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”.
I think the “mistake” started with the formation of Israel. I can understand the founding of their state after WWII, and their desire for a place where they can live without persecution. But, the location was a huge mistake if the goal was “peace”.
Dropping them in the middle of their Holy Land? Automatic war for as long as they are there. Now, many are under the impression that they really are “God’s Chosen People” and all of their desired “Holy Land” righteously belongs to them.
I think what is happening today was the desired outcome of Israel’s foundation. USA and UK were perfectly fine with the Jews and Muslims fighting to the death, no matter who “wins”, whatever is left will be all the easier for them (Christians incidentally) to control.
personally, I am opposed to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, to me there are no “good guys” to be found in the “Holy Land”.
ETA Israel is a nuclear power now, remember that when you propose “solutions”.
being vaguely on the right side of one of easiest human rights issues humanity has ever faced and writing a book about it does not make this guy an expert. His looking for causes outside to explain the zionists as victims and not owners and perpetratos is weak sauce.
No one becomes an expert based on their opinions or conclusions. In this case, he became an expert through his Oxford PhD, and subsequent 35 year long (and counting) academic career,
He’s a historian. Looking for causes is kind of his job.
What makes someone an “expert”, what’s the bar? Who do you think qualifies as an expert?
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.
don’t know if there’s a reasonable way out.
the way out need not be reasonable for the zionists. They are not due “reasonableness” at this point. Justice and peace needs to be restorative to the victims, not reasonable in the eyes of the criminals. The dead cant be brought back can they? How are zionists going to find a way out of that, beyond paying with their own blood? We’re all open to their suggestions, but they arent even interested in coming to the table and never have been.
and
If there had been no Netanyahu
Go back and read about ben gurion and the start of Israel. Its never been reasonable, they always knew they were using terorristic means, theft and murder. They used to be more honest about it. Netenyahu is just the latest in 90 years of these violent supremecist murdering thieves.
https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quotes-their-polemical-uses-abuses/
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.
Theres open repression even in free speech societies too, that if you talk about this in too strong of terms, they will attack you and the people you love. The more they are allowed to continue, the more they will seek to exert global influence on all of humanity. They need to be stopped.
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.
Opinion on zionism has moved over time. Zionism started out as fringe around 1900, but now its the overwhelming majority opinion across judaism.
Also, 86% of American Jews (the vast majority of Jews – about 85% are in the US or Israel) think Israel is necessary for the Jewish people. They may hold a handkerchief to their noses at “all the stuff currently going on”, but israeli terrorism, theft, abuse and repression has been going on unbroken since the founding of israel and the nakba-- farther even-- since the ottoman empire withdrew from owning that territory for 800 years, even, at the end of WW1. They cant have it both ways. If they support the existence of israel, they explicitely support the existence as its been since it started. Since day 1 of its existence there has never been a humanitarian israel rooted in equality or basic human rights, and there never will be such an Israel. So that 86% (and sure, thats not all ) supports genocide but lacks the courage to say so. We can call it genocide-lite.
I think survey results show pretty clearly that a huge majority want the outcome of genocide but dont want to be seen supporting it. They love the idea of Israel but find the deaths of other regretable, and are happy to talk your ear off about how its inconvenient for them and how afraid they are-- as if that could hold a candle to whats been done to the innocent people Israel wanted land from. Their theory is that the real vicitms here are them, even as a vast majority of them explicitly or implicitly support genocide, often from existences of day to day 110% safety-- more than any other minotiry group-- where they may only ever experience having to deal with a political opinion on a blog that they find objectionable, which they feel like they can then frame as a bodily attack on their very existence.
What needs to happen is some form of adult government installed in the Levant, not the theocratic fascist ethnostate that is Israel. A violent ethnostate is going to continue to cause global terror and mass conflict. They cant be permitted to rule, because they have shown the world they cant be trusted to do it without rampant murder.
“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.
No one cares what Israel wants anymore. Why are you catering to murderers? Could it be that you are on their side?
If someone knocks on your door, panthera, and says they will kill your entire family but they will settle for just eating your little girl, you sound like the type of person to push the girl out the door to them instead of grabbing a weapon and doing whats actually right.
A better analogy would be someone offers this person a vacant lot, in exchange this person would own the place I’m living in.
Why are you catering to murderers
But Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been murdering each other in the Holy Land for many centuries.
They’re all murderers. What participant has clean hands?
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.
Israel will not fund the recreation of Palestine and the US will back Israel. Remember, the article said that pro-Israel donors have an influence on US politics.
The US also supported Nazi Germany until very late in the game. Germany also had(maybe still do?) reparations to Israel for the Holocaust. There also reparations placed on Germany after WW1(which played a large role in WWII, but seperate story) and one of my main reasoning to put Jews, especially Israeli Jews, on conservatorship, is because of the donor strangehold on America. Saying they won’t, is a pretty good indication that it’s a good punishment though.
It is probably illegal in the US to put Jews on conservatorship.
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.
But there is no choice. Israel doesn’t want a Palestinian state.
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?
Not only nuclear capable but Israel is the most powerful country in the Middle East.
Israel is the size of Vermont. Its only powerful because of bribes.
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.
To the contrary, they could have their own land. I don’t think Egypt would give them the land but may allow it as a state within Egypt.
They do have their own land. Israel has stolen it.
