The anti-Israel bias at NPR, dubbed National Palestine Radio by its critics, has escalated tremendously since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, following Hamas’ October 7th massacre and hostage-taking. Producers lose few opportunities to seek out anti-Israel detractors, and air programs that vilify or delegitimize the Jewish state.
NPR news programs frequently follow the New York Times’ lead for story ideas and candidates to interview. Just two days after the New York Times published an op-ed by Omer Bartov claiming that Israel was committing a genocide, NPR’s Morning Edition featured an interview with him to reiterate the same points.
Omer Bartov is an Israeli-born professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. The benefit of using Bartov in the campaign to accuse Israel of genocide lies in the use of his academic position and identity “as a Zionist who grew up in Israel” – the latest iteration of “as a Jew” – to lend authority to his pronouncements against Israel.
In fact, Bartov is far from an impartial scholar. He has a long-standing pattern of using inflammatory language to criticize Israel. For example, he has spoken of Israel having been injected with “a poison” that “distilled into the veins of the country” and has led it “toward savagery.” He also leads a list of signatories on a statement labeling Israel as an “apartheid” state and accusing it of practicing “Jewish supremacism.” Following the October 7th Hamas attacks, his response was to blame the violence on the “repressed reality” of Israel’s “occupation.” His hostility toward his birth country has resulted in his becoming an active participant in the effort to portray Israel’s war against Hamas not as a defensive response but as an act of genocide and a “crime against humanity.”
So he begins the interview with a recitation of his bona fides as a good Israeli Zionist, explaining that he was slow in coming to his belief that Israel is carrying out a genocide of the Palestinian people. He follows by acknowledging that genocide “describes an attempt to destroy a group as such, not simply killing many people…” He does not mention that the definition of genocide is the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Indeed, Israel has always made clear that its aim is to destroy the terrorist group Hamas, sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state, after it perpetrated the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, seized hostages and publicly vowed to repeat such massacres “time and again until Israel is annihilated.”
But targeting the Hamas group clearly does not constitute genocide because it is neither a national, ethnic nor or a religious group. It is a terrorist group. So Bartov contends instead that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people.
His “evidence”? Bartov claims that what made him believe that Israel’ military campaign was not meant to destroy Hamas and release the hostages, but was rather intended as a genocide of the Palestinian people was that Israel’s offensive in Rafah was launched despite the presence of a million Palestinians, many of whom were told by the IDF to go there for their safety and were then displaced to the beach area.
In fact, such evidence undermines Bartov’s claim. Surely, a genocidal regime intent on eradicating an ethnic group would hardly warn that group — with flyers, text messages, phone calls and maps of safe routes– to evacuate in advance of military actions. Surely, they would not bother to set up field hospitals and tent camps for displaced Palestinians or attempt to facilitate humanitarian aid there?
Bartov divines that Israel’s intent was indeed genocidal because the military actions “conformed to the statements that were made in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, which was to systematically destroy Gaza.”
But, the statement made by the Israeli prime minister in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre was quite clear about the intent of the war:
“The IDF will immediately use all its strength to destroy Hamas’s capabilities. We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens. …All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.I say to the residents of Gaza: Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”
Even NPR host Steve Inskeep appeared somewhat uncomfortable in accepting Bartov’s arguments as incontrovertible proof of genocide because he asked the interviewee to explain why he rejects the IDF justification about Hamas operating from tunnels, under buildings, and hiding amid the civilian population. Bartov had no convincing response. He simply asserted:
“Well, they [the IDF] are also going after Hamas. They are trying to find Hamas militants. But most of what they’re doing … is destroying Gaza.”
Despite how unconvincing Bartov might have come across in the NPR segment, a canard repeated often enough is accepted as truth by listeners who are exposed again and again to only one side of the story. That NPR chose to feature this partisan because of his essay promoting the false canard about a genocidal Israel is telling.