RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

On Genocide: Omer Bartov in Conversation about Palestine, Israel, and Germany

·54 min·3 clips

By May 2024, Bartov says the IDF’s actual plan matched the “genocidal statements,” not the official war aim.

The conversation begins with atrocity and complicity. Kipp sets the interview around Hamas's killing of approximately 1,200 people in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza, where reports cited in the episode put Palestinian deaths above 67,000, nearly a third of them children. Bartov speaks as a genocide scholar. He is introduced as a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies who warned early about the danger of genocide in Gaza, then later argued that the crime was happening. The exchange asks why Western liberal democracies, while calling themselves defenders of peace and rules based international order, have answered with silence or support. Germany is not a side thread. It is the case Kipp uses to ask whether remembrance culture has failed, been betrayed, or shown its limits. Bartov's comparison comes through the Herero genocide. He describes German settlers in German Southwest Africa taking grazing lands, a Herero revolt against settlers, and German troops driving people into the desert while blocking water holes. He is not making a simple one to one analogy. The pattern is the point: perpetrators describe their own violence as the defense of civilization against people they have already stripped of humanity. That language makes killing sound necessary. The discussion stays grave and precise. Kipp presses on whether Germany's response to Palestinians betrays remembrance culture or follows from something already wrong inside it. Bartov answers through colonial history, comparison, and the words states use when they justify violence. Gaza stays at the center. The opening description names destroyed homes, injured bodies and minds, and child death on a scale that makes diplomatic language sound evasive. The ending turns to political design. Bartov rejects the old two state framework as dead and points instead to a confederation of two independent sovereign states with open borders, separate citizenship and residence, mutual self-determination, and rights of return. External pressure is necessary in his view. Without it, the proposal is less a prediction than the only path he can see beyond permanent domination and war.

As heard by us

A serious conversation about genocide, memory, and political responsibility.

This episode makes a grave, methodical case about Gaza, genocide, and the failure of Western liberal democracies when ideals run into mass violence.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For a hard look at genocide claims, Germany's silence, and how memory politics breaks under pressure.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from RevDem Podcast