Fathom just published a shorter version of the article I post below. At the time it accepted the piece it dropped some of the specific criticism of Omer Bartov given how long ago his piece was published. But since then, Bartov has redoubled his perverse analysis. As a result, I include the original essay, before it got cut by the editors at Fathom. The Fathom essay has been translated into Polish by Malgorzata Koraszewska.
Bartov and the Wrong Genocide: A Millennial Analysis
In a highly controversial piece in the NYT, Israeli historian and professor at Brown University, Omer Bartov expressed alarm at the inflammatory remarks by Israeli leaders after 7/10 that, to him at least, suggested both genocidal intent and even actions. Many have criticized Bartov for focusing exclusively on angry Israeli reactions to 7/10 and not mentioning the consistent record of openly genocidal statements uttered by Israel’s neighbors for now three generations.[1]
To overlook this other, genocidal, explicitly antisemitic, discourse grossly misreads the available historical record. This genocidal discourse, of which Hamas is the current reigning activist, belongs to a distinct category of millennial movements: active cataclysmic apocalyptic. The “true believers” consider themselves the (divine) agents of the massive destruction that clears the way for the coming millennium: Destroying the world to save it. This genocidal discourse is found in other such movements that focus on an arch-enemy (Antichrist, Dajjal), with their attendant violent paranoia, scapegoating, projection, and cult of death).
The greatest overlap of millennial details appears when comparing the apocalyptic narratives of Hamas in the 2020s and the Nazis in the 1930s.
- Both seek world conquest and the subjection of the “other” – for Nazis non-Aryans, for Jihadis, infidels.
- Both view the apocalyptic scenario leading to collective redemption as calling for cataclysmic destruction and consider themselves the agents of that destruction.
- Both target the Jews as especially dangerous enemies of their project who must be exterminated in order for it to reach fulfillment.
- Both project onto the Jews their own unavowable desires and accuse them of world conquest and genocide.
- Both embrace a cult of death which, if empowered, can bring about megadeath on the scale of tens and hundreds of millions.
Aside from the observation that one was allegedly anti-religious and racist, and the other is zealously religious and theocratic, the movements are remarkably similar.
Herf and Goda, two of Bartov’s earliest critics, make a key historical point in this context of his ignoring the more serious source of genocidal discourse and intent at play in the land twixt river and sea.
As it happens, there is an interesting and challenging connection between the current Gaza war and Nazi Germany, but it is not the one Bartov proposes. It concerns the relationship between a terrorist dictatorship and the population over which it rules. Historians have long debated why Germans fought to the bitter end of the war, why the army never overthrew Hitler, and why there was no popular revolt against the Nazi regime. The famous term Volksgemeinschaft or “people’s community” captures the mixture of terror on one hand and popular consensus on the other that allowed Hitler’s regime to survive. The relationship between the Hamas dictatorship and ordinary Gazans raises similar questions. After 17 years of Jew-hatred preached from Gaza’s mosques, taught in its schools, and beamed into its television sets, is it any wonder that so many civilians in Gaza seem to support Hamas?
For example, rather than ignore such a parallel, one might imagine that an historian (a fortiori an historian of the Holocaust) would explore the kind of electric enthusiasm that Hamas’ deeds inspired in some in the West. What comparisons can one make between Hitler’s mesmerizing power to enthuse the German Volk, and the kind of excitement Hamas’ savage assault inspired. Professor at Cornell University and Black Lives Matter spokesman, Russell Rickford,exclaimed at a rally supporting the Palestinians: “It was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing! I was exhilarated!” And that exhilaration comes from his identifying his “revolutionary” desire to “challenge the monopoly on violence” with Jihadi savagery.
Could there not be a potential path here whereby this kind of excited sympathy for people rejoicing in their slaughter of human beings, might lead to the kinds of mass enthusiasms the Nazis so ably choreographed? Bartov finds such a line of inquiry both incorrect and racist. Along with fellow “holocaust scholars,” he rejects even the very suggestion.
Israeli leaders and others are using the Holocaust framing to portray Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza as a battle for civilization in the face of barbarism, thereby promoting racist narratives about Palestinians.
This is post-colonial rhetoric at its most threadbare. The perspective he formulates in the least attractive way possible, has nothing to do with real racism since all the players involved embody not race but ideological and cultural phenomena. Calling it by the inflated term “racist” impoverishes the historical debate and crams our vision into 75-year old struggle for Palestinian rights, not an 85-year old marriage of Nazi and Palestinian Muslim eliminationist antisemitism. If such accusations carry weight, we cannot discuss the role of Hamas since 1988 in carrying that millennial aspiration into an active apocalyptic phase, where the first aspiration is to kill a Jew.
In what historical seminar studying movements such as these, say, of the Annales school, would someone analyze a case where two such unusually dangerous movements appear two generations apart, and share such striking similarities, without discussing the many connections and parallels? Who would begin an historical reconstruction of the later movement in the three years after the defeat of their predecessors and allies in 1945, and begin with (their own failure in) 1948 when Israel deprived Palestinians of their rights, rather than the late 1930s, when Jihadis and Nazis first joined forces? What historian of mentalités would discuss the rise of multiple, genocidal Jihadi cults in the Muslim world in the subsequent generations, without examining their relationship to the double genocidal failures of the 1940s? Not any seminar I or Omer attended back in the years before Orientalism took over.
If “civilization” arises from the organizational treasuring of life, then is this conflict not a civilizational battle with a death cult, which even Muslims find alarming? And is that cult not showing alarming strength? There are historical cases when an active cataclysmic apocalyptic movement “took” inside a given civilization. And none have happy endings.
And just as it is appropriate to see the two world wars of the 20th century as one “thirty-year’s war” with a brief respite, how much the more likely, in the perspective of an historian, is it to see this battle over the land twixt river and sea as the only, still active, battle front of World War II? Or, worse, the opening of the next round of a global struggle with totalitarian cults of hatred and death that is, apparently, far from over.
Back in the 1990s, when people began to warn about Caliphators (Jihadis, Islamists), about a religious war brewing between the agnostic West and the zealous Middle East, most of us who heard that these true believers were fighting to take over the world and create a global Caliphate, dismissed it as ludicrous fantasy, or, especially after 9-11, dangerous “Islamophobia.” And the only way a millennial historian could respond to that incredulity was to point out that in millennial movements, wrong does not mean inconsequential. Look at the damage done by twelve years of the Tausendjährige Reich.
Now, a generation later the landscape looks more menacing. While we slept…
One of the key moments in the history of all movements that, as millennial analyst Henri Desroche put it, “take” like a forest fire, is the moment they show their real face in public. In most cases, the public gaze repels them and their radical, impossible ideas, sometimes violently. But in the rare and famous cases where “going public” sparks excitement and enthusiasm, the movement gains public authority and a path to taking and exploiting power.
7/10 was the day of revelation. Faced with the savagery of their brethren, the civil-society, human rights Palestinian community cheered. And they were joined by people who, in principle, supported them according to their progressive claims. What is the meaning of these demonstrations on our campuses and around the country. Are those who call BDS a cult, correct? Is this a new religious movement? It was certainly clear to Eric Hoffer in the 1950s that “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”
These celebrations of savage sadism, with their attendant cries of “revolution” and accusations of “genocide,” bode ill for the liberal societies in which they appear. They hail a death cult.
One would think that was bad enough… that there was no need, like Freud claiming the Jews killed Moses as the Nazis held their rallies, for Bartov and his Jewish colleagues, to give their imprimatur to the grand projection of the Jihadis: the Jews are committing genocide!” And then turn around and forbid us our “racist” discussion of Jihadi hopes and dreams. I can only hope historians of the next generations will understand and teach how Bartov’s essay, far from contributing an historian’s perspective, confounded our understanding with its ahistorical and misguided attempt to contribute to (a disastrous) history.
[1] Responses, Amnon Lord, “The Great Failure of the Holocaust researchers,” Israel Hayom, November 20, 2023; Jeffrey Herf and Norman Gona, “Holocaust Historians, the Genocide Charge, and Gaza,” Quillette, November 23, 2023; Dina Porat, “Charging Israel with Genocide in Gaza is Inflammatory and Dangerous,” Haaretz, November 28, 2023; Ingo Elbe, “Missbrauch der Holocausterinnerung? – Eine Kritik an Omer Bartov und anderen,” MenaWatch, November 28, 2023.
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