It's a serious and unyielding text, whose author weighed every word with infinite precautions. In a lengthy article published by the Guardian, titled "As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel," Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov bears witness, with a mixture of horror and consternation, to the extent of the damage caused, deep down in Israeli society, by the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023. He also deplores the violence of Israel's military response in Gaza, as well as "the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name."

The professor of contemporary history at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was invited to Israel in June to speak at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba. But due to "activists in extreme rightwing organisations," he writes, "things did not work out as planned."

Born in Israel in 1954 and having served in the army and even experienced combat during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Bartov has all the service credentials to feel entitled to express himself, but this has not shielded him from criticism, insults and hostile slogans. And it is with dismay that he describes a country where war has become "its own end," before noting "the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza."

Then, at the end of a meticulous argument, insisting on the unbridgeable gap that has opened up between Israeli public opinion and many outside observers of the conflict, Bartov concludes that his opinion has changed and that, in his eyes, "since the attack by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions."

While the terms "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" are now used by many legal experts and specialists in mass violence, given the scale of the destruction in Gaza, the appalling results of the Israeli army's operations and the humanitarian situation in the enclave, the latter term, "systematic genocidal actions," is more controversial. This is because it refers to one of the pillars of the world order established at the end of the Second World War, the notion of "genocide." The neologism was coined by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959). It was enshrined in international law by a convention signed in Paris in 1948 to qualify the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," whether by killing or by "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

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