Editor’s note: Adam Aron is a professor of psychology at UC San Diego. 

Last Tuesday, the world-renowned Holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov came to UC San Diego and gave a riveting presentation on his new book, titled, “Israel: What Went Wrong?” Over 100 people attended the presentation, listening carefully as the Israeli-born historian from Brown University argued forcefully that the state of Israel, with its guiding ideology of Zionism, had morphed into a violently racist apartheid state that was committing genocide in Gaza and oppressing the Palestinian people. He ended by discussing how political power might shift to favor the coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians.

The timing of the event was propitious: It was almost two years ago to the day that Chancellor Pradeep Khosla sent in 200 police to crush the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, arresting 64 students and faculty members. It also occurred at a moment in U.S. history when more citizens than ever are asking themselves why the U.S. is so tightly bound to the state of Israel. They have seen how the U.S. has evidently been dragged by Israel into an illegal and unprovoked attack on Iran which, apart from all the death and suffering on several fronts, has triggered a worldwide crisis of energy, fertilizer, food, and inflation, and quite possibly an unfolding recession.

Although many faculty report a chilling effect on academic freedom, partly related to the actions of the UCSD administration over the past two years — such as restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly through new “time, place, and manner policies” — the event occurred without obstruction. The administration even sent a potentially related campus-wide message two days afterward, affirming that “we cannot censor voices or ban groups we disagree with.” 

 Aside from an academic event like this, political speech is now mostly restricted to the area in front of Geisel Library, which is heavily surveilled by cameras and campus spies known as “community specialists” — something the faculty senate is currently investigating. The few students and nontenured faculty brave enough to engage in political speech, especially on Palestine, often mask up because they believe data from those cameras could be shared with federal agents and powerful institutions.

 The Bartov event was a model of respectful exchange. At one point, a questioner who identified herself as Jewish said that, while she was dismayed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, she could not accept that Zionism was a settler colonial enterprise. Bartov, a former Israel Defense Forces soldier and author of over 20 books on the Holocaust, responded with solid facts and historical interpretation, and without sacrificing gentleness or empathy. This was the same empathy he said he felt when he’d interviewed former Wehrmacht soldiers in the 1980s who were still in denial about what they’d done. This is the empathy he has today when an IDF soldier comes home to his progressive mother in Israel and says, “I need to talk about what we’ve done in Gaza,” and she replies that she doesn’t want to know. 

 Still, Bartov didn’t mince his words. And these are words that everyone must hear, or read, in his new book.

 For him, Zionist settlement in Israel began as an emancipatory attempt to free European Jews, but became a colonial venture with Jewish settlers outright referring to themselves as colonists, before it finally turned into “an ideology of ethnonationalism, expansionism, militarism, and racism.”

As Bartov explained in his interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “What Hamas did on Oct. 7 was a war crime. … I would have preferred to see Hamas leaders captured and put on trial alongside a number of Israeli leaders.” But referring to the Nakba and long-standing Israeli punishment of Gaza, he also warranted that there is context: “Resistance to occupation, to siege, to the attempt to control people trying to express national self-determination is legitimate. [The prestate Zionist militias such as] Haganah did it. The French Resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Armed resistance is entirely legitimate, including under international law.” Importantly, he added that “the right to resist an occupation does not give you the right to commit massacres [of civilians].”

 The definition of genocide refers to the intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” In Gaza, official estimates of the death toll range from 75,000 to 100,000, with thousands more potentially buried under the rubble. But genocide goes beyond killing people; it kills a whole society, with a systematic destruction of cities, schools, universities, hospitals, orchards and the poisoning of the soil. 

 Now, as The New York Times reported on Sunday, Israel is currently engaged in an attempt to Gaza-ify southern Lebanon by destroying dozens of villages to make it uninhabitable.

 Bartov sees a rift developing in world Jewry, especially American Jews: “You cannot be a liberal Jewish minority in the United States and also be on board with what Israel is doing.” 

 In his presentation, he expressed his hope for an outcome in which the limits of Israel’s power move back to where it belongs — in Tel Aviv and not Washington. At that point, he thinks the people between the River and the Sea will finally be compelled to figure out how to coexist.

 What Israel is doing concerns all of us at home and abroad; it is now connected with a worldwide polycrisis. The Israeli state’s actions and the U.S.’s complicity should be roundly discussed. Yet, such discussion is often deliberately chilled, especially under the absurd International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism recently passed by the San Diego City Council, which conflates criticism of the state of Israel or the ideology of Zionism with antisemitism. 

 Those who organized last week’s event, and Bartov himself, were defending that discussion, standing up for academic freedom, free speech, and justice everywhere.