JERUSALEM 

An Israeli-American historian and former soldier in the Israeli army expressed surprise as he was abruptly disrupted by students ahead of a lecture he was scheduled to give in June this year at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

Omer Bartov arrived at the university to find a group of students protesting outside the lecture hall, he recounted in an article for the British newspaper The Guardian that was published Tuesday.

Bartov is an Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide.

“When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it,” he said.

The protesters, mobilized via WhatsApp, accused Bartov of endorsing a petition labeling Israel as an “apartheid regime” and criticized an article published in The New York Times in which he said that “although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide.”

Bartov also noted that the event's organizer, Oren Yiftachel, also faced criticism due to his affiliation with the anti-Zionist B'Tselem Israeli human rights organization.

In response, the academic offered to engage in a discussion with the protesters if they agreed to cease their disruptive actions.

“We agreed that perhaps the best step forward would be to ask the student protesters to join us for a conversation, on the condition that they stop the disruption.”

The protesters, many of whom had recently returned from reserve service in Gaza, “were activists in extreme rightwing organizations,” he added.

The ensuing conversation highlighted a significant shift in Israel's political landscape.

Bartov, who has deep personal connections to Israel, including service in the army during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, noted that the country has changed dramatically from his earlier experiences.

“Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing,” he said.

His background includes research on military ideologies, drawing parallels between the army’s practices and those of Nazi Germany.

Bartov referred in The Guardian article to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's controversial directive during the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule, in 1987.

“When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987, I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defense, to the IDF (army) to “break the arms and legs” of Palestinian protesters.

He expressed concerns about the Israeli army's moral trajectory, comparing it to Nazi military indoctrination.

Israel, flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire, has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza since an attack last October by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

Since then, an ongoing Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians.

Over 10 months into the Israeli war, vast tracts of Gaza lie in ruins amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which ordered it to immediately halt its military operation in the southern city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians had sought refuge from the war before it was invaded on May 6.