Omer Bartov on Gaza — a genocide scholar's changed assessment
Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, explaining when and why he revised his initial assessment of the Gaza campaign and concluded that Israel's conduct constitutes genocide.
Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and a former soldier in the Israeli army. He did not regard the Gaza campaign as genocidal at its outset, and the record of his changed assessment is the reason his position is frequently cited: it documents a scholar moving under evidence rather than beginning from a conclusion.
Speaking on 17 July 2025, two days after publishing an essay on the question in The New York Times, Bartov described the point at which his view changed: “by May of 2024, it became apparent that these statements were not only made in the heat of the moment following the massacre by Hamas, but were actually being implemented.” The “statements” are the public declarations of Israeli officials from October 2023 onward — the same body of material the ICJ examined in January 2024 and the UN Commission of Inquiry analysed in September 2025. What altered his assessment was not new rhetoric but the correspondence between the rhetoric and the conduct.
On the substance of the finding, he described what he understood the campaign to be effecting: “Israel is trying to concentrate the population of Gaza in the southernmost parts of the strip, to enclose them and to enforce, eventually, either that they would just die out there or that they would be removed from the Gaza Strip altogether.” Bartov also published a scholarly treatment of the question, “Israel’s war in Gaza and the question of genocide,” in 2025.
Why it matters
- A leading Holocaust and genocide scholar whose position changed publicly, with the reasoning and the timing on the record.
- His pivot is evidentiary and dated: statements plus their implementation, from May 2024.
- Together with Raz Segal and Amos Goldberg, he marks the range of assessment within the field — including on when the threshold was crossed.
Key resources
Cited work
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“Omer Bartov on Gaza — a genocide scholar's changed assessment.” Research Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/research/omer-bartov-genocide-scholar.- MLA
“Omer Bartov on Gaza — a genocide scholar's changed assessment.” Research Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/research/omer-bartov-genocide-scholar. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-omer-bartov-genocide-scholar, title = {Omer Bartov on Gaza — a genocide scholar's changed assessment}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/research/omer-bartov-genocide-scholar}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }