The Nero Effect: Are We Jews Distracted by Claims of Genocide while Judaism is Burning?
Omer Bartov and Yuval Harari on Genocide and Judaism
We all know the apocryphal story that the Emperor Nero “fiddled” while Rome was burning in the Great Fire of 64 CE. The story, of course, is a myth, the fiddle wasn’t invented until centuries later, and although Nero was well-known for his musical talent on the lyre, he was not likely playing it during the blaze that threatened his empire. Whatever its origins, the story has become a symbol for the lack of concern for crisis or, perhaps, a lack of attentiveness, even care, to what is happening around us.
I kept coming back to Nero as I read Omer Bartov’s op-ed in The New York Times, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I know Genocide When I See It” (NYT July 15, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html) and listened to Yuval Harari’s interview on “Unholy: Levi and Freedland” about the impact of Gaza on Judaism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD7YOmqENTM). In fact, I think it was Bartov and Harari together that brought me back to Nero. Below I offer some reflection of what I am calling a “Nero moment” for the Jews.
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First, who are Omer Bartov and Yuval Harari?
Omer Bartov (full disclosure, we are friends, and recently did a documentary together called, “How Did Israel Win the West?”) is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Born and raised in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University, and serving in the IDF. Bartov’s work on genocide, the Holocaust, and Nazism is respected worldwide. He is the author of eights books and many scholarly and topical essays on genocide and genocide studies. His forthcoming book, with FS&G is Israel: What Went Wrong (2025).
Yuval Harari was born and raised in Israel and trained at the Hebrew University. He is a military historian, and a historian of technology, economics and politics. His popular book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) talks about what he calls the “cognitive revolution” of early humans and how we developed into who we are today. He has lately been writing about AI and the future of humanity. He does not often speak about Israel and thus his comments on “Unholy” were especially noteworthy.
Pairing Bartov and Harari, two Israelis living in the US, each of whom have deep roots in Israeli society and each of whom in some way identify as Zionists, creates an interesting frame of what I am calling the “Nero Effect.” Each focus on a different aspect of the implications of the destruction of Gaza through a wide lens. I intentionally do not use the word “war” here because, with Bartov and Harari, I do not think there is a war in Gaza any longer. Rather, there is a systemic destruction of a society, what Keith Doubt calls “sociocide” in his book by that name in 2020. Whether it reaches the bar of genocide or not is the topic of Bartov’s essay, but not at all part of Harari’s remarks, as we will see.
Bartov’s essay, placed as a featured op-ed in The New York Times, has predictably raised intense resistance from Israel’s defenders as a legitimate exercise in self-defense and even from many who are critical of the war but refuse to view it as genocide. The resistance is largely pro forma at this point: try to focus on omissions (he did not mention October 7 enough, or he didn’t use sufficient horrific adjectives in describing October 7), he equivocates on points of legality (this is a fair critique but needs legal argumentation which is rarely given), he cites those such as Francesca Albanese who pro-Israelists deem “antisemitic” (true or not is a matter of debate) and thus his view has an “agenda,” or perhaps the most common critique of all, that Bartov is being used by anti-Zionists and antisemites against Israel and thus he is aiding and abetting antisemitism. I saw one social media post that implied that Bartov himself was an antisemite (made by an American Jew who recently moved to Israel and somehow has taken upon themselves the mantel of the “Israeli voice”).
This is all common fare. My question to such detractors is twofold: first, are Bartov’s critics claiming that Gaza isn’t genocide, or are they claiming that Gaza can’t be genocide. There is a fine but substance distinction here. To those (non-experts in what constitutes genocide) who reflexively discount Bartov, whose analysis is based on a deep knowledge of the subject (agree or disagree with his conclusions), my question is: what in your mind would convince you that what is happening in Gaza is, in fact, genocide? Where is the line that one crosses from devastation, even war crimes, to genocide, in your assessment? I venture to think that for many, no such line exists, because if one listens to Israeli politicians and pundits openly claim the intent to destroy Gaza completely (which has largely been accomplished), watch videos, or see photographs of utter destruction, death, and disease, and talk to many (not all) international law experts, that line seems quite clear. That is, if you believe there is, or can be, a line at all.
I once asked someone I casually know, an ardent Zionist, “what could Israel do that would cause you not to support it?”. He was silent for a moment before looking at me and said, “Nothing.”
And here perhaps we can invoke Israeli exceptionalism via the Holocaust to suggest that its exceptional status creates a reality where Israel as a perpetrator of genocide is simply not possible. Not. Possible. But if Israel aspires to be “like all the nations,” arguably the raison d’etre of Zionism, then of course it can perpetrate genocide. As the Israel philosopher and gadfly Yeshayahu Leibowitz said in the 1980s, “there is no reason why Israel cannot also become Pharoah.”
In Bartov’s case, the “Nero Effect” is that all the predictable and reflexive resistance to the genocide claim, is Nero’s “fiddle.” It drowns out the devastation, the death, the child amputees, or tacitly justifies it all, calling it “the sad consequences of war,” or quickly turn to antisemitism, either as the motivation of the writer, or the effect of their conclusion. It may be the case that scholars like Bartov are being used as fodder by antisemites. But what if, in fact, what is happening in Gaza is by any reasonable metric, genocide? Should we, can we, deny that? And what are the consequences? This is part of the tension of many who claim Israel to be “normal” and “exceptional” simultaneously.
Bartov’s discussion about Holocaust education is the most overlooked yet one of the more salient points in his op-ed. We are facing a crucial moment in Jewish history, what is sometimes called the era of “the last survivor.” We, or certainly our children, will witness the passing of the last survivor of the Nazi genocide. How will the Holocaust be taught, how will it be remembered, and what place will it take in Jewish history when it is no longer a living memory? This is not unusual. Blacks in America faced the same dilemma when, sometime in the 1960s, the last black person born into slavery passed away. Holocaust Historians and educators grapple with that, and for good reason. Bartov is suggesting that, to extend my metaphor, “playing the fiddle” with excuses and deflections and accusations while Gaza literally burns, will make Holocaust commemoration much more challenging. Bartov writes,
“Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity.”
Can we Jews continue to use the Holocaust as the standard of “Never Again!” against anyone, after Gaza? And can we reflexively deny, or justify, the atrocities of Gaza, even to the point of genocide, and yet enable Jews to continue to responsibly use the Holocaust as the motto of “Never Again”? I ask this as a serious question, not suggesting a comparison between two incomparable things. How will the Holocaust be taught after Gaza? To be clear, I am not suggesting we must agree with Bartov. One can wage a critical analysis of almost anything and, knowing Omer, I am sure he would welcome that informed critique. But that is not what I see happening. Rather, I see a dismissal, not according to analytic and intellectual criteria, but as an emotive expression of “No!” Not “no it isn’t” but tacitly “no, it can’t be!” Each critic of Bartov will have to assess this for themselves. Which one is it? It matters.
Bartov suggests at the end of his essay,
“Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity.”
This is a point that has been made by people from David Ben Gurion to Tom Segev, Jacob Neusner, and even Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer. Seriously owing up to what we have done to Gaza, not only to Gazans, but to Gaza itself, and not falling back on “the most victimized victim” narrative that stands at the core of Israeli exceptionalism, what Ismar Schorsch called in an essay in the 1980s “negative exceptionalism,” even as Israel is the only nuclear power in the region and has the US, still the most powerful country in the world, as a solid ally, may be a positive step forward. Stepping out of the shadow of catastrophe is no doubt difficult. But if looking away or justifying what we are doing in Gaza is a product of the that shadow, it may be necessary for the future of Israel. But unfortunately, the fiddle continues its well-rehearsed tune, in a predictable and sad refrain.
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Yuval Harari has thrown all this into a completely different register. In his brief interview on “Unholy” he goes where, to my knowledge, no one has publicly gone before. The crisis of Gaza, Harai argues, is not the existence of the state of Isreal, which will survive intact given its military prowess and allies. The real crisis, he states, is a deep spiritual crisis in Judaism. Harari claims that Gaza may be the biggest challenge facing the Jews since to destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Before one rolls their eyes in dismissal (“what about this, what about that?”) let’s examine Harari’s comment seriously. The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple was, at least as historically remembered, the loss of political power for the Jews. In truth, the Jews didn’t have much political power during the Second Temple, their biggest military success was likely the Hasmonean rebellion which was basically an insurrection against Seleucid domination. And its impact did not last that long. Foreign rule remained dominant for another few centuries.
Yet the entire framework of what we call Judaism that emerged in the wake of that destruction was a set of values and an ethos that, while not pacifist, eschewed the state violence to which the Jews were victim, and developed a way of surviving catastrophe through living in a covenantal promise of divine protection through fidelity to Torah. The rabbinic hero was Rabbi Akiva, who died as a martyr for the preservation of Torah, and not Bar Kokhba, who rebelled militarily against Rome.
And even when that ethos of covenant was challenged with Zionism which was in many ways a revolutionary subversion of that “covenant of exile,” (and many Zionists openly acknowledged that) many early Zionists believed that they could build a society that would not replicate Rome or the empires where Jews resided, they would not do to others what was done to them. They believed they could create something quite different. While the challenges of statecraft made that difficult - some would say impossible - one could argue the project maintained a semblance of the older ethos born of powerlessness even in the new state of power. The popular adage “shooting and crying” in the wake of the Six-Day War may be an example. For the most part, soldiers are not “shooting and crying” in Gaza. They are just shooting.
Harari suggests this venerable tradition could be wiped away in Gaza. Israel fought wars before and, as Benny Morris and others have showed, did some nefarious things in those wars, but Harari claims Gaza is different, and I think he may be right. This is because, as I mentioned above, Gaza may have started as a war, but it is no longer a war, it is the destruction of an entire society.
This is what I think Harari means. He claims this is an inflection point that reaches back to the very transformation of 2000 years of Judaism. Why? Because what threatens to replace a project of legitimate self-determination is emerging as a state of supremacist domination. Is this act of domination justified? Certainly, all states of domination are justified.
These inclinations existed in Zionism before, most recently in Meir Kahane. But let us remember that the Israeli Parliament in 1985, both left and right, rejected Kahane, even legislating a “Racism Law” to remove him from the government. Today, however, Kahane’s specter is more apparent than ever, and not only on the radical right. The premise of Kahane’s position was that whatever liberals say and do, in time, they too will recognize that the Arab question (he preferred Arab to Palestinian) is a zero-sum game. He gets this in part from Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay “The Iron Wall.” Today “zero-sum-gameism” is not a radical position, in fact, it has become quite normative. And zero-sum-gameism” is Kahanism. Domination is not a solution to inequality; it is the instantiation of inequality. And while it may succeed, the price is very high.
As I understand him, Harari is arguing that with the fusion of Judaism and pro-Israelism in many circles, Gaza threatens Judaism itself, transforming 2000 years of Jewish ingenuity and genius. The Church Father Tertullian first articulated “Athens and Jerusalem” when he asked, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” as a theological challenge. Many Jews such as Leo Strauss took this as a categorical distinction between two opposite civilizational models. Moses Hess and Lev Shemtov, borrowing from the New Testament (e.g. I Peter 5:13 et al) shifted it to “Rome and Jerusalem,” (both have books with the title Rome and Jerusalem). In the case of Hess making a case for Zionism that would decidedly not be “Rome.” Is that correct in 2025?
Harari is claiming there is another kind of “fiddling” going on, and it may be the debates about genocide and the “existential crisis” of the state, while Judaism is burning around it. It is an arresting thought, but one that resonates with me as a scholar and practitioner of Judaism. What if to protect the state one truly must transform Judaism as we know it? What if that is already happening? What if Judaism as we know it is no longer the foundation of the state, but the servant of the state? What if the “and” in Rome and Jerusalem becomes an “is”? Can we understand the growing young Jewish rejection of Zionism in some circles as precisely that sentiment; does “Not in Our Name” mean “This is Not Our Judaism.” Are we missing the forest for the trees. Is the real question not the state, but Judaism itself?
Again, for many Israel defenders all this is categorically impossible. Why? Because Israel, like the Jews, is always the victim, never the perpetrator. This is what Yehuda Bauer critically called the “mystification” of the Holocaust. But that may be the fiddle talking. There is nothing, not our history and not even the Holocaust, that will definitively prevent us from becoming our worst selves. Leibowitz said that in the 1980s and people laughed at him.
As Harari noted, “This is not a prophecy,” nor a foregone conclusion, but it is certainly a possibility if Israel doesn’t change course. But perhaps those reflexive detractors of Bartov, or those engaged in increasingly unfathomable Gaza denial, are like someone in the passenger seat of a car holding the wheel against the will of the driver as the car careens toward a cliff. The cliff, however, may not be the fate of the state. The state, as Harari argues correctly in my view, will survive. Rather, the cliff is a 2000-year-old wisdom tradition called Judaism.
This entire debate is flawed. Whatever Bartov’s motive may be, he does little beyond repeating the case that South Africa has presented before the ICJ - including the same distortions and misrepresentations of comments by Israeli officials - that South Africa itself has lost faith in. Why else has it now argued that the Court should depart from several decades of case law and suddenly expanded the legal definition of the crime itself. In so doing, South Africa is following in the footsteps of both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who, quite surreptitiously, redefined the term “genocide” before then finding Israel guilty under their new and broader definition. This is not an intellectually serious approach.
The facts on the ground don’t sustain any claim of genocide as understood in the international convention and the caselaw. The Hamas generated casualty numbers have been disputed by statisticians so much that in the numbers more recent iteration, it turns out that some 70% are men of combat age. Also, the latest demographic numbers support that state of affairs. There is no random distribution of death among Gazans, something that would be expected were Israeli targeting to be indiscriminate.
And, of course, were genocide the objective, it’s hard to understand why Israel would so far sacrifice nearly 900 soldiers while helping feed the population rather than flattening Gaza through aerial and artillery bombardements. After all, it was Egypt with the support of most of the world community that sealed its border and prevented Gazans from seeking refuge - unlike the experience of Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion that had a clear ethnic cleansing angle to it.
Every Western military expert who has examined IDF tactics up close find a model to learn from if not emulate. For them, the claim of genocide is laughable as a factual matter and unsustainable under the Laws of Armed Conflict.
And notwithstanding his mandatory stint in the IDF, Bartov seems to know nothing at all about IDF targeting choices and the many levels of review (including legal) before approval is given. Indeed, all he is really doing is telling Hamas and every future terror army that their tactic of embedding within the civilian infrastructure and willfully sacrificing civilians is a winning strategy against Western democracies.
Of course, Hamas as a fighting force or its strategy doesn’t appear in his analysis. It’s almost as if it’s the IDF versus unarmed Gazans which self-evidently is not what happening. But this cherry-picking and faulty framing ultimately undermines Bartov’s analysis. It could be said that the Nazis fought two wars simultaneously, the one against the Allied forces and one against the Jews of Europe. In fact, the latter seemed to have been the priority toward war’s end. Nothing remotely similar can be said of Israel’s response to October 7. Its fight is with Hamas and the latter’s decision to fight among, behind and under its civilians while eschewing uniforms (all war crimes) creates the scenario for civilian casualties - which, even now, are at an historically low civilian to combatant ratio - another proof of no genocide.
What we do have is a “genocide” for those who like to use scare quotes to denote something other than the real thing. Yet the impact of the false allegation reverberates throughout the world, bringing on the foreseeable consequences of scattering such seeds on a fertile bed of lightly slumbering antisemitism. How else to explain attacks on non-Israeli Jews, their places of worship and their places of business?
But to say there is only a “war” now going on in Gaza approaches a willful blindness to the facts and context of Hamas breaking the permanent ceasefire in place the morning of October 7.
We now know from Hamas documents that the invasion was supposed to be part of a multi-front attack on Israel. The coordination seems to have failed for a variety of reasons, among which seems to be Iran’s decision to preserve Hezbollah as its shield for its nuclear aspirations rather than a sword to assist Hamas.
While many pretend to support Israel’s right to defend itself, October 7 has changed the calculus. Now the threat itself must be eliminated and in Gaza that means Hamas must be destroyed the way the Nazis were in Germany.
Perhaps the more interesting question is one only Bartov can know: why the desire to lower the standards of the internationally recognized crime of genocide, thereby undermining his own specialty.
And his protest to the contrary in his recent op-ed in The NY Times notwithstanding, the charge of genocide is not one he reached after long thought and painful reflection. It was one he first intimated only a few weeks after Hamas orgy of violence on October 7, 2023.
Thank you. I'm sharing this with a team of Jewish Israelis, Palestinians from Israel and the West Bank and others who are involved in Nonviolent Communication initiatives there. I would like to add to the important points you articulate that it is crucial to use this understanding to generate empathy for the millions of people who just can't absorb the shocking and dismal precipice where we now stand. Not to meet the hatred and violence and supremacy with more of the same.