The televised genocide in Gaza as of July 2025

The Gaza genocide and ethnic cleansing is continuing. And it’s being reported live on television for the world to see. Here’s a report from Owen Jones discussing that set of facts: (1)

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian and one of the actual scholarly experts on the exceptionally grim subject of genocide. In retrospect, when we look back at the early statements of Israeli officials immediately after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, those statements look like part of a genocidal plan.

Bartov here explains why he was initially reserved in describing this as a genocide until he saw a pattern of action by the Israel government and armed forces that confirmed the genocidal intent of those earlier statements. (2)

In this grim field, “ethnic cleansing” can be a feature of genocide and is a crime in itself. But the UN Genocide Convention does not make ethnic cleansing itself equivalent to genocide. It’s a comment on the sad state of humanity that it was only after the Second World War that ethnic cleansing came to be considered an illegitimate action. The peace treaties after the First World War, the Potsdam Agreement among the Allies during the Second World War, and the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (aka, the Hitler-Stalin Pact) of 1939 all endorsed large-scale ethnic cleansing. (3)

The United States has been supporting this genocide under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. There is no excuse for either of them for doing so.

Germany is the second-largest military supplier of Israel. And it’s now in the 2025 version of the long process of “working through” the Holocaust. A large part of that effort has been to support the State of Israel with minimal criticism. That has the perverse result that now Germany finds itself supporting a very public genocide that has gone on for a year and a half and gets worse by the day.

Bartov comments in his interview about something which I had not heard addressed this way until now. He claims that various museums and historical groups that focus on Holocaust remembrance have declined to criticize the current genocide under way. He makes a comment that surprised me, which is that he thinks it’s very possible going forward that while Holocaust studies and genocide studies have been interconnected fields, that they may now become two separate fields that don’t actively cooperate and interact with each other as they have in the past.

It has long been a matter of discussion whether the Holocaust is a particularly Jewish issue or a more general one. The ecumenical theologian Hans Küng discussed the Jewish religious angle on that question in his 1995 book Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, three decades ago. And the discussion continues to evolve. Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust scholar who headed Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum’s International Institute for Holocaust Research from 1995-2000 and founded the Holocaust and Genocide Studies journal, insisted that the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust such as gays, Sinti and Roma, and the developmentally disabled be understood as victims of the Holocaust.

Bauer passed away in 2024. In December 2023, he wrote:

History does not repeat itself, and we would agree that the events of October 7, however horrific, are distinct from the Holocaust. Hamas, whatever its murderous ideology and the unimaginable atrocities it has committed, should not be seen as a modern-day reincarnation of the Nazis. In contrast to the popular tendency to view the Holocaust and that Black Shabbat [October 7 Hamas attack] as almost equivalent, comparative analysis in history entails the recognition of both similarities and differences. While the two terrible events share certain similarities, such as the chilling brutality of the killings, the underlying ideological hatred, and even the voices that deny these crimes, fundamental differences between the two events are immense. (4)

Notes:

(1) Gaza Famine PANICS Pro-Israel Media: THEY DID THIS. Owen Jones YouTube channel 07/24/2025. <https://youtu.be/gYAQepkuaPc?si=_Wjdoe1q-t_ZdqMX> (Accessed: 2025-25-07).

(2) "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 07/17/2025. <https://youtu.be/QfmW0AQWV5E?si=m5gkWCXfbG4yW2tx> (Accessed: 2025-25-07).

(3) Schwartz, Michael (2013): Ethnische „Säuberungen“ in der Moderne. Globale Wechselwirkungen nationalistischer und rassistischer Gewaltpolitik im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert. München: Oldenbourg.

(4) Bauer, Yehuda (2023): Preserving historical integrity: a call to avoid politicising the Holocaust. Jewish Chronicle 12/08/2023. (Accessed: 2025-25-07).