Israeli historian Omer Bartov, a specialist in World War II and the Holocaust, considered the ongoing offensive against the Palestinians "an operation whose goal is to destroy the ability of Palestinians to live in this region as a group." "And by my definition, it is a genocide," said the Brown University (Rhode Island) professor when asked about the current situation in the Middle East.

A critic of the Israeli government, Bartov accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of wanting "any criticism of Israel to be immediately transformed into an anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic argument." According to him, "the occupation creates dehumanization. That's what it does. It doesn't just dehumanize those you occupy, it dehumanizes the occupiers." Asked about the Holocaust, the historian replied: "You can't understand anything in history without making comparisons," he said. "If you say the Holocaust is unique, nothing like it happened before, nothing like it happened after. It ceases to be a historical event, it becomes metaphysical," he added.