Understanding genocide not as history, but as a warning
By examining the fragmented memories of Eastern Europe, the brutal machinery of the Wehrmacht, and the quiet complicity of neighbors, historian Omer Bartov has spent much of his life exploring how genocide happens. His work is not an abstract academic exercise. It is a direct confrontation with how ordinary societies descend into atrocity, how ideology becomes action, and how violence embeds itself in the intimate spaces of towns, families, and friendships.
What Bartov teaches us is that genocide is not an event. It is a process. And it begins long before the first shot is fired.
The Making of a Scholar
Omer Bartov was born in Israel in 1954 and served as a soldier in the Yom Kippur War. That experience, coupled with his academic training at Tel Aviv University and Oxford, helped shape a career focused on the inner workings of state violence. His early scholarship, particularly The Eastern Front, 1941–1945 and Hitler’s Army, exposed how the Nazi military waged a war of annihilation not only through its leadership but through the participation of ordinary soldiers.
Later, Bartov’s attention turned from battlefield history to the lived experience of civilians in Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. In this microhistory of a small town in what is now Ukraine, he peeled away the notion that genocide is imposed solely from above. Instead, he showed how neighbors, driven by fear, opportunism, and propaganda, became killers. It was not the faceless bureaucrat but the man across the street who turned on the Jewish population.
This shift from state-level analysis to local memory reframed genocide as something disturbingly intimate. That insight is crucial if we want to prevent such horrors from recurring.
Genocide Is a Process, Not an Event
One of Bartov’s enduring contributions is the insistence that genocide does not erupt from nothing. It unfolds in stages, often cloaked in the language of national security, justice, or progress.
Genocide begins with dehumanization. It is heard in rhetoric that reduces people to animals, insects, or diseases. It advances through legal and bureaucratic structures that isolate, impoverish, and displace communities. And it culminates in violence that is made to appear necessary or even moral.
In his recent book Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (Yale University Press, 2023), Bartov examines the parallels between past and present not to equate them simplistically, but to highlight how the warning signs often go unheeded. Genocide does not announce itself. It emerges through small escalations that, in hindsight, seem like inevitabilities.
The Role of Language and Rhetoric
Bartov has long emphasized the role of language in normalizing violence. In interviews and editorials, he points to the danger of metaphors like “human animals,” a phrase used by Israeli officials to describe Palestinians during recent military campaigns in Gaza.
Such rhetoric, he argues, is not merely offensive. It primes a population to accept or ignore the suffering of others. When people are no longer seen as human, their deaths no longer appear tragic. They become tactical. Collateral. Justified.
In July 2025, Bartov published a New York Times guest essay titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” in which he assessed Israel’s ongoing operations in Gaza. He wrote that what began as retaliation had transformed into systematic violence. The aim, he warned, appeared no longer to be military victory but the destruction of a people’s ability to live in dignity—or to live at all.
This was not a statement made lightly. It followed months of cautious language, public debate, and careful examination of state policy, media coverage, and leadership speeches. Bartov’s conclusion reflected his lifetime of study, and it divided the academic community.
Confronting the Present Without Denying the Past
Bartov is no stranger to criticism. Some accuse him of drawing inappropriate analogies between the Holocaust and modern conflicts. But Bartov rejects the idea that acknowledging one genocide requires diminishing another. To the contrary, his argument is that the legacy of the Holocaust should serve as a lens through which we examine all mass violence—not as a singular, untouchable event, but as a warning.
This principle underlies his critique of contemporary Israeli policies. As a Jewish scholar and an Israeli-born historian, Bartov argues that genocide prevention must apply universally. No state, no people, no ideology is exempt from moral scrutiny.
In The New Yorker and Democracy Now, he has emphasized that criticizing the policies of a government is not antisemitic. In fact, he believes that genuine memory of the Holocaust demands that we speak out against violence wherever it occurs, especially when it echoes the early stages of genocidal intent.
Why the Lessons Are So Often Ignored
Despite decades of research, countless public warnings, and education campaigns, genocide continues to occur. From Rwanda and Bosnia to Myanmar and now Gaza, the world has struggled to translate memory into action.
Bartov suggests that this is partly because we still see genocide as the work of madmen or monsters. That vision is comforting. It allows us to believe that we would never participate, never look away, never justify.
But history says otherwise. Genocide is a social phenomenon. It happens when institutions collapse, when fear overrides empathy, and when political goals become more important than human lives. It happens when we are silent.
Education Is Not Enough
Education about the Holocaust and other genocides has expanded in recent decades, but Bartov warns that knowledge alone does not inoculate us. What matters is how that knowledge is used.
If we treat genocide as a relic of history, we miss its relevance. If we teach about the Holocaust but ignore other atrocities, we create a hierarchy of suffering that leaves some lives unprotected.
Bartov’s approach demands a more honest reckoning. It requires us to see the humanity of all victims, to challenge dehumanizing narratives, and to understand how easily the machinery of violence can be set in motion.
A Historian’s Call to Action
Omer Bartov does not write from a place of rage or political posturing. He writes as someone who has spent his life studying how societies destroy themselves from within. His call is not for vengeance or ideology, but for vigilance.
The lessons of genocide are not theoretical. They are urgent. They tell us that violence begins with language, that policy becomes fate, and that no one is immune.
To prevent genocide, we must stop thinking of it as history. We must see it as a mirror, one that reflects not only the crimes of the past, but the choices we face today.
Sources:
- Bartov, Omer. Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. Simon & Schuster, 2018
- Bartov, Omer. Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine. Yale University Press, 2023
- Bartov, Omer. “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” New York Times, July 2025
- Democracy Now!, interview with Omer Bartov, July 17, 2025
- The Guardian, “Defining genocide: how a rift over Gaza sparked a crisis among scholars”, Dec. 20, 2024
- The New Yorker, “A Holocaust Scholar Meets with Israeli Reservists”, August 2024
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