![]()
“I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know One When I See One.”
That was the headline the New York Times ran Tuesday in a blistering op-ed by Holocaust expert Omer Bartov. After months of tiptoeing, the Times finally allowed the word genocide to appear in print to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza—though only in the opinion section, not in its reporting.
Bartov writes:
“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer, and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”
Even as an op-ed, this marks a seismic shift: a respected Holocaust scholar breaking ranks with institutional silence to call the atrocities what they are.
But according to the New York Post, calling Gaza a genocide makes you a Holocaust denier.
This is peak propaganda gymnastics.
Alan Dershowitz argues that recognizing genocide in Gaza somehow denies the Holocaust—because if everything is a Holocaust, then nothing is. Or something like that. It’s hard to follow the logic when the point is to protect a monopoly, not the truth.