Omer Bartov and the Corruption of Academic Standards
We cannot afford to ignore the blurred lines between scholarship and activism.
This article was originally published in the Jerusalem Post on August 19, 2025.
Genocide is a legal term… I use that term in debates now because I know, I see the immense urge to deny… But for the people in Gaza, do you think it really matters if you call it genocide or war crimes? We need to use that terminology because we are talking to another public… For the people in Gaza… who cares what you call it.”
These are the striking words of Prof. Omer Bartov, dean’s professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies at Brown University, during his lecture “Making Sense of Mass Atrocities” at the University of Maryland on April 7, 2025.
With the full text of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention projected behind him, the revered historian made a startling admission: he had abandoned academic integrity for a political agenda.
I was in the audience that evening, gathering research for my senior thesis on the erosion of boundaries between scholarship and activism, alongside the trend of Jewish and Israeli scholars who demonize and delegitimize Israel or hold non-Zionist or anti-Zionist views. Among the scholar-activists I encountered, Bartov stood out as a particularly compelling case. His ideas, and more notably, his transformation, demand deeper investigation.
Bartov has not always held the views he disseminated in Maryland. In 2004, he published “He Meant What He Said: Did Hitlerism Die with Hitler?” in The New Republic, where he warned that Hamas embodied a Hitlerian ideology requiring confrontation “by the use of legitimate force.” In the same piece, he denounced anti-Israel campus protest rhetoric as “poisonous,” part of a “new antisemitism with a Hitlerite quality.”
Bartov once also urged caution in using the term “genocide,” warning against diluting its legal meaning or fueling antisemitism. In 2010, during a debate with historian Martin Shaw over whether Israel’s 1948 War of Independence constituted genocide, he claimed the accusation was a historical distortion that fed into antisemitism. The professor insisted Israel had fought a “just war.”
BARTOV TODAY disseminates a starkly different view. He now argues that Israel’s war against Hamas mirrors the genocidal behavior the Holocaust was supposed to condemn. In April 2024, he lectured at the anti-Israel University of Pennsylvania encampment protest that teemed with antisemitism – antisemitism that Bartov rejected entirely.
Most tellingly, Bartov and Shaw now largely agree that describing Israel’s Gaza campaign as a “war” is a “misnomer,” and that Zionism itself carries “exclusionary” and “settler-colonial” qualities, as he described in the lecture.
After years of warning against using Holocaust memory for political purposes, he resigned from the Yad Vashem Studies Editorial Board last summer, where he had served for two decades, accusing the board of ignoring the “extraordinary carnage by Israeli troops, including the killing and maiming of thousands of children.”
When I asked Bartov about his dramatic shift over the past 20 years during the Maryland lecture, he responded: “It is commendable for scholars to change their views.” But this was not merely a change. It was a metamorphosis calling for exploration.
Bartov pointed me to Hamas’s 2017 “redrafted” charter as justification for his evolved thinking. However, this document remains equally extreme, simply using language that resonates with Western ears. The 2017 text still reaffirms that “Palestine is the land of the Arab Palestinian people,” brands Zionism as a “racist, colonial project,” and insists on “no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity.” Did he overlook this eliminationist language, or deliberately turn a blind eye?
Though Bartov doesn’t openly embrace Hamas’s ideology or call himself an anti-Zionist (as of 2023, he still identifies as a Zionist), his genocide accusations feed into Palestinian resistance rhetoric that legitimizes and promotes the terrorist group in the West. He currently lends support to the spurious Soviet Islamo-Marxist accusations of Israel, like apartheid and colonialism, that defame the Jewish state and reframe Holocaust memory through dubious decolonial struggle – all of which desecrate the true meanings of historical instances of apartheid, colonialism, and genocide.
At Maryland, Bartov disputed findings from Urban Warfare Institute Chair John Spencer, who concluded Israel’s combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio in Gaza is approximately 1:1.5, remarkably low compared to modern urban warfare’s 1:9 average, six times as much. He dismisses that Hamas – not Israel – is the openly genocidal entity, funded by Iran and committed to destroying both the “Little Satan” (Israel) and the “Great Satan” (America).
IN HIS recent statements, including his New York Times article entitled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know it When I See it,” Bartov demonstrates “intent,” the standard for genocide, through misrepresenting Israeli government officials’ inflammatory statements or even inventing them. Simultaneously, he ignores the combat realities of Hamas’s deeply embedded military infrastructure and trivializes the many policy prescriptions around its strategy.
The genocide scholar’s dismissal of facts is as troubling as his explicit dismissal of legal standards. While acknowledging no legal consensus on genocide, he argues that we should call Israel’s actions genocidal anyway – because for “people being bombed,” it “doesn’t matter what you call it.”
Yet it does matter. The pathological fixation on Israel in the academy, media, and public square has revealed the damage Bartov does. It matters because scholarly standards and academic integrity are collapsing in favor of libelous activism that occurs inside and outside the classroom, plaguing the media and public square.
The consequences have proven dangerous. Across university campuses in the West, Jewish students are harassed and even assaulted to the extent of having to be hospitalized.
In Washington, two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. In Boulder, Colorado, a group pleading for the release of Israeli hostages was attacked with an incendiary device – one of them was an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor who died from her burn wounds. Ohio Congressional Rep. Max Miller was off-roaded by a driver with a Palestinian flag. All of this, in the name of opposing a so-called “genocide” in Gaza.
How is it that scholars, cloaked in respectability, can so brazenly invert reality? The line between scholarship and activism has been erased; truth is under siege. Will we continue to let academics like Bartov discard integrity and legal standards as they engage in charlatanry? That, we simply cannot afford.
Bartov Shaul Magid and their ilk all think they have some special expertise in criticizing Israel since they are walked away from supporting Israel