Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis

by Omer Bartov

This book discusses some of the most urgent current debates over the study, commemoration, and politicization of the Holocaust through key critical perspectives. Omer Bartov adeptly assesses the tensions between Holocaust and genocide studies, which have repeatedly both enriched and clashed with each other, whilst convincingly arguing for the importance of local history and individual testimony in grasping the nature of mass murder. He goes on to critically examine how legal discourse has served to both uncover and deny individual and national complicity. Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine outlines how first-person histories provide a better understanding of events otherwise perceived as inexplicable and, lastly, draws on the author's own personal trajectory to consider links between the fate of Jews in World War II and the plight of Palestinians during and in the aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel.

Bartov demonstrates that these five perspectives, rarely if ever previously discussed in a single book, are inextricably linked, and shed much light on each other. Thus the Holocaust and other genocides must be seen as related catastrophes in the modern era; understanding such vast human tragedies necessitates scrutinizing them on the local and personal scale; this in turn calls for historical empathy, accomplished via personal-biographical introspection; and true, open-minded, and rigorous introspection, without which historical understanding tends toward obfuscation, brings to light uncomfortable yet clarifying connections, such as that between the Holocaust and the Nakba, the mass flight and expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

Published August 10, 2023

About the author

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-born historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a noted historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of genocide.

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The genocide of the Jews was part of a vast plan to entirely alter the democratic structure of Eastern Europe by ethnically cleansing its mostly Slav populations and resettling it with ethnic Germans. The plan could not be implemented because of Germany’s inability to win the war against the Soviet Union, and the only part of it that was carried out was the extermination of the Jews. (p.16)”.

Half of those murdered in the final solution did NOT die in extermination camps, but “in their own homes and streets, cemeteries and synagogues, in nearby hills, forests and ravines.” “The murderers often knew their victims by name and saw them face-to-face just before they shot them …[they were] often people they had known for years as classmates, colleagues and neighbors.” Townspeople made profits from this “butchery” - “there was a shop in the city where the clothes of the murdered were sold cheaply.”

Instead of seeing the Holocaust as clinical industrial murder, picture how “hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Jews, the majority of whom were children, women, the sick, and the elderly, were murdered in full view of the populations in whose midst they had lived: in Poland (see Jan Gross’s book Neighbors), the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, and Western Russia.” Poland criminalized the assertion that Poles were in any way complicit in Nazi crimes (proven Polish collaboration in the Holocaust like in Jan Gross’s Neighbors) – memory laws passed by countries as a tool of forgetting. We also have this erasure in the US where we have the Vietnam War Memorial in DC which honors the death of every American who fought in just one of our many illegal wars but intentionally makes no mention of the 2-4 million Vietnamese we killed after invading.

Israel doesn’t like “competition”: “For Israel, recognizing the Holodomor as genocide would put it perilously close to the Holocaust.” How dare historians rank Ukrainian lives as important as Jewish ones? It’s like Hiroshima victims getting upset when Nagasaki victims remind the world, “don’t forget it happened to us too!” Because of the Holocaust, if you bring up the Nakba, Zionists will respond, “How can you compare?” I’m sure there are Zionists who when showed the Gaza death toll since October 7th, will say, “But, still how can you compare?” How dare you mention your school shooting, because MORE people died during MY school shooting! The Holocaust was manipulated into a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card, weaponized not by Jews (believers in the “Justice, Justice, Justice” of Deuteronomy), but by Zionists for its political utility in shutting down all discussions of international law, dissent or even dialog. Yad Vashem was created in Israel to capitalize on the Holocaust in 1953. Eichmann during his famous trial repeatedly confirmed Zionist collaboration with the Nazis for the benefit of Zionist over non-Zionist Jews (the non-Zionist Jews then were worked “for their own extermination” - p.115).

Zionism teaches “to see all threats as existential, and to view all opponents as potential Nazis; and of course, the only good Nazi, is a dead Nazi. But this time it was the Jews who were armed to the teeth while the ‘Nazis’ were Palestinian teenagers armed with slingshots.” Note that Zionism’s mantra of “Never Again” is never publicly, universally, or joyfully invoked as “Never Again for Anyone” (including even Palestinians). Let’s face it, peaceful co-existence with the Palestinian occupants of the land, can never happen w/o “Never Again” finally meaning never again for ALL humans. Zionism throughout its history fosters Nakba denial, Diaspora denial, and thus demands selective erasure (just like the Nazi plan for Roma, Jews and Slavs) over obvious recognition and acceptance (p.119). Permanently inclusive types like Kermit the Frog and Mr. Rodgers would have made terrible Zionists. As an example of selective erasure, Zionists might tell you about the July 1946 pogrom in Kielce, but never the Deir Yassin Massacre (which happened only two years later).

This was a great book by Omer Bartov, which I’m very glad to have read. I look forward to also reviewing his “The Eastern Front 1941-45” and “Hitler’s Army” as soon as I finish my 1 ½ year slog through reading and reviewing 80 books on Israel/Palestine (this review is #46 of the 80 I am reading after the October 7th attacks happened) on Goodreads. As long as US liberals stay utterly silent on their social media about the US financing Israel’s ongoing obvious genocide and occupation, I will keep on reading. Give me a progressive any day. It’s interesting how often today’s moral cowards (liberals) achieve their peace through intentional avoidance of the uncomfortable, omission and denial. As John Stuart Mills reminded us in 1867, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men look on and do nothing.”

[Julian Olbinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

"the Nazi genocide of the Jews was presented as the inevitable consequence of the Diaspora, which therefore had to be relinquished and forgotten, and the near-total destruction of Palestinian civilization had to be followed up with the erasure of its remaining material traces and the wiping of its memory, thereby allowing the newly created status of an 'Arab minority' to appeared as if it had always been such."

"It would not be correct to say that this utter displacement of Jews from everything they had belonged to made them wish to do the same to others; but by all accounts, it rendered many of them indifferent and callous and at times vengeful towards the Arab population they encountered in Palestine."

"For as the cunning of history would have it, once the displaced had displaced others, they became pawns of the fate they had imposed on themselves, recreating another version of that inescapable trap from which they had hoped to liberate themselves."

"For the Zionists, the State of Israel was an 'answer' to the Holocaust; for the Palestinians that very 'answer' implied a negation of their existence as a nation, a mass expulsion, and an ongoing repression and existence as a stateless people. All this must be recognized openly and clearly."

[Ben Vogensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

read this for my history class. thought it was solid but also the "israel-palestine" in the title is clickbait as hell lmfao. my man spent one 10 page chapter on that. the rest of the book was mixed some chapters were fire and made some really cool points about ground up history but some were snoozers like part 3? i think? whatever the two chapters about that book and then various jews cultural impact. he also should not have put the thesis of each chapter in the intro like a sociopath fucked up to do, made reading this a lot more confusing. overall still liked it though he was COOKING in that final chapter

[Ozan Sülüm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although it is a great book to learn about the Holocaust in a very detailed manner, the name of the book comes from a very limited part of the whole thing. If you want to learn about what Omer Bartov thinks about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, watch his interview on Zeteo, do not read this.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

me when im in a repeat the ideas you already talked about competition and bartov is my opponent😬