August 6, 2025 • 16 mins
As ceasefire talks with Hamas stall, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to convene his security cabinet to agree on a new Gaza strategy.
He’s been pushing for a full military takeover of the strip – but that plan is exposing deep divisions inside his own government. The meeting was postponed, senior defence officials warn the operation would be costly and endanger the remaining hostages, and critics say it risks leaving Israel even more isolated internationally.
Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice is still weighing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, and Gaza’s Health Ministry says the death toll has surpassed 61,000.
Today, Israeli-American scholar and professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Omer Bartov, on what constitutes genocide – and why only a new paradigm can save Israelis and Palestinians alike.
If you enjoy 7am, the best way you can support us is by making a contribution at 7ampodcast.com.au/support.
Socials: Stay in touch with us on Instagram
Guest: Israeli-American scholar and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, Omer Bartov
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi. I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to seven.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
AM as cease fire negotiations with Hamas stall Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netnia, who was expected to hold a security.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Cabinet meeting to finalize a new plan for Gaza. Netnya,
who has been calling for a full military takeover of Gaza,
that that plan is highlighting a rift in Israel's government.
The security meeting has been postponed. Military officials are warning
it would be dangerous and costly and risk further isolating
Israel on the international stage. This all comes as the
(00:40):
International Court of Justice is still weighing South Africa's genocide
case against Israel. According to the Health ministry in Gaza,
the death toll has now surpassed sixty one thousand people today.
Israeli American scholar and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies
Omer Batov on what constitutes a genocide and why only
a new paradigm can save Palestinians and Israelis alike. It's Thursday,
(01:10):
August seventh. Omer I thought we could start with the ICJ,
the International Court of Justice. It's currently considering the question
of whether or not Israel is committing genocide against the
Palestinian people. So, as a scholar of genocide, can you
(01:31):
tell me exactly what that means?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
So, the ICJ is considering genocide as it is defined
in the Genocide Convention of nineteen forty eight, and that's
the only definition of genocide that actually matters in this
case and in any case of international law. And that
definician says that genocide are acts committed with the intent
(01:56):
to destroy a particular group, and that can be an
ethic group, a racial group, a religious or a national
group in whole or in part as such. So what
that means is that in order to find that genocide
is happening, you have to show two things. You have
to show that there's a clear intent to destroy a group,
(02:21):
and secondly, that this intent is being implemented to the
extent that people who are subjected to genocide are not
subjected to it as individuals, but as members of the group,
because the goal is not to kill all the people,
or name other people, or harm all the people, but
rather for that group to be destroyed as such.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
And so do you think that Israel's actions now meet
that definition?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Well, I think Asrael's actions have met that definition, at
least as far as I could tell by May of
twenty twenty four, and the way I saw it because
I about it's already in November twenty three and I
wrote an op ed in the New York Times, and
(03:07):
at the time I argued that it appeared that Israel
was engaged in war crime and crimes against humanity, and
that there had been general side of statements by leaders
of Israel in the immediate aftermath of October seventh.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
We are putting a complete siege on Gaza, no electricity
in Muzzlim, no food, no water, no gas. It's all
closed with fighting animals, and are acting accordingly.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
But these could have been interpreted as simply people were
very really outraged by what happened on October seventh, and
so you could expect, especially in the political climate and Israel,
for people to make very strong statements. They appear to
have a general size of content, and they could also
(03:58):
have been seen as insight went to soldiers. So in
that piece at the time I said that this could
develop into genocide, that my intent was to warn to
stop things before it happens. By May of the following
year of twenty twenty four, is very defense for US
as the IDEA decided to move into Rufa, which is
the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, in which about
(04:22):
half of the population of Gaza was concentrated a million people.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Israel says it plans to proceed with its planned military
operations in the southern city of Rafa, that despite two
separate International Court rulings this week condemning Israel's actions as
well as the attacks by Hamas.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
And at that point, because the IDEA wanted to move
into Rufa, it moves all those people, a million people
to another area along the beach so west of there,
to the Mawasi area, and then went to Rafa and
destroyed it. And BIOLOGUSI was the standard. And at that
point I started examining the following. What is the relationship
(05:03):
between the statements that were made by these politicians and
generals immediately after the massacre and the official war goals,
and the official war goals were to destroy Hamas and
to release the hostages.
Speaker 6 (05:18):
I've set three war goals. The first is to release
the hostages, the second is to destroy Hamas, and the
third is to ensure that Gaza does not pose a
threat to Israel in the future.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
And it appeared to me by then that the ideas
was not then and is not now actually engaged in
an attempt to destroy Hamas and release the hostages, but
rather to systematically destroy Gaza so as to make it
entirely and inhabitable for its population, and to the extent
that it's possible to remove it from the Gaza strip altogether.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
And as well as the country was founded in the
aftermath of the Holocaust for which the of genocide was created,
so many people in Israel think that it's impossible that
the country could ever commit a genocide or be found
guilty of doing that. So what would a finding like this,
What would it do to the country, What would it
(06:15):
mean for Israel and for its government?
Speaker 3 (06:17):
So you know, this is the sort of the paradox
and the outrage of the whole thing. For many people,
I think, and for me too, the fact that Israel
is now engaged in what appears to be a generocide
or action is an outrage. It's a scandal because it
does fly in the face of everything that you would
(06:40):
have wanted to believe in. We have a kind of
belief that people learn from genocide and the lesson that
you would draw from having been a victim of one
is to do everything you can to avoid that from
happening right or from participating in one. And in fact
that Israel. For many years, the Holocaust became something else.
(07:03):
It became a warning of imminent danger, not only something
to remember and commemorate and research, but also a clear
and imminent danger that behind every threat to Israel, whether
real or perceived, whether major or minor, behind the corner
Auschwitz was lurking. And that created a state of mind
(07:29):
where the Holocaust is actually a license to violence against others,
rather than something that would prevent you from ever contemplating
carrying a genocide out like.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
This, after the break the two very different futures ahead
for Israel and Palestine, let's talk a little about what
might come next. For Israel. It's still experiencing significant support
(08:07):
from powerful allies. So while that is the case, what
does the future of the country look like?
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah, it's hard to say. You know, I'm a story
and I look back, but I think the future is bleak.
I can think of two scenarios. Basically, one is likelier
than the other. The first is that this at some
point will end it's actually not a war at all
what is happening in Gaza now because there's no organized
(08:35):
resistance to what the idea of is doing. It's just
a campaign of demolition and ethnic cleansing. But this may
end at some point. But if Israel is unable to
come to terms with this, if the international community just
sits back, what this has done to Israeli society itself,
quite apart from destroying Palestinian society, is that Israel is
(08:59):
becoming increase seemly violent within its own borders. It will become,
I think, a fore blown apartheid state. It's become increasingly authoritarian.
There's a great deal of police violence, not only against
Palestinians but also against protesters, against people who oppose the government,
and I think it will become a pariah state. It
(09:20):
won't be able to survive as such for very long.
It will implode. What will happen then is hard to say.
So that's the dire scenario. There is another scenario, which
is that Israel will be forced because there's no internal
dynamic in Israel now to force this change, but that
Israel will be forced by pressures from outside, from its
(09:44):
own allies. For its own good, to change the political paradigm,
not out of anti Israeli, sentimental anti Semitism or any
of that, but rather to save it from its own demons,
to change the political paradigm, and to seek out a
waigh for seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews who
live in that area to share that space, rather than
(10:06):
to try using bombs to resolve this dispute between them.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Can you tell me a bit more about what that
pressure could look like? As you've said, you're historians, so
what moments in history can we draw from in thinking
about this.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
You cannot expect the country that's carried out genocide against
another group too simply after some years to say, Okay,
we're really sorry about it and we won't do it again.
There has to be much more of a process. One
of course, is the example of South Africa. And South
Africa is important here because South Africa, no one, I
(10:45):
mean most people anticipated that apartheid would collapse into a bloodbath,
and that's not what happened. So I would not want
to idealize South Africa now. It's not an ideal place.
But the way that apart the Aparthe regime fell was
a combination of several factors. Two of the most important
(11:07):
were first, huge pressure on South Africa and second that
there were people there who could take up this leadership
and lead their own nation to a distant future. And
that too is crucial. There's a moment in which you
need those people and you need to support them, you
need to stand behind them. And in the case of
(11:28):
South Africa, the international community played a huge role. And again,
I mean, if you think about what happened in nineteen
forty five in Europe, the Allies could have come into Europe,
into Germany and destroyed it because it thoughts out such
a terrible war. There could have been a politics of
retribution and destruction and mass arrest and even genocide, and
(11:52):
they could have done that. And instead the institute the
Marshall Plan and rebuilt Germany. And that's why you became
what it is today. And so you can see that
vision and generosity and understanding that you cannot go back
to the past, that you must build something new actually
can work. It's not just some kind of you know,
(12:14):
liberal pipe dream. It has actually worked in the past,
and it could work in the Middle East as well.
Most people, most is rarely Jews and most Pedestinians don't
want to live in this kind of reality that they're
living in now. They don't love it. They would like
to see a different future, but nobody is offering it
(12:34):
to them.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah, for something like that to work, you need outside pressure,
but you also need people within those countries to be
willing to push for that kind of change. So how
do you see that happening? Given the state of the
relationship between Israel and Palestine.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
There is a group of Pedestinians and Jews, Israeli Jews
who have been thinking now for several years, since started
before October seventh, of a different way of rethinking this.
Because so many politicians always say, well, we'll support the
two state solution, it's a kind of fig leaf to saying, well,
we'd like to see something, and the two state solution
(13:11):
as it is now seen is not going to happen.
This group is thinking about the creation of a consideration
between Israel and Palestine, two sovereign states that would be
in consideration with each other. They would have open borders,
and they would make a distinction between citizenship and residents,
so that people could be citizens of one state and
(13:34):
live in the other, but they would vote and be
politically active in the state of their nationality. There is
a lot of creative thinking behind that, and I think
that countries like Australia, like Norway, like Germany can actually
help the people who are trying to put together these plans,
(13:54):
who are trying to advertise them to the rest of
the world, together with pressure on Israel itself. I'm trying
to be hopeful. Of course, this is not something that
would happen tomorrow, but if they were international assistants, combined
(14:14):
with real pressure on its role, with economic pressure, so
that people would know that if they continue on this path,
they will become increasingly isolated, I think something at least
we can see that not as the opportunity that Israeli
policymakers saw October seventh as, which was the opportunity to
destroy Pedestinian existence in Gaza, but rather as an opportunity
(14:38):
to change entirely the relationship between Jews and Pedestinians in
that region.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Oma, thank you for your time, Thank you very much.
Also in the news today, US President Donald Trump indicated
he would not interfere with possible Israeli plans to occupy
(15:11):
the entirety of the Gaza Strip. Asked about reports of
a potential military takeover of Gaza, Donald Trump stated it
was pretty much up to Israel, saying his administration's focus
was on increasing food access to Palestinians. And An indigenous
group has launched an appeal to prevent the construction of
a stadium that would be used for the twenty thirty
(15:32):
two Olympics in Brisbane. It follows the Queensland government fast
tracking legislation to override fifteen environmental and Heritage Acts in
order to build the stadium. The Yugara Mrganjin Aboriginal Corporation
lodged a protection application with the federal government, saying the
site contains stories, ancient trees and possible ancestral remains and
(15:53):
Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
A blow of money
Hi. I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to seven.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
AM as cease fire negotiations with Hamas stall Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netnia, who was expected to hold a security.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Cabinet meeting to finalize a new plan for Gaza. Netnya,
who has been calling for a full military takeover of Gaza,
that that plan is highlighting a rift in Israel's government.
The security meeting has been postponed. Military officials are warning
it would be dangerous and costly and risk further isolating
Israel on the international stage. This all comes as the
(00:40):
International Court of Justice is still weighing South Africa's genocide
case against Israel. According to the Health ministry in Gaza,
the death toll has now surpassed sixty one thousand people today.
Israeli American scholar and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies
Omer Batov on what constitutes a genocide and why only
a new paradigm can save Palestinians and Israelis alike. It's Thursday,
(01:10):
August seventh. Omer I thought we could start with the ICJ,
the International Court of Justice. It's currently considering the question
of whether or not Israel is committing genocide against the
Palestinian people. So, as a scholar of genocide, can you
(01:31):
tell me exactly what that means?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
So, the ICJ is considering genocide as it is defined
in the Genocide Convention of nineteen forty eight, and that's
the only definition of genocide that actually matters in this
case and in any case of international law. And that
definician says that genocide are acts committed with the intent
(01:56):
to destroy a particular group, and that can be an
ethic group, a racial group, a religious or a national
group in whole or in part as such. So what
that means is that in order to find that genocide
is happening, you have to show two things. You have
to show that there's a clear intent to destroy a group,
(02:21):
and secondly, that this intent is being implemented to the
extent that people who are subjected to genocide are not
subjected to it as individuals, but as members of the group,
because the goal is not to kill all the people,
or name other people, or harm all the people, but
rather for that group to be destroyed as such.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
And so do you think that Israel's actions now meet
that definition?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Well, I think Asrael's actions have met that definition, at
least as far as I could tell by May of
twenty twenty four, and the way I saw it because
I about it's already in November twenty three and I
wrote an op ed in the New York Times, and
(03:07):
at the time I argued that it appeared that Israel
was engaged in war crime and crimes against humanity, and
that there had been general side of statements by leaders
of Israel in the immediate aftermath of October seventh.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
We are putting a complete siege on Gaza, no electricity
in Muzzlim, no food, no water, no gas. It's all
closed with fighting animals, and are acting accordingly.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
But these could have been interpreted as simply people were
very really outraged by what happened on October seventh, and
so you could expect, especially in the political climate and Israel,
for people to make very strong statements. They appear to
have a general size of content, and they could also
(03:58):
have been seen as insight went to soldiers. So in
that piece at the time I said that this could
develop into genocide, that my intent was to warn to
stop things before it happens. By May of the following
year of twenty twenty four, is very defense for US
as the IDEA decided to move into Rufa, which is
the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, in which about
(04:22):
half of the population of Gaza was concentrated a million people.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Israel says it plans to proceed with its planned military
operations in the southern city of Rafa, that despite two
separate International Court rulings this week condemning Israel's actions as
well as the attacks by Hamas.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
And at that point, because the IDEA wanted to move
into Rufa, it moves all those people, a million people
to another area along the beach so west of there,
to the Mawasi area, and then went to Rafa and
destroyed it. And BIOLOGUSI was the standard. And at that
point I started examining the following. What is the relationship
(05:03):
between the statements that were made by these politicians and
generals immediately after the massacre and the official war goals,
and the official war goals were to destroy Hamas and
to release the hostages.
Speaker 6 (05:18):
I've set three war goals. The first is to release
the hostages, the second is to destroy Hamas, and the
third is to ensure that Gaza does not pose a
threat to Israel in the future.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
And it appeared to me by then that the ideas
was not then and is not now actually engaged in
an attempt to destroy Hamas and release the hostages, but
rather to systematically destroy Gaza so as to make it
entirely and inhabitable for its population, and to the extent
that it's possible to remove it from the Gaza strip altogether.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
And as well as the country was founded in the
aftermath of the Holocaust for which the of genocide was created,
so many people in Israel think that it's impossible that
the country could ever commit a genocide or be found
guilty of doing that. So what would a finding like this,
What would it do to the country, What would it
(06:15):
mean for Israel and for its government?
Speaker 3 (06:17):
So you know, this is the sort of the paradox
and the outrage of the whole thing. For many people,
I think, and for me too, the fact that Israel
is now engaged in what appears to be a generocide
or action is an outrage. It's a scandal because it
does fly in the face of everything that you would
(06:40):
have wanted to believe in. We have a kind of
belief that people learn from genocide and the lesson that
you would draw from having been a victim of one
is to do everything you can to avoid that from
happening right or from participating in one. And in fact
that Israel. For many years, the Holocaust became something else.
(07:03):
It became a warning of imminent danger, not only something
to remember and commemorate and research, but also a clear
and imminent danger that behind every threat to Israel, whether
real or perceived, whether major or minor, behind the corner
Auschwitz was lurking. And that created a state of mind
(07:29):
where the Holocaust is actually a license to violence against others,
rather than something that would prevent you from ever contemplating
carrying a genocide out like.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
This, after the break the two very different futures ahead
for Israel and Palestine, let's talk a little about what
might come next. For Israel. It's still experiencing significant support
(08:07):
from powerful allies. So while that is the case, what
does the future of the country look like?
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah, it's hard to say. You know, I'm a story
and I look back, but I think the future is bleak.
I can think of two scenarios. Basically, one is likelier
than the other. The first is that this at some
point will end it's actually not a war at all
what is happening in Gaza now because there's no organized
(08:35):
resistance to what the idea of is doing. It's just
a campaign of demolition and ethnic cleansing. But this may
end at some point. But if Israel is unable to
come to terms with this, if the international community just
sits back, what this has done to Israeli society itself,
quite apart from destroying Palestinian society, is that Israel is
(08:59):
becoming increase seemly violent within its own borders. It will become,
I think, a fore blown apartheid state. It's become increasingly authoritarian.
There's a great deal of police violence, not only against
Palestinians but also against protesters, against people who oppose the government,
and I think it will become a pariah state. It
(09:20):
won't be able to survive as such for very long.
It will implode. What will happen then is hard to say.
So that's the dire scenario. There is another scenario, which
is that Israel will be forced because there's no internal
dynamic in Israel now to force this change, but that
Israel will be forced by pressures from outside, from its
(09:44):
own allies. For its own good, to change the political paradigm,
not out of anti Israeli, sentimental anti Semitism or any
of that, but rather to save it from its own demons,
to change the political paradigm, and to seek out a
waigh for seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews who
live in that area to share that space, rather than
(10:06):
to try using bombs to resolve this dispute between them.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Can you tell me a bit more about what that
pressure could look like? As you've said, you're historians, so
what moments in history can we draw from in thinking
about this.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
You cannot expect the country that's carried out genocide against
another group too simply after some years to say, Okay,
we're really sorry about it and we won't do it again.
There has to be much more of a process. One
of course, is the example of South Africa. And South
Africa is important here because South Africa, no one, I
(10:45):
mean most people anticipated that apartheid would collapse into a bloodbath,
and that's not what happened. So I would not want
to idealize South Africa now. It's not an ideal place.
But the way that apart the Aparthe regime fell was
a combination of several factors. Two of the most important
(11:07):
were first, huge pressure on South Africa and second that
there were people there who could take up this leadership
and lead their own nation to a distant future. And
that too is crucial. There's a moment in which you
need those people and you need to support them, you
need to stand behind them. And in the case of
(11:28):
South Africa, the international community played a huge role. And again,
I mean, if you think about what happened in nineteen
forty five in Europe, the Allies could have come into Europe,
into Germany and destroyed it because it thoughts out such
a terrible war. There could have been a politics of
retribution and destruction and mass arrest and even genocide, and
(11:52):
they could have done that. And instead the institute the
Marshall Plan and rebuilt Germany. And that's why you became
what it is today. And so you can see that
vision and generosity and understanding that you cannot go back
to the past, that you must build something new actually
can work. It's not just some kind of you know,
(12:14):
liberal pipe dream. It has actually worked in the past,
and it could work in the Middle East as well.
Most people, most is rarely Jews and most Pedestinians don't
want to live in this kind of reality that they're
living in now. They don't love it. They would like
to see a different future, but nobody is offering it
(12:34):
to them.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah, for something like that to work, you need outside pressure,
but you also need people within those countries to be
willing to push for that kind of change. So how
do you see that happening? Given the state of the
relationship between Israel and Palestine.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
There is a group of Pedestinians and Jews, Israeli Jews
who have been thinking now for several years, since started
before October seventh, of a different way of rethinking this.
Because so many politicians always say, well, we'll support the
two state solution, it's a kind of fig leaf to saying, well,
we'd like to see something, and the two state solution
(13:11):
as it is now seen is not going to happen.
This group is thinking about the creation of a consideration
between Israel and Palestine, two sovereign states that would be
in consideration with each other. They would have open borders,
and they would make a distinction between citizenship and residents,
so that people could be citizens of one state and
(13:34):
live in the other, but they would vote and be
politically active in the state of their nationality. There is
a lot of creative thinking behind that, and I think
that countries like Australia, like Norway, like Germany can actually
help the people who are trying to put together these plans,
(13:54):
who are trying to advertise them to the rest of
the world, together with pressure on Israel itself. I'm trying
to be hopeful. Of course, this is not something that
would happen tomorrow, but if they were international assistants, combined
(14:14):
with real pressure on its role, with economic pressure, so
that people would know that if they continue on this path,
they will become increasingly isolated, I think something at least
we can see that not as the opportunity that Israeli
policymakers saw October seventh as, which was the opportunity to
destroy Pedestinian existence in Gaza, but rather as an opportunity
(14:38):
to change entirely the relationship between Jews and Pedestinians in
that region.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Oma, thank you for your time, Thank you very much.
Also in the news today, US President Donald Trump indicated
he would not interfere with possible Israeli plans to occupy
(15:11):
the entirety of the Gaza Strip. Asked about reports of
a potential military takeover of Gaza, Donald Trump stated it
was pretty much up to Israel, saying his administration's focus
was on increasing food access to Palestinians. And An indigenous
group has launched an appeal to prevent the construction of
a stadium that would be used for the twenty thirty
(15:32):
two Olympics in Brisbane. It follows the Queensland government fast
tracking legislation to override fifteen environmental and Heritage Acts in
order to build the stadium. The Yugara Mrganjin Aboriginal Corporation
lodged a protection application with the federal government, saying the
site contains stories, ancient trees and possible ancestral remains and
(15:53):
Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
A blow of money
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!