the internet just waiting to be grabbed by anyone looking to exploit you. And that is why I simply have to recommend delete me.

I have been using the service for years before they ever advertised on this show. In fact, the reason they advertise on the show is because they heard me talk about how much I like it on a podcast. and then they reached out to say, hey, why don't we sponsor you if you like the product so much? Genuinely, I really believe in what these people do. Because did you know

that there are people out there who make a living just off of trading your personal info? They're called data brokers and they are serving up an all-you-can-eat buffet of names, addresses and other personal information

to anyone who is willing to cough up the cash. So if you want to take your name off the menu, you really need to check out, delete me. Their teams of experts diligently hunt down your personal info,

remove it from the internet and keep it, gone, keeping you and your loved ones safe from bad actors. As the world gets more and more wired, there has been an uptick in online harassment, identity theft, and even real-life stalking, all because of this easily accessible information. So why take the risk? You, your family, and your loved ones deserve to feel safe from this kind of invasion

of privacy. So check out Delete Me, not just for your security, but for your friends and family, too. You can get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to join DeleteMe.com slash Adam and use promo code Adam at checkout. That's join deleteme.com slash Adam promo code Adam. So apart from like moving, is there anything more stressful than looking for a car? I mean, which one do you pick? How do you know if it's right for you?

It's like staring into an infinite automotive hall of mirrors. Well, with car gurus, you can make the experience less circus funhouse and more just regular fun. Car gurus can lead you out of the maze of misleading prices and hidden fees so you can shop with confidence. You'll find real price analysis, vehicle history, and price drop alerts.

Car Gurus has over 4 million listings more than any other major online auto marketplace in the U.S., so you never have to worry about missing the best deals. When you're ready to buy, Car Gurus also connects you with trusted dealerships to ensure a transparent and hassle-free buying process. It's no wonder similar web estimated traffic data

shows Car Gurus is the number one most visited car shopping site. So buy or sell your next car today with car gurus at car gurus.com. Go to car gurus.com to make sure your big deal is the best deal. That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-S dot com, car gurus.com. You mentioned the Armenian genocide. I know that just from being around this sort of activism myself, there was a long, there's a long attempt to deny the existence of the Armenian genocide.

Here in the United States, we shy away from calling what Europeans in America or white Americans did to indigenous Americans, a genocide, even though as you're talking, I can't help but think about what was done in those years. So along with genocide always comes, it seems like, this attempt to deny the existence of the genocide, or to make it debatable. and that seems to happen less often with other crimes. So can you talk about that a little bit? Absolutely.

I mean, this is a very important point. You are totally right. So genocide is an attempt, of course, to destroy a group. But what is interesting about genocide is comes first with a denial of that group's existence prior to the genocide itself. a denial of the value, the reality of that reality of that very group, calling them savages, calling them cockroaches, calling them migrants, calling them anything that makes them less than human and less than like us. We know that we are a group, we have a culture, we have a history,

they do not. And that already makes it much easier to carry out genocide. So generally in genocide, certainly in modern genocides, the first sign for genocide is the dehumanization of the other group. You speak about that group in terms that remove it from this sort of a circle of human solidarity. They're not like us. They're different. That's a very important element. in genocide. Secondly, once you carry it out, part of what goes on, and you're totally right in that, it's both to eradicate that group and then to eradicate the memory that that group ever existed and to eradicate the case, the actual eradication itself, to say they never existed, we never did what we did, and if we did it, we are not going to remember it. There's

nothing there. And this, as I said, this was my experience when I was traveling in West Ukraine and there was no memory. Nobody knew that there was a group there, that there had been a group there for hundreds of years, no memory of them at all by the population that lived there, no memory of how they disappeared. What happened? And then, of course, nothing in the politics of memory of that country they're after. Now, so you're right in that sense that memory, not simply as speaking of memory and memory studies as a kind of fancy academic engagement, but rather as a politics of memory and is very much part of the attempt to eradicate the group, you also want to say that group never existed. If you read what Vladimir Putin was writing before the illegal invasion of Ukraine, what he was writing was, there is no such thing as the Ukrainian people.

They never existed. There is no such thing as a Ukrainian language. It's some kind of branch of Russian. They're basically Russians. They just don't get it. Yeah. So he was denying the very right of that. group to exist. And in Israel, of course, as you rightly say, this comes from Israel. And this goes

back to before 1948. This is really with the beginning of Zionism as Jews begin to come to Palestine. And they discover, well, actually in Palestine, there are people living here. It's not what Zionism said. The land without a people comes to a people. A people without a land comes to a land without a people. There were people there. So they said, well, okay, but they're Arabs. They are sort of primitive. They can live. Why do they have to live here? They can live in Egypt. They can live in Saudi Arabia. They came from there. Didn't they? They only recently arrived. So it's to delegitimize that group as a group and then say, but we of course have totally different rights. First of all, we are developed. We're European. We have better technology. We know how to

work the land. We know how to build buildings. And secondly, we have historical rights. We were there already in biblical times. And these people just come and go. And much of the right wing in Israel says to this day, look, I mean, the vast Arab countries around there, why do the Palestinians have to live in our tiny little country? Why don't they move to Jordan, to Syria, to Iraq? There's a lot of space there. That is a rhetoric that has been, now it's used by the right wing in Israel, but it was used already, I remember it for the 1960s, 70s by labor governments in Israel. Why don't they just move? So that is an attempt to say, this people doesn't exist, doesn't belong.

And anyway, if it wants to exist and belong, it can go elsewhere. It denies the existence of the people. Why don't they just move? They just came here recently. Look, if millions of people live in a place, you know, they are a people and they have a connection to the place. There's no way for people to live in those numbers in a place and not be a people. Of course, and look, I mean, the point of course is that Zionism was a new movement created in the 1880s that reimagined Jews as a nation, as a modern nation, and said that that modern nation needs to go back to its ancestral land.

And Palestinian and Arab nationalism, like all nationalism, is also a product of the 19th century. And by the early 20th century, Palestinian national identity is also developing. just as Jewish nationalized that this is developing, only that they clash with each other. And the result of this now is that you have a country between the Jordan and the sea in which you have seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians. They're equal numbers, but they don't have equal rights. The Jews have succeeded in self-determining, in passing a law of return, so that any Jew who wants to live in Israel can become a citizen,

and the Palestinians have no rights. Even the 2 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel hypothetically have the same rights, but in practice do not. And the 3 million who live in the West Bank and the 2 million in Gaza have no rights at all. They live under military rule. It's totally arbitrary. But they're there, and they're not going anywhere.

You have 14 million people living there. They have lived there for a long time, for long enough to say that this is their home. have had generations of people born there, and they have to find a way to live with each other because nobody's going anywhere unless you kill the other group. Yeah. You talked about how you had a realization about where you grew up, right? That this had happened in the past, and you hadn't, that history had been erased.

You hadn't seen it, and you later reflected on it. Could you speak a little bit more about that, about the history of Israel and Zionism and, yeah, just tell me more about that realization on your part? Well, I'll say two things. First of all, you know, I just finished the book that tries to talk about that. And I'd say Zionism begins in the 1880s as a movement of emancipation, of liberation, of appeal to humanitarianism, because the Jews are. a minority living in lands that increasingly don't want them there with the rise of ethno-nationalism there and the rise of anti-Semitism. And so in that sense, Zionism like other national movements of the time, but a national movement of a minority that is not wanted where it's living.

Once it comes, once Zionism starts to settle in Palestine, it also becomes a settler-colonial, movement because they speak openly about coming there and settling the land and creating colonies. That's the language that is used. And in that process, they start marginalizing and pushing out the indigenous population, the indigenous Palestinian population there. So that's a process that, of course, I started thinking about all that much later on, but that's a process where you have a transformation.

in what Zionism is. During the 1920s and 30s, as the Jewish population of Palestine grows, and that's at the time under the rule of Britain, right, this is a British mandatory territory, and the British promised the Zionists already 1917 in the Balfour Declaration to help the Jews create a national home in Palestine. So during that time, the Jews there are beginning to create the infrastructure for a future state. And they do that by, among other things, increasingly encroaching on Palestinian lands. At the same time, the Jews in Europe are under growing threat, and they have no place to go to, as we talked about ethnic cleansing. There's nobody who wants them in. The United States has very fierce immigration laws already from the early

1920s. They don't want Jews in America. They don't want Jews in Britain. This is after the Great Depression. There's unemployment everywhere. So the only place Jews can go to is to Palestine. So Zionism in that sense, during that period, has these two faces. One is to rescue the Jews, and the other is taking over Palestinian land. That changes in 1948, when the state is established, And within that struggle over that land, the Jews ethnically cleansed the vast majority of the Palestinians from what becomes the state of Israel. 750,000 Palestinians are removed. So I'm born into that. I was born in 1954.

What I know when I'm born are two great denials. One denial is the denial of the diaspora. We were supposed to be raised as Israeli. We are looking only forward. We were ashamed of our ancestors who lived in the diaspora, who were these Jewish people who wield and dealed. We were supposed to be rooted in the land and strong and able to defend ourselves. And we also despised the whole idea of all these Jewish masses

who went like sheep to the slaughter. This was a kind of education we got, So we had a denial of everything, of all of Jewish civilization. We connected ourselves directly to the Israelites. We were like Joshua's soldiers, not like our grandparents. You felt you were raised in an environment where the diaspora was denigrated. Absolutely. Absolutely, of course.

And the second denial was what had been there just before we were born. That is, there had been an Arab-Palestinian, civilization there that was wiped out. I grew up in North Tel Aviv and then in Ramatavir, which is where the University of Tel Aviv is now, and there were villages there. You could see, but the people were gone. We used to play cops and robbers in those abandoned villages, and nobody talked about it. There was abandoned cemeteries, abandoned mosques. And there was a complete denial of that, as if it never happened. And later, Eventually, neighborhoods were built over that.

The entire University of Tel Aviv is built over a Palestinian village or forest planted over villages, up to 500 villages were completely demolished and destroyed partly so that people could not come back to them, which is what Israel is doing in Gaza now. So this sort of coming to terms with that, both with my own, and I'm not the only one, but my own sort of Jewish origins, my origins in Europe, and coming to terms with what happened in Palestine just before I was born, which is a kind of repetition of that erasure

and the tragedy of it all, that the people displaced the Palestinians with Jews who had been displaced from Europe. That is something that took me a long time to begin to think through. I could not imagine that, Israel would do what he's doing now. I have to say that was, and that he would do it with such impunity, that it would be allowed to do it by the international community for so long that I

couldn't expect. But the dynamic was there, clearly, the dynamic of erasure was always there. Well, given that, I mean, you're making the case that Israel was a country that was founded on ethnic cleansing, like at its root to an extent, and that you expect. this. And so I'd like to come back to, you know, your earlier piece that you wrote in November of 2023, where you said, well, the leaders of Israel are making genocidal statements. Ah, but it might just be in the heat of the moment, right? You know, we just have to make sure it doesn't turn into a genocide. Knowing, I'm struck by the fact that you as a historian of genocide saw them making clearly genocidal statements and knew what you knew about, uh, what you

you know, the foundation of the country and the place that you had grown up. But you and so much of the rest of our political culture said, well, let's not maybe take them at their word about it. There were folks who were saying, hey, this is a genocide or it's going to be very soon. And we're saying that, you know, in late 2023. But why extend that sort of grace, given that the entire country, as you're making the case, sort of founded on the removal of the Palestinian people. And we had the statements from the leaders.

And then they did what they said they were going to do, right? Like they did go ahead and do it. It seems like one would take leaders like that at their word, especially given the rest of the context. And I wonder if I'm not saying this to cast aspersions on you. I'm asking to sort of elucidate like what is a little odd about our political culture that allows us to give so much grace to the leaders of the state of Israel. Oh, well, they probably don't really mean it. Well, why would we think they would mean anything else?

Right. So I'll say two things on that. One is about using the term genocide. The problem with the term genocide that a lot of people have spoken about, including scholars of genocide, is that once the term was coined, and, you know, Lemkin and others have quoted the, crime of crimes, this is the worst crime that you can imagine, then people will use it whenever they

see something terrible happening. They see an atrocity, they see a terrible war, and they say, well, this must be genocide. What else could it be? And if you say, well, I mean, right now we see war crimes, war crimes is not enough. Of course, war crimes is terrible. War crimes can lead to the killing of millions of people. But people say, no, no, no, it's genocide. This has to be genocide. And they don't care whether things conform, actions on the ground conform to genocide. I'll give you an example. The U.S. and Britain in World War II strategically bombed Germany. But that's a clean way of saying that they carpet bombed open cities. And they did it intentionally. And they killed about 600,000 civilians, often in fire bombings, horrible

death, right? You could have said at the time, had the word been around, I mean, this is genocide. I mean, you are killing children, babies, old people, just burning them to death. So was it or wasn't it? And I think a lot of people would have come up and said, yes, I mean, this is genocide. To me, you have to look within the context. And the context is that when the U.S. and Britain, occupied Germany, they won the war, they occupied Germany. What did the U.S. do? Did it continue killing Germans? No, it actually created the Marsha Fund. Now, we did it for its own reasons as well. It was afraid of the communists and so forth. But the U.S. contributed massively to the rebuilding of Germany. So by the 1950s, Germany had an economic miracle. And that was because

the policy for the United States was not to destroy the German people. The policy was to very brutally fight a war against the Nazi regime and to win it, which it did. So the difference between genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity actually is meaningful. And I was afraid immediately after October 7 that people, and some people did, immediately said, well, Israel carrying out genocide. Even before they began bombing, they said, this is genocide. And I did not want to participate in that because I wanted to be as cautious as I could to make sure that there's enough evidence to show that this is indeed genocide. And in Israel, and in the, certainly in the international media, people were speaking for both sides of their mouth.

So Netanyahu was saying to the Israeli public, remember Amalek, and was saying to the international community, we are not fighting the Garzans, we have nothing, we don't want to harm the civilians, we are only fighting Hamas. And this kind of rhetoric, as well as the official war goals, as they were declared by the state, were very different from those kinds of statements. Now, I didn't write that article to say it's not genocide. That was the kind of headline that the New York Times gave it for its own reasons. I wrote the article because I was afraid that he would become that. And I was hoping that it would stop.

And I have to say, had President Biden in November or December, 2023, told Natalia, you have to stop, and then Natalia would have stopped because Israel can't do any of what he does without massive American assistance on a daily basis since then until today. then we might have said this could have become a genocide but it didn't. There were war crimes there were crimes against humanity, there were

atrocities, but he did not become a genocide. But he didn't act and my goal in writing it was to warn and to say there is time, that's exactly what I wrote. It's better to warn against genocide before it happens than to lament it after it's already happened

and nobody did anything And to me, the main question is why? Why did the United States, Germany, France, Britain, why have they, until today, have allowed Israel to do something that many other countries have done, but not countries that were direct allies and dependents of these Western allies. That's the first time, the only time that I can think of,

after 1945, they're the same countries that swore that they, to never again, that they would maintain human rights and the rule of international law. These countries themselves are complicit of being facilitating the genocide that Israel is carrying out in Gaza. And it's not only the United States. The United States is, of course, the most important. It's also giving the diplomatic cover, as we said in the Security Council. But Germany is a major contributor. Yes. Israeli tank engines are made in Germany. You know, all these engines are German-made. The Israeli Navy is made in Germany. All these boats that are shelling Gaza are made in Germany.

And now the chancellor has said, we won't give them any more arms. It's so clear what he meant exactly, but that's after almost two years of this slaughter. Yeah. And the United States, of course, is still supplying weapons. Of course. And so why do you think it is? Do you have an answer to that question? Why are we still continuing to support it? So that's a complicated question. And I think it's a bit different when you speak about the United States and you speak about Europe. Let's talk about the United States because that's where I'm sitting right now. Yeah. I mean, I think in the United States, first of all, Israel has made itself over time a kind of strategic ally of the United States.

And for the United States to have a well-armed Israel in that region serves its own interests. And I think it does not want to give up on these interests, and it's willing to play along to an extent that I would not have imagined, by the way, with extremist Israeli policies. But it does see it as a strategic asset. And I think that American policymakers, both Democratic and Republican, have been entirely persuaded did that. Secondly, there is a very, Israel succeeded over a long period of time to embed itself in American technology, in American art manufacturing, in American finances. It has a huge amount of influence within the United States, not just as a country, but because it's so closely

woven with what you might call the American military industrial complex. It's very much part of it. And there's an interest by a lot of people who have power, who may not represent the majority of the electorate in America, but have a lot of power to maintain that. And these are, you know, these are cynical people. People who make bombs and rockets obviously don't think about humanitarians when they get up in the morning, they think about producing even more lethal weapons. So I think that's another element. There is something else, which is a kind of American Zionism, which is not

only within the Jewish community, where increasingly since the 1980s, more and more American Jews have started identifying themselves as Zionists without often articulating what that means. It's not like they're going to live in Israel, but they feel that the safety of Israel is part of their identity, and they're very, I'd say, sensitive about that, but also a vast evangelical electorate, far greater than the Jewish population of the United States, that is also pushing in that direction. So some of this has to do with internal American policies, and the combination of that, I think, has brought us to this point. I would say that this is, I think, I may be wrong, but I think this is the climax of it.

I think precisely because of what Israel has been allowed to get away with and the growing amount of information that is finally trickling in, the American electorate is changing its mind. All the polls are showing that. And that's not only among liberals. That would be completely wrong. You see that among MAGA supporters. I have seen it. Right? There are literal MAGA supporters, MAGA comedians.

I've seen pro-Trump comedians, right-wingers who are like, what the hell is happening in Gaza, you know, et cetera, and have a problem with it. Yeah, and I think, look, what happened in the United States in the early months after the war when there was a major protest movement on campuses, including my own. and I went to other places, the way to shut down these protests was by alleging that they were anti-Semitic. Yes. Now, obviously, they were not anti-Semitic. There are always some anti-Semots around

and there might have been some, but the vast majority had nothing to do with that. In fact, many of the protests were themselves Jewish. Yes. And the way, and this starts with the Biden administration, not with Trump, the way that anti-Semitism was instrumentalized and weaponized to shut down speech and to intimidate people and quite successfully intimidated students, faculty, and universities as such, I think is reflect or is going to produce a rise in actual anti-Semitism in this country,

not the kind of allegations of anti-Semitism, but real anti-Semitism, because the feeling will be that speech was being shut down because the Jews insisted on that, because it was serving Jewish interests, and there will be a kind of identification between the Jewish population of the United States and the state of Israel, which has always claimed to be the representative of Jews without ever asking them whether they agree with that or not. And that, to me, is another kind of symptom that you can see in parts of the American more radical right or neo-Nazi right or whatever it is, that there's always been this argument, why are we sending all our boys to die in these foreign wars? Why are we not taking care of our own

interests? Who is behind them? Who is pulling all those strings? Whose interests are we actually serving? And the argument now, unfortunately, can be, is the state of Israel who's doing that. They are taking all our money. They are dropping our bombs to kill other people. We are paying all the taxes for that. So to me, American politics is likely to change. I can't say that it will change necessarily in the kind of direction that I would like it to change because there are many other elements within American society that have nothing to do with this or, of course, at all, to the Middle East, but there will be emboldened by what you see happening now. So it's not a good, I don't have particularly positive predictions for what effect this

will have on the United States, but I do think that there will be far less support for Israel within a few years. You know, I'm not proud to say so, but I need constant stimulation or I get bored. Something to look at, a podcast to listen to, a little tasty treat here or there. I have a million ways to jangle the shiny keys of life in front of my face and to stay entertained and stimulated. But I can't always say the same thing for my dog. That's why I do everything I can to make sure my pup isn't bored. I mean, she's a cattle dog.

She needs a lot of stimulation, okay? And the number one place to do this is meal time, because that's when she perks up. I mean, would you want to eat the same thing every single day for every single meal? No, and neither does she. Nom Nom offers six unique recipes that keeps things endlessly interesting for my pooch, all while delivering real health and wellness benefits.

And their recipes are crafted by vet nutritionists so I feel good knowing this design with my dog's health and happiness in mind. Nam Nam has food that actually engages your dog's senses. That means textures, smells, ingredients that are meant to engage. And the recipes are bursting with premium proteins, vibrant veggies,

and tempting textures designed to add excitement to your dog's day. They got pork potluck, chicken cuisine, turkey fair, and beef mash, lamb pilaf, turkey and chicken cookout? That's so many incredible recipes. It has been so fantastic to see Nom Nom Add some extra excitement to my dog's life, and I think that you are going to say the same thing. So keep mealtime exciting with Nom Nom, available at your local pet smart store or at Chewy.

Learn more at trynom.com slash factually, spelled T-R-Y-N-O-M dot com slash factually. Folks, today I'm really privileged to tell you about a sponsor that's on a mission to help those most in need of immigration assistance. They're called Acacia Center for Justice. If you're a lawyer who feels called to fight to protect due process, Acacia's unaccompanied children program is your answer. Explore their nationwide provider map and find an organization near you to get involved at acaciajustice.org slash defend kids.

In this moment of heightened attacks on immigrant rights, children's rights are under threat too. It's hard to fathom, but sometimes children are forced to make the hard journey to the United States to seek safety all alone. Many even begin their journey with their parents only to be separated along the way. America's immigration system does not meet their courage with compassion. Instead, these kids are treated like criminals. They're not guaranteed legal representation, and many are forced to do the impossible to defend their own case in immigration. court, no matter how young they are. The Acacia Center for Justice builds, strengthens, and expands immigrant legal defense

programs across the country. Lawyers employed in the unaccompanied children program provide free representation to break this cycle of injustice. So if you're a lawyer who feels called to fight to protect due process, the unaccompanied children program is your answer. Unaccompanied kids need a lawyer like you. Explore their nationwide provider map and find an organization near you to get involved in your city at acaciajustice.

slash defend kids. That's A-C-A-C-I-A-Justus.org slash defend kids. But I take your point about, look, anti-Semitism is rising. But I take your point about the actions of Israel leading to more anti-Semitism, because if the defenders of the state of Israel will often say to object to the state of Israel is itself anti-Semitic that that Israel is identical with the Jewish people. And so if one actually accepts that premise, but then also disagrees with what the state of Israel is doing as horrified by it and but also accepts the premise that the state

of Israel as identified with the Jewish people, then that leads to anti-Semitic beliefs, right? Whereas if one can keep them separate and say, no, the Jewish people are one thing, the state of Israel is another thing, then you can criticize the state of Israel without being anti-Semitic. But it creates a perverse rise in anti-Semitism itself. And look, I don't have any positive predictions either for the outcome of a genocide. I don't think that there's any positive outcomes are likely. I do wonder, though, if in addition to the actions of the state of Israel itself causing

political support in the U.S., like the U.S. is itself to some degree a country that is also founded on genocide and the denial of it. You know, I live in Los Angeles. I wasn't raised here. I was raised in New York in New York, but, you know, the, you know, there was an indigenous group that lived on Long Island where I grew up. I grew up in a town called Wading River. The town was named that because that's the translation of the indigenous name of the town,

but that's all I ever knew, right, of the people who lived there. I was, like, similarly to your experience, grew up in a place that, had a previous civilization that had been erased. And I was barely taught that growing up. And now there's an active effort to teach that less to remove those teachings from our society. And so it's sort of built into America's political DNA to deny these things. And I'm struck by, you know, your piece in The New York Times was notable because many people feel, I think, correctly that the New York Times has not appropriately covered. the horror of what Israel is doing as being a moral calamity and disgusting thing.

But a couple days later, one of their in-house columnists rebutted your piece with a piece that said, no, in fact, Israel is not committing a genocide. And here's all the reasons it isn't. And this guy writes a column almost every week. His name is Brett Stevens. And he wrote that if Israel was really trying to commit a genocide, oh, they would have killed way more than 60,000 Gossans. They would have killed even more, which is, I'm a little bit curious.

A, what you make of that argument, but be this reflexive need we have to deny what's happening right in front of us. Like that seems to be a really huge part of what's going on here. Yeah, you know, I'd say first, as some people have said to me, the fact that the Newer Times published that particular piece by Brett Stevens seems to reflect that they, agreed with me because it was a really weak piece. It was just the argumentation was terrible. Now, Brett Stevens was, you may know, editor of the Jerusalem Post.

So he's this sort of strong supporter of Israel and right wing. So I don't know that he presents mainstream opinion in the United States and certainly not in the New York Times. That argument specifically, you know, in fact, Netanyahu was interviewed a few days ago on some podcasts, and I don't know why he's doing interviews on podcasts now, maybe mainstream channels don't want to take him anymore, I don't know. But he said there, look, if Israel wanted to carry out genocide, it could have done it in an afternoon. Okay?

So that's the logic here. The logic is if Israel killed only 60,000 of whom 19,000 are children, that doesn't make a genocide. It has to be more than that. So first of all, just on the moral and ethical level of this kind of argumentation, you just have to wonder where are these people coming? from? Do you have to wait for 500,000 people to be killed before you say it's a genocide? Or what sort of percentage of the population do you need to see actually dead?

There are many others, of course, like this morning I was talking with Benny Morris. I was a well-known Israeli historian. And, you know, so they say, well, how do you know it's 60,000? This is just the number that the Hamas supported health ministry in Gaza's giving. And when you say, look, actually, they give the names, unlike the IDF that just throws numbers around that are completely unreliable, they give only the numbers of those whose names they can identify. So, in fact, the numbers are much higher than that. There are at least 100,000, if not more.

There are an estimated 10,000 people buried under the rubble, probably much more than that already, because that's a figure that goes back about a year. So just to talk about these numbers in this way is both inaccurate and morally devastating. But beyond that, as we said before, you don't do genocide simply by killing a lot of people. You identify, is there an attempt by a state to destroy a group as a group? and all the evidence is, clearly now, you know, 20, the Palestinians in Gaza now live in 25% of the territory, and the IDF now actually quite unwillingly, at least by its chief of staff, is beginning an operation of moving a million people from Gaza City to the south.

So that's, now the Palestinians are in three parts of the Gaza's trip, which are only 25% of the territory, and they want to move them further south into a smaller territory. So you'll have 2 million people in something like 15% of the territory. And of course, all of this done is done with incredible violence. People don't just leave. You bomb them, you shell them, you don't give them any water, so that they have no choice but to leave. So this argument that it's not enough people that Israel has already killed is a very, very strange argument.

I don't think many people brought into that. But, you know, you hear that a lot in Israel. What you hear in Israel from many on mainstream media, on television, from talking heads,

but also from members of Knesset, from members of the Likud Party, from members of even more far-right parties, you hear them saying exactly that. We should kill far more of them. So the genocidal urge is definitely there. And I would say one thing that I found personally really hard to take, quite apart from just watching the images of what is going on in Gaza, and we don't get a lot. of it on mainstream American TV either, of course, is the fact that although now, I would

say the vast majority of the population in Israel wants this government to go and want the war to end, they don't want that because they care about what's happening to the Palestinians there. Poles show that most of the population wants, of the Jewish population in Israel, want the war to end and are fed up with this government and don't trust. Netanyahu, and most of that same population would like to see ethnic leasing of Gaza. There is no contradiction between the two. Wow. And that gives the lie to, you know, this sort of constant refrain you hear in U.S. liberal political circles that Netanyahu is the problem. He's the one doing it once we get him

out of there. He's an authoritarian. He's in mini-Trump. Get rid of him and things will be better. well, no, actually, if we had the slightly more liberal democratic government that a lot of Israelis want, it might be doing the exact same thing, because it's woven into, at this point, what, the very fabric of the state? Yeah, look, I mean, one main problem in Israel now, and that's a process that has gone on for decades. Everything has moved to the right in Israel. So the majority of the population is right-wing.

that means that the opposition is not able to present any alternative politics to that of Netanyahu's. And the reason that Netanyahu has become so unpopular is because he's terribly corrupt. It's totally clear. He's under corruption charges. He is responsible for the fiasco of October 7th. it was a result of his politics, of a long-term politics, of actually using Hamas as an asset of providing Hamas with money coming from Qatar. This was Netanyahu's policy. Wow.

He perceived, he spoke about Hamas as being an asset because if you have Hamas, then you can say, well, we can't talk with these people. So there's no point about speaking about negotiations with Palestinians. Luke was in charge. So he kept the Palestinian authority in the West Bank very weak, and it really served. as a kind of kvitzling government for Israel. They take care of internal order there and are paid for that

by Israel, but they have no power and they're very unpopular in the West Bank. And Hamas in Gaza, and you separate between the two. That's, of course, dividing rule, always works. So he spoke about it. Smoltaichu is even more right-wing

member of cabinet in 2015, made a speech in the Knesset. And he said, Hamas is an asset because Hamas is not recognized by the international community. They all say it's a terrorist organization. The Palestinian Authority, that's a problem because they're actually recognized by the international community, by the UN. So we want Hamas to be there. However, Hamas then attacked Israel, just broke out of the cage.

And so for Netanyahu, this is a fiasco, and he has never, never admitted any responsibility. He has wanted everybody else, the chief of staff and the head of intelligence, to admit responsibility and resign, but he has not. He has blocked establishing a state commission of inquiry on what happened on October 7th. So we cannot actually establish all the facts. No one knows exactly what happened on October 7th. How many cases of rape there were, how many Israelis were killed by the IDF itself. as part of the Honeybomb procedure.

None of that has come out because there has not been an inquiry, an independent inquiry. So the public just wants him to go. And of course, the most emotional aspects of this for most Israelis is that he clearly is not interested in releasing the hostages. There is a deal on the table now, for instance,

for 10 days, and the government has not even talked about it. Hamas agreed to the conditions provided by Israel and the United States. And the cabinet says, we don't have time to talk about it. And there are 20 people who are dying of hunger there. Hostages whose images

have been sent by Hamas and they look indeed like they're in a Nazi concentration camp. They've been starved. And the government is doing nothing. So he is detested by much of the public. But who and what will replace it?

It's not that somebody will come and say, okay, it is time now to change the paradigm. We have to talk now. We have killed. We have bombed. What have we accomplished? Nothing. We are only becoming a pariah state, which is what Israel is becoming around the world.

Israel can't even travel as tourists. If they speak Hebrew in places, they're being attacked. And I have to say I have a little bit of sympathy with that, because why should you be traveling and having fun in Greece? when you just a week earlier were soldier in Gaza. So there is no alternative policy being offered by the opposition, and because of that, and because the opposition can actually gain a majority in Israeli elections only through cooperation with the 20% Palestinian population of Israel.

20% of the population is Palestinian. If Palestinian parties, political parties, join in coalition with Jewish parties of the left, it's not really left, but the center, left of center, then they can topp of the right, but they won't do it. They will not go in coalition with the Arabs. And so because of that, Netanyahu is sort of gaining from the inability of anyone to have to be brave enough to provide an alternative policy. But even if someone did, the population still seeks ethnic cleansing on this broader,

or at least as sympathetic to it, on this broader level, the fact that Israel is becoming a pariah state is, to me, clear, in how they are trying to promote the narrative that nothing bad is happening. something that I've noticed, it has really jumped out. It happened yesterday. I was watching a YouTube video, and the ad before the video was an ad from the state of Israel saying there's no starvation in Gaza. And they were playing happy music over footage of, I don't know where the footage was taken,

but it's presumably Palestinians with skewers of kebabs and, you know, like big rice dishes and things like that. And everybody's happy and having a good time over this upbeat music. And that as a strategy of promotion to me was, A, ghoulish, but B, who could believe this? Who could believe that if a country has to put ads on YouTube saying, we are not starving these people, look at how much food they have. We all know that advertising is a lie on some level. You know, we all, you know, you believe it a little bit.

Oh, okay, the new iPhone looks pretty good. but, okay, Apple's only telling me this to convince me of something. We know that that's what advertising is for. If a country is paying to tell me they're not committing a genocide, makes it seem more like they are. It's a bizarre state of affairs. And for this to happen in a state that the ostensible reason of its founding was in response to a genocide against its people is, you know, you said the most, one of the most remarkable

things about this is that all the Western countries that said never again are supporting it militarily, militarily, are, we in the United States are contributing weapons to this genocide that are being used to bomb people and kill people and, and try to destroy the group. It's also being perpetrated by the state of Israel, which itself was founded in response to a genocide. That is such a bizarre historical fact, it sounds like science fiction that that could happen or some sort of bizarre historical fiction. And it's clearly such an immense tragedy that the world has come to this. How do you metabolize it emotionally? How does it make you feel to know that this is happening? Yeah, look, I mean, I should say,

I'm, as somebody who's spent most of his career studying war crimes, genocide, the Holocaust, I sort of trained myself to think rationally and to have a degree of detachment. And so I try not to begin with my emotions, but to, think from a distance. And if you think about it as a historian, if you think about it as someone who lived through much of this period, who was born into a very, very different state, I was surrounded by Holocaust survivors in my childhood, you know. To think that that state, that as you say, in 1948, two things happened. One was the Genocide Convention, which was agreed on by the UN as the response to Nazi crimes.

That's why the international community of the time could come to a consensus on such a convention. And the second thing that happened was the recognition of the state of Israel, which again was seen by the international community at the time as the only just response to the Holocaust, that the Jews were a minority, had been slaughtered all around Europe, and that it was time for them to have a state of their own, that they would have their own government and their own police and their own army, and they would be able to protect themselves. And that had there been a state, maybe before the Holocaust,

maybe more Jews could have come there and it would not have happened. So it was a kind of atonement. And to think that that state, that yes, then based its whole, moral agenda on the fact that it was the response to the Holocaust, that that state, less than eight decades later, would itself be engaged in genocide, is just, it's impossible to square that circle. I think the responses of many Israelis and many Jews around the world, and also, by the way, many Germans, and I'm in touch with a lot of Germans.

people just refuse to accept it. It's not the same denial that we talked about before. I mean, they know, but they just cannot bring themselves to say that because people think genocide, that's the Holocaust. And how can you say that Israel is carrying out the genocide? Then look, I'll say over the years, and I've seen that, there has been an attempt to Nazify your hands. enemies. So the Israelis now say, Hamas are Nazis. And that gives us licenses to do anything. And that's

how they are called on the Israeli media, Hamas Nazis. And many enemies of Israel, not all enemies of Israel are good people, have always wanted to say, well, the Jews are the new Nazis of the Middle East. So always to make this analogy which is never correct. It never works. The Nazis always win out when you make these comparisons. They were actually worse than anybody else. But now we have reached a point where you can actually say, it's not that Israel is carrying out the Holocaust. It's not the Holocaust.

There's no extermination camps. There's no shooting pits. It's carrying out a genocide. And to think that that state would be doing that is morally impossible to put into words. I can write it, I can argue it, but on some level, it's impossible. I mean, I think about my father who died, who was an old Zionist, and died in 2016 when he was 90. For him to see something like this, he was a soldier in World War II in the Jewish Brigade.

His most Syrian encounter was with the survivors of the Holocaust. as a soldier in the British army with the shoulder tag with the Star of David. For him to think that that would be the end of that process, he already, in his last year, spoke about Netanyahu as the wrecker of Zionism, as the greatest record of Zionism. So something has happened in the country that has distorted the... The whole project, which was, yes, was a problematic project, was like all projects, as you said, the United States, or Australia, or Canada, or New Zealand, or South Africa, they all, you know, and you can look at European countries too. They always have many sins in their past, right? They were always also based on all kinds of crimes.

But they have other things to them as well. They're not only about that. They created culture, they created something that was good for their own people as well. And mind you, all human civilization is based on that. There was always ethnic cleansing and always genocide, and yet there was also always something else, which is what we love about humanity, right? Yes. To think that in Israel, Zionism, which had all kinds of other aspects to it too, has become

this sort of racist, Jewish supremacist, genocidal ideology is, yes, I mean, I can't associate myself with that anymore at all. And it is like breaking with part of who you were once. My heart breaks, as you say that. It's incredibly sad. And I think part of the tragedy is one would have hoped that a people who had suffered genocide would be the people who would never commit genocide again. And I don't want to say it's the same people because there's generations apart. But I think that was part of the hope, right? That we would all learn. And at the very least, the very people would learn about how to stop genocide. As you say, sometimes it seems that ethnic cleansing and genocide are simply part of the human story, that one group of people

say, we want this land. Oh, there's people living there? No, there aren't. We'll move them off and say they don't exist and cause them to not exist. It happened on the continent in which I live. It's happened many times throughout history. How do we put an end to it as a society? Is there a way to disrupt this pattern and this recurrence? And to sort of end us here, What do you think is incumbent upon us as citizens of a country that is helping to perpetrate this genocide still today? So look, this is the main issue because after 1945, there was an attempt to create a mechanism that would make it less likely for such crimes as those that were carried out by the Nazis to recur. And a whole system was put into place, a series of laws and conventions and courts and international agreements to prevent that. Now, did they prevent it?

No, of course, there were many genocides between 1945 and today. But a system was put into place and there were attempts. We can say that after the fall of communism, because during the Cold War, of course, there were other dynamics in international politics. But after the Cold War, yes, there were two generals. But also, there were two international tribunals that actually found people guilty and brought them to court and punished them. So something, there was an attempt to do that, and it's an ongoing attempt, and it's filled with holes and compromises, and it often fails, but there was a recognition of the need to do that. We are now at a point where this whole edifice may be crumbling, in part because of the two wars that are happening right now, both the one in Gaza, which is, it's not really a war, but the genocide in Gaza, and what's going on with Russia and Ukraine, with the Russia invasion of Ukraine. These two events are threatening to destroy the post-World War II international order.

And what will replace it? What will replace it will be something that Trump has spoken on about, and he seems to want to have it, would be a kind of politics, 19th century politics, where the great powers get together and decide what will be the fate of the smaller powers. Russia and the U.S. can get together and say, well, you have this part of Ukraine, I have this part of Ukraine. What are the Ukrainians going to do about it? We decide. That was the kind of order that brought about the destruction of the first part of the 20th century of the two world wars. And that was what this new edifice of international law and agreements in the UN tried to prevent. So can we stop this process? We still live in democracy.

And the way to stop it is for people to stand up and to do something about it and to realize, first of all, to inform themselves, because one of the major problems with democracy is if people are not informed, you can easily fool them to inform themselves and to act against it, to act to understand that if this international order collapses, although it appears like it's going to do with Ukraine and Gaza, why would I care if I live in Minnesota? It will come back to you. This will create chaos in the world, and that's chaos in the world will mean that economies will collapse, that wars will intensify, that the kind of chaos that we saw in the first half of the 20th century will repeat itself. And so people have to actually stand up. up and fight for something that appears initially not to concern them very much, apart from feeling sorry for all those victims. It is not only about that. It is also about their own safety

and to make sure that governments are bound within this kind of network that however weak and problematic it is, is much, much better than the alternative. Well, I hope that we're able to build that network again. even in the face of the destruction of the old one, which was of limited use in the first place. But, I mean, all we can do, I return back to one of my core beliefs, which is all we can do in the face of this backslide

is how it feels is wake up and try to build a better tomorrow every day and call out what is happening and do what we can to stop it and prevent it from happening again. I can't thank you enough, Omer, for coming on. and educating me and educating us on this, I think that you're such an important figure in convincing those who wanted to withhold judgment, right? There were those who felt that they knew what was happening immediately, and there were those who said, I want to wait and see.

And I really felt that your op-ed was such a bellwether and such a moment that those who were maybe coming to it a little bit late, right? It's becoming unignorable. And I think that's such an important role for you to play. And I'm just really grateful for you spending so much time with me today and sharing your experience and your perspective and your expertise. Where can people find your work on this subject? You said you have a book. Is that out or are you working on it now? I just did the proof.

So it will be out in April. Wow. Okay. We'll look for it in six to eight months. In the meantime, I hope folks go and check out your op-ed in the New York Times from July. Is there anywhere else you'd like to direct them? Well, they can look at a book of mine that came out in 2022 just before October 7th. And it's called Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel, Palestine.

And that's easily found on Amazon or wherever they look for books. Omer, thank you so much for coming on. I can't thank you enough. Thank you very much for having me. Well, thank you once again to Omer Bartov for coming on the show. I hope you got as much out of that conversation as I did. I learned a lot and it really made it impossible to look away from what's happening. If you're interested in his book, we'll throw up a link to it at our special bookshop,

factuallypod.com slash books. Of course, when you buy a book there, supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly and all the episodes we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Once again, we're reading Rashid Khalidis the 100 Years War on Palestine in our book club right now. We're, I believe the book club is meeting

in late September. If you'd like to come chat with us about that, we have a wonderful reading group of folks who read books and discuss them together. We also have a Discord. We'd love for you to join. If you chip in 15 bucks a month,

I'll read your name in the credits. This week I want to thank Nick Wagner, Callin, hey, look at distraction, Uber Elder and Avaro Egg Burger. Let me go down to another spot of the list. Just read out some random names here. Lacey Tigenoff, David Kahnover, that's my dad.

Thanks for your support, dad. Margie, Andrew Corlis, Tompacon, Paul Malk. We thank all of you for supporting the show. Patreon.com slash Adam Conover, if you'd like to join them. Of course, if you want to come see me on the road, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Oklahoma,

Braya, California, Los Angeles, Tacoma, Washington, Spokane, Washington, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, D.C., oh, New York City on November 15th at the Bell House. Got a bunch of other shows coming up. I'd love to see at, head to Adamconover.com. dot net for all those tickets to tour dates.

I want to thank my producer, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson. Everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HitGum podcast. Hi, I'm Alana Hope Levinson. And I'm Dan O'Sullivan. And this is The Outfit, the new podcast from Higher Ground and HeadGum. We're two journalists who are slightly obsessed with the

mob and organized crime and other nefarious stuff like that. Every week, we're going to bring you a story about a mobster. Some you've heard of. Some you definitely haven't. But all of them are going to help explain why America is like this. See, the mob explains all sorts of things, from milk expiration dates to why we got into Cuba, to Las Vegas. Gay bars.

Who knew? Who knew? The mobs involved. All that and more. Subscribe to the outfit wherever you get your podcasts and watch video episodes on YouTube, New episodes every Thursday What's up everybody? I'm Kyle Mooney

And what's up everybody? I'm Beck Bennett And man, ooh, we got something to tell you. Yeah, we definitely do. Yes, it's a brand new podcast on HeadGum. That's right. And it's called What's Our Podcast? Yep.

And that's because we don't have a single idea what our podcast she'd be about. Yeah, we don't. So we actually have guests come on and they tell us what they think our podcast should be about and then we try it. Yep. Guests like Mark Marin, Jack Black, Brittany Brosky, Caper Lan, Bobby Moynihan,

Megstallter, and Tim Balls, Landon Axler, Corey, Joni McGreeze, and Dender. And Dender. New episodes release every Wednesday, so subscribe to what's our podcast. On YouTube, or any of your favorite podcast platforms. Yeah. I'm gonna go do it right now. I'm Tignotaro. I'm May Martin.

And I'm Fortune Feimster. And together, we're handsome. What is handsome? Well, it's a state of mind. It's how you feel. It's whatever you want it to be. Handsome is also a podcast hosted by us. Three stand-up comedians you may have seen on your TV.

We swap stories, share life updates, and occasionally laugh until we cry. Every episode, we answer a question from a celebrity friend. People like Sarah Silverman. It's Stephen Colbert. It's Reese Spoon. My name is Mindy Kaling. Hello, handsome podcast. It's Jen Aniston here.

You gorgeous, devil you. So if you're looking for a positive, joyful show guaranteed to make you giggle, check out Hansom. Jump right in with whatever episode tiggles your fancy, or start from the very first episode. Listen to Hansom on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. And don't forget. Keep it Hansom.