Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.
Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.
Bartov did more than simply apply the word genocide to Israel’s actions: he shouted it from the establishment-media rooftops, making the case in a lengthy July 2025 essay in the New York Times titled: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. (He had addressed some of the arguments in a Guardian essay the year prior.) Bartov’s declaration cost him several close relationships, he told me, even though subsequent events have not only validated his analysis but further demonstrated the lack of concern for Palestinian suffering that has become prevalent in Israeli society.
His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, is an attempt to explain that indifference. The book, which was published on Tuesday, is a detailed account of how Israel was transformed from a hopeful nation that in its founding document promised “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex” into one intent on what he bluntly terms “settler colonialism and ethno-nationalism”.
This was an interesting read.
Especially his speculation that lack of a clear constitution (Basic Law was adopted as late as 1994 and is not a full-fledged constitution) and lack of clear borders contributed to Israel’s fall into the current state.
Too generous US “security assistance” certainly helped. If you can solve a problem with bombing without worrying about getting bombed, you may start thinking of war as a normal thing.
Failure to contain the populist extreme right is another stumbling block. If there had been no Netanyahu (and his corruption scandals, and the court cases awaiting him domestically, filed a considerable time before the ones awaiting abroad), things might be different.
Ultimately, I would say: Israel failed to install brakes, and failed to contain its greed for power and land. It had too much cooperation and still has too much cooperation.
I don’t know if there’s a reasonable way out.
Zionism was a White Jewish Supremacist ideology from the very start and Israel was a White Jewish Supremacist and Colonialist project from the very start.
It didn’t become so, it was always so and always meant to be so, the only thing that changed was the feeling of impunity to push-back from Western nations as, over time, Israel invested a lot abroad into capturing Politics and the Press, into Kompromat gattering Honeypots such as the one headed by Epstein, and into in Propaganda, especially in Anglo-Saxon nations, thus capturing the political classes there and shifting Western public opinion in favor of Israel. As that feeling of impunity increased, so did they more freely, openly and violently practiced their ethno-Fascist (same variant of Fascism as the Nazis) ultra-racist ideology against those they very openly called “vermin” - Muslims in general, especially Palestinians.
They have and always have had, as they themselves say, “Western Values”, specifically late 19th century white colonialist values and early 20th century white supremacist ones.
PS: And if anybody has any doubt on the White part of their supremacist ideology, just look up the treatment of Black Jews from Ethiopia by the state of Israel, which included amongst other things forced sterilization.
Who would have thought that the lesson they learned from the Holocaust was to Pay It Forward?
Better to say “has become”. The genocide is on going. We all just act as we can to try to stop it.
Israel went wrong before it began. There is no way of displacing a population to create an ethnonationalist colony in a way that could be called “right”.
Note that several prominent Jews, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, opposed the creation of a Jewish state in a 1948 letter, warning of fascism and comparing the precursor of Likud to the Nazi party.
“Became”
There were idealistic, non- (or at least less) ethnochauvinist strands of Zionism through most if its history, alongside the colonialist, genocidal factions. Those less toxic groups have been disempowered and marginalized, and now the thugs dominate.
Some (and I’m among them) are of the view that, regardless of the benign motivations of some, the logic of colonialism and single-ethnicity nationalism will always cause it to reach this end state. Using an example from the Americas, there were priests among the conquistadors who opposed the genocide of the Aztecs. They were well-meaning people who wrote some nice books. The genocide still happened.
Haven’t read the book, but the title suggests things could have been different. That something happened to make things bad. If that’s the argument, it is completely wrong. Israel could have turned out no other way. Extermination is the only possible outcome of a colonial ethno-state.
This is my proposal to end the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Egypt will be given the West Bank enlarged by land equivalent to the Gaza Strip. In return, Israel will be given the Gaza Strip and land at least 3 times larger than the West Bank in the Sinai Peninsula. Some of the land will be adjacent to water so Israel can build desalination plants. The Sinai is inhospitable, and Egypt doesn’t have the technology to develop it, but Israel does. With its new land, Egypt can give it to the Palestinians, make it a state within Egypt, or whatever it wants.
Israel wants land. This is a way of giving it land without harming the Palestinians.
Counter proposal. Israel prosecutes the IDF solders that carried out the Hannibal Directive and killed all those Israeli Jews on Oct 7th to false flag their nation into committing a genocide against a semite population. For 14 months before Oct 7th, there were constant protests in Tel Aviv about Bibi’s corruption. It’s a bit late to send him to jail over that, but it’s long past time to send him to the Hague and at the very least put him in an electeic chair for his crimes against humanity. And much the same way Germany was funding Israel for all the years for the Holocaust, Israel needs to fund the recreation of Palestine, and much the same way Germany wasn’t allowed a large military after WW2, Jews, especially those in Israel, can’t be allowed to control money for the same time period. Their own, or anybody else’s.
How about we give the Palestinians their homeland back, and israel can be remade in america, since so many of the settlers have american passports, if we’re giving away any random country’s land to capitulate to this genocidal state?
Your plan is Aesop’s Fable, The Mice in Council. See https://aesopsfables.org/F184_The-Mice-in-Council.html
So you agree that the state of israel is a murderous one, and your solution is to give them the land of the people they murder with impugnity and celebrate the deaths of with champagne?
Read my proposal. Egypt would own the West Bank enlarged by land equivalent to the Gaza Strip, which would be given to Israel.
I understand your proposal, but wholeheartedly reject it at its premise.
It involves giving land that is historically Palestinian, to countries that are not Palestine.
How arrogant. That land isn’t ours to give.
No, it’s up to Egypt and Israel.
No, fascist. It’s up to Palestine. The country that existed before the 1930s. The country where people of multiple religions, Muslim, Christian and Jewish peacefully lived together until Churchill and the brits decided (under pressure from political groups) to sell land they didn’t own to a group with no claim to it.
It’s not up to the people killing civilians, it’s not up to Europe, its not up to the US, it is and has always been Palestine.
Palestinians have no power so they can’t decide.
And why is it that they don’t have power?
Is it because a nuclear capable occupation holds them under what can only described as an apartheid system?
You’ve placed the same copy paste blurp multiple times now, and predictably everyone votes you down bectyour idea is just horribly stupid
There could be new people joining the community and others who never read it. People are dying. I offer a solution.
You offer erasure of a people. Nothing more.
