West’s ‘diplomatic Iron Dome’ shielding Tel Aviv amid ‘slow-moving genocide’ in Gaza: Scholar

A genocide expert has denounced the Israeli regime’s Western allies for their all-out efforts at shielding Tel Aviv from accountability, despite the latter’s deliberate and systematic push to make Gaza uninhabitable.

Professor Omer Bartov made the remarks in a detailed interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) that was published on Saturday.

Bartov, Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, argued that the regime's actions in the coastal sliver since October 2023 demonstrated a clear “intent to destroy a particular group, in whole or in part,” as defined under the UN Genocide Convention.

He stated, “Making life impossible has become a central strategy—not an accidental consequence—of Israeli policy.”

The scholar pointed to statements from Israeli officials after October 7, when Palestinian resistance movements staged an extensive operation in the occupied Palestinian territories, which the regime used to try to justify the war.

Those statements that included calls to flatten Gaza and dehumanizing descriptions like “human animals,” served as early evidence of genocidal intent, he added.

By May 2024, he remarked, Israeli forces had shifted from stated war goals to systematic destruction aimed at rendering Gaza uninhabitable.

He cited the Israeli military’s forced displacement of over one million people from the southern city of Rafah to the uninhabitable Mawasi area, followed by Rafah’s destruction, as part of a broader pattern of operations.

‘300-percent increase in miscarriages in Gaza’

A report from Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli rights group, has highlighted the targeted elimination of Gaza’s health, education, and religious infrastructures.

Bartov noted a 300-percent increase in miscarriages since October 7 amid the situation, emphasizing the Genocide Convention’s clause on preventing births within a group.

He criticizes the international community for shielding the regime through, what he terms as, a “diplomatic Iron Dome,” led by the United States and European allies, which continue supplying arms and political cover.

“This is extraordinary,” Bartov says, “because the very countries that present themselves as guardians of international law are those facilitating what may well amount to genocide.”

‘Supremacist Israeli clique’

Regarding the dynamics within the regime’s politics, Bartov describes the coalition that was being led by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the most far-right in the regime’s history.

The coalition, he added, included figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, both of whom espouse “supremacist ideologies.”

‘Plan to turn Rafah into concentration camp’

He also highlighted radical proposals by other ministers, such as Israel Katz’s plan to turn Rafah into a “humanitarian city,” saying what Katz seeks to create is actually a “concentration camp.”

Bartov, meanwhile, lambasted Israeli media self-censorship and the portrayal of all Gazans as “complicit terrorists.”

He, however, found hope in first-person Palestinian testimonies, which he believed could shift global understanding of the conflict.

Concluding, he stressed the necessity of confronting not just Israeli actions, but also the global silence that enables them.

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