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”.
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.