Omer Bartov on his experience speaking with right-wing students who had just returned from military service in Gaza.
Omer Bartov is one of the preëminent historians of the Third Reich. In the course of his four-decade career, he has written numerous books and articles examining Hitler’s regime, with a specific focus on how Nazi ideology functioned in institutions such as the German Army. Bartov was born in Israel, and served in the military during the country’s war in 1973, against several of its neighbors, including Egypt and Syria. He currently teaches at Brown University.
After the Hamas attacks of October 7th, Israel began its military campaign in the Gaza Strip, where more than thirty-eight thousand Palestinians have been killed. Bartov quickly became a vocal critic of the war: he accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity and raised the question of whether its conduct constituted genocide. I recently called Bartov, because I heard that he had visited Ben-Gurion University, in Beersheba, and met with a number of right-wing students who had returned from military service in Gaza. I wanted to learn about what exactly had occurred, and what he took away from the experience. Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is below. In it, we also talk about how he thinks Israeli society is refusing to face up to what’s happening in Gaza, and what he learned talking to former soldiers in the German Army after the Second World War.
Can you tell us about what you were doing at Ben-Gurion University?
A friend and a colleague of mine, a geographer named Oren Yiftachel, who teaches at Ben-Gurion, heard that I was coming to Israel to see my new grandkids, and he said, “Why don’t you come over to Ben-Gurion to give a talk?” He was interested in hearing more about what’s happening on American campuses, and all these allegations of antisemitism and the encampments and so forth. So I came, but about a day or two before that he got some information that there would be a protest by local students. I think most of them were from a movement called If You Want, which is a very right-wing student organization that is associated with the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and his party.
I’m assuming that this is because, since October 7th, you’ve criticized the Israeli campaign in Gaza.
Correct. And, of course, these students hadn’t actually read any of this, but there was some kind of analysis that they received that I had signed some petition in which the possibility of genocide was mentioned. And there was a call there on President Biden to reconsider sending arms to Israel.
We informed security at the school, and then we arrived, and there were a few older professors sitting in the hall. Outside the hall, there were a few muscular security guys, and there was a group of students, and they were very excited.
I assume you do not mean excited to hear you speak.
That’s correct. Oren started to introduce the talk, and they began banging on the doors, banging on the walls, shouting that this should not happen at Ben-Gurion University, that it should not be allowed, that they’re being accused of genocide, and that they’re not murderers.
And the security people weren’t doing anything. Subsequently, they told us that they can’t arrest anybody. If we wanted that, we’d have to call the police. Obviously, nobody wanted to call the police, but the protesters were extremely disruptive. It was impossible to do anything. And that lasted for a while. And then Oren suggested, and I certainly agreed, that we ask the students if they want to come in as long as they agreed to actually talk with us. And most of them—I can’t say if it was all of them, but most of them—said, “O.K.,” and they walked in.
There was one who was extremely destructive, was standing at the door, and wouldn’t let anybody close the door. But eventually that fellow was persuaded to leave. It took a while. I mean, the whole thing took about three hours. So we are talking about a lengthy process and with a lot of tension in the air.
Finally, they sat down. But there was no way that you could lecture. They were too excited, too angry. It appeared like they actually wanted to ask questions and also to just say what they think, and so we sat down and we started talking with them, and that was, to me, in retrospect, quite interesting.
What can you tell us about the conversation?
Quite a number of the students, including at least two women, had served in Gaza. They had just come back from service. And my sense was that they felt that they were being accused of all kinds of crimes, and that the accusations were not true, and that they were doing the right thing. And one interesting point was that they shared photographs with me. One of them shared a photograph on his phone where he showed a bunch of Palestinian children, and he said, “Oh, you say that there’s hunger in Gaza. There’s no hunger in Gaza at all. And, look, here are a bunch of Palestinian kids. And we gave them all the food that our unit had.” This, of course, probably meant that the kids were hungry. But he wanted to show that they cared about these children.
Another told a story that, when he was there, he was approached by a girl, obviously a Palestinian girl, whose leg had been severely injured. He didn’t say how, he didn’t give the context, but one can imagine. He said, “And we immediately gave her all the medical help we could. Everything that we needed for our unit was used to take care of her.” So they were trying to say, “We really care about the children and we are not beasts.” But there were these contradictions.
I began talking about the I.D.F.’s use of these giant bombs, and that if you drop a bomb like this to kill some people in a tunnel beneath a school where there are many people sheltered because they were told that they should shelter there, you’re going to kill many of them. And one of them said, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s not at all true. That’s not true. We came to these schools. These schools are full of Hamas people.” And the interesting thing was that there was another fellow sitting there, and he said, “Well, we were also there. We didn’t see so many Hamas people.”
They got angry at me and were saying, “Well, what do you know? You just sit in your air-conditioned room in the United States.” At some point, I said to them, “Actually, I was also a soldier. I was a company commander. I was wounded. It was a different war and a different time, but it’s not like I don’t know anything about this.” That slightly calmed them down.
But then I told them that, for my dissertation, I investigated the crimes of the German Army and that, in subsequent years, I used to go to Germany and lecture about it. And usually the first two or three rows would be filled with Wehrmacht veterans. As I was talking, they would also become very excited. And one of them would get up and say, “Nothing like this happened in my unit.” And another guy would get up and say, “Maybe not in yours. But in mine it did.” So there was some parallel to what I was seeing there.
There was a young woman at Ben-Gurion—she jumped on the stage and started shouting. She was very angry, and said that they were fighting for the people who were murdered on October 7th, that comrades of theirs had been killed and friends of theirs had been killed. And, as she was talking and shouting, she started crying. I, at least, had a distinct feeling—not to excuse what they were doing, but I had a distinct feeling that many of them maybe had P.T.S.D.
You mentioned the contradictions, and one thing that I’ve really noticed just following the news from Israel is what I would characterize as a broad contradiction: Israelis are saying, “We’re not Hamas. We’re a democracy. We respect laws. We’re not terrorists,” and so on and so forth. And, at the same time, “We are fighting a horrible enemy. We have to do what needs to be done. We’re not even going to pretend that we care that much about things like allowing aid for starving civilians.” And various politicians have made really grotesque comments about Palestinians.
So, first of all, yes, I think that’s true. I think you could distill it by pointing out that, on the one hand, people call the I.D.F. the most moral Army in the world. You will actually hear people saying that. And, on the other side, they will say, “Well, Hamas are animals, look what they did to us, and we have to destroy them. They’re using these Palestinians as human shields. And, in any case, these Palestinians supported them. Why did they let them do that? And they were cheering. At the time of October 7th, they were so glad, and therefore they just have to be wiped out. And we don’t want to know too much about how this is being done.”
But there are two other things I would say. Much of this discourse is not by the soldiers. There are people in the media, but they’re not actually there. At Ben-Gurion, I was talking with young men and women who spent months in Gaza, so they see exactly what’s going on and they have to filter it somehow. And they are looking at things through a particular prism. They want to think that they’re doing the right thing. They want to think that it’s not just revenge, and that they’re fighting a just war, but they’re also seeing things and they can’t admit to themselves that they’re seeing. They’re seeing the vast destruction, the suffering there, the lack of food, the numbers of innocents who were killed. They see that and they have to somehow rationalize it. Some of them were rationalizing it by saying, “But we’re actually taking care of them. We care about them. It’s not that we are there to do that. We are there only to kill the Hamas people.”
Another thing I want to say is that it’s very difficult being in Israel right now. It’s a very strange experience. What sort of people do I know in Israel? They’re mostly, so to speak, left, liberal, however we define it. I don’t know too many right-wingers there. But even people on the left—they’re tense just about meeting you. You can feel there’s tension in the air.
And it’s not just me. They know that I’ve written various things, but it’s more that they feel that, because I did not experience it, I may say things that they can’t quite process.
October 7th, you mean?
Yes. They feel so traumatized and so confused that they have no way of speaking about it. They don’t actually want to speak in a reasonable, analytical manner about what happened on October 7th. They don’t even want to speak about it at all. In a sense, they feel that your presence as someone who’s come from the outside is destructive to their understanding among themselves—that they have been terribly hurt and that somehow the only thing they can talk about is how they feel and what has happened to their society, what has happened to people they know. People were killed, people were displaced, and they have absolutely no ability to speak about people in Gaza. It’s absolutely striking.
I don’t want to say too much about it, but I know a woman, an old friend, who had, in a different context, written and worked on issues of sexual abuse and exploitation and rape. And I met her and she spoke for about two hours with real rage about what she believed was the complete denial of the rape of Jewish women on October 7th. She had no room whatsoever to really think about anything else but that. Of course, violence against women is something that she’d worked on, and feels very strongly about, but it was also a kind of filter. If you say that thousands of kids were also killed since then, it doesn’t get through.
Advertisement
The Israeli media has been broadly very supportive of the war, and there has not been sufficient coverage of the situation in Gaza. I’ve heard lots of people say Israelis aren’t seeing the same war that everyone else is seeing. Did you sense that people you were talking to were having their views shaped by the Israeli media, or is it more that the Israeli media is just a reflection of how people feel?
Look, it’s hard to say, but I think it’s both. I think the media is catering to a particular sentiment in the public, yes. But I also think the media is just not doing its job. It’s not reporting about what’s going on in Gaza. And so people have to watch, say, Al Jazeera. And most people don’t. You can’t actually watch it now in Israel on TV anymore. [Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted to ban Al Jazeera broadcasts in Israel after a law passed by the Knesset, in April, gave the government the power to close news outlets that were deemed threats to national security.] You have a bunch of military correspondents on all the major news outlets, and they go all the time to Gaza. They’re attached to various military units, and they speak with generals. And they give you exactly the Army’s version of what’s going on. They rarely ask any critical questions.
Now, there are, of course, a lot of people in Israel who are protesting. I went to a protest on a recent Saturday night. There are those who are protesting to change the government. There are those who want to stop the war. There are those who want to exchange the hostages. And so there are protests. I don’t think they’re going to make a difference, but there are protests by different groups—but they’re not really about what’s going on in Gaza. They are about the sense that this government is leading us nowhere (which is, of course, true), and that things can get much worse in a really big hurry in Lebanon. There’s a lot of fear in Israel about that. But there’s no talk about the situation in Gaza, specifically.
To return to the students who told you that they were in Gaza for the right reasons and acting ethically: Did you feel that they were sincere?
First of all, let’s say again that these people I met are not representative, of course, because they are members of a right-wing organization.
One of them said to me, “I’m going to be called up again and I really don’t want to go.” But they feel, first of all, that they’re doing the right thing, and it’s very important for them to stress that. My sense is that, underneath all of that, there was a lingering sense of guilt. These people had just stood outside and shouted that I was a traitor; but, at the same time, they actually wanted to come in and they wanted to talk. I think that they saw a whole lot [in Gaza] that they themselves have not processed. So I don’t think that they’re lying, but I think that, unfortunately, there is a distortion of reality.
They know what they’re seeing, but then they have to interpret it in a way that does not put them in a particularly bad light. And so they can say all kinds of things. They can say, “We took care of them.” They can also say, “But they’re animals.” And they can say, “They all support Hamas.” People who are in that state of mind will say a whole lot of things that are contradictory; I think they believe them, but there’s something underlying all of this, which is that they are in denial. They’re actually denying to themselves, and not just to me, some of what they saw and experienced.
Right, and, just to go back to the contradictions, you said that these students are from a political movement that is aligned with Ben-Gvir. People in that movement talk pretty openly about fighting essentially a religious war and repopulating Gaza with settlers, right?
Yes. I don’t know what the religious practices were for the students there, but they weren’t carrying any signs of religion. I don’t think there was a single one who even had a yarmulke. And they did not use that language. That doesn’t mean that they have not been exposed to it. It doesn’t mean that they don’t go to such rallies. I suspect they do. And it doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in all those things. But it’s curious why they weren’t speaking in that manner with me.
I’ve been saying a lot of very critical things about what Israel is doing in Gaza, and now I’ve met some of the people who are engaged in it. And I think it’s worthwhile trying to think through what this kind of war is doing to a generation of young men and women. It’s not at all to justify what they’re doing. On the contrary, it’s to say that this is a shattering psychological experience. When you’re at a rally and when you are in a battle, shooting a civilian—it’s different.
In 1930, the German Student Union was taken over by the National Socialists. That was three years before Hitler came to power, and German students had endorsed National Socialism. They were doing it, in large part, because of the memory of the First World War: how they lost the war and how they’d been betrayed and stabbed in the back, and all the Jews and the Socialists did not allow the Army to win. And now they were electing, promoting, fighting for someone who promised to make Germany great again. And he did. Germany became powerful, and Germany conquered all of Europe, and Germany killed millions of people. And then it launched a war and it was totally destroyed. And only then these young people started seeing the world through different eyes.
The majority of Jews in Israel right now are right-wing, and they support people like Ben-Gvir and [the finance minister, Bezalel] Smotrich and various other right-wing tendencies. And they are already beginning to pay the price for what they believe in.
How did the conversation end?
It went on for three hours. And, even as we were walking out, they were still talking with me. They were angry. It wasn’t friendly, but they wanted to talk.
I really felt that one problem we have—you can think back to various American wars too, of course—is that you need to talk with soldiers. We don’t do that. We talk about them. In Israel now, everybody’s a hero. Anybody who puts on a uniform or is killed or wounded—they’re a hero. This kind of language was not used to the same degree when I was a soldier. But, at the same time, nobody actually talks to them or listens to them. You just send them to do things, and you don’t want them to tell you exactly what they did, and then you don’t even provide enough psychological help. This will have really severe repercussions in the future. ♦