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”.

  • PepperoniNipple@lazysoci.al
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    6 hours ago

    Terrible proposal. I have a better solution: Normal people around the world should keep punishing Zionists. Whether that is opening their heads to the truth and move on, or educate them if possible.

    TLDR: The more people see how disgusting Zionists are, like you when you posted this comment in another post: “The difference could be the context. Waving Palestinian flags as part of a protest is different than a winner from Israel displaying the Israeli flag. There’s nothing wrong with an Olympic athlete running around with its nation’s flag after a win,” the more they will reject them, bully them, avoid giving them a job, avoid helping them, and so on. I am seeing it happen in my city here in Mexico, the local Jews and people who support Israel are being shamed heavily in public and online, and I personally don’t feel like interfering. They can’t use the Holocaust or October 7 as a defense or excuse anymore.

    Interacting with Zionists fucking sucks. Like, you literally said “there is nothing wrong with celebrating having killed at least 72,000+ innocent people and about 200 journalists as a response to an attack that only killed 1,200 of your people” with your comment about waving the flag. Watching Israel’s actions from afar is like watching a big brother abusing its little brothers. A big brother that was literally born with an extreme level of narcissism and psychopathy in its brain, 2 traits of the Dark Triad, the ones that make you a sadist that releases dopamine only when you see others suffer first. That’s what we’re dealing with everywhere.

    And then you look at its past, and it’s so weird, how obvious the ape-behavior it is: Israel, which is a White Jew Supremacist project (super clearly now. Mask went off in October 8, when you decided to do more than 70+ October 7s on Palestine), was sooo humiliated by Germany in WWII, another white supremacist project, one that actually convinced the world that “they are the good ones,” blue-eyed, blonde, attractive, sexy, like high elves from a fantasy novel, while Jews are always depicted as greedy ugly ass goblins… The fact the USA and most of the world did not really gave a fuck about Jews, they only joined the war to stop the Nazis, not really liberate or save the Jews as we don’t really do that anywhere, not with the Uyghurs, or everything done in the Middle East under the excuse it is “to save them from the terrorists” has been an obvious unsuccessful lie. To still think all Muslims have some kind of gene or thing in their culture that makes them hate America or Israel “for no good reason. Magically, out of nowhere, hence the reason we must kill them all!” is just pathetic. It’s the worst gamble I have seen an entire culture do. They literally just signed their death. People will remember them the same way they remember those tribes made up of irrational violent cannibals that were eradicated in the past. That’s how the Jewish culture and religion will be remembered thanks to their relentless support and loyalty to Netanyahu, and they are too brainwashed with the supremacist ideology, by narcissism and pride, that they refuse to see that, so, they continue to further doom the future of their culture by making everyone hate it today.

    Like, dude. I hate Hitler, I hate Nazis so fucking much, I hate MAGAs so much. I am a Mexican Lebanese who lost family in Lebanon, Palestine and here in Mexico to the USA and Israel, yet I am aware that Jew != Zionist. American != MAGA. That there are good chill cool Jews out there, genuine innocent ones, despite what the polls online say. I am capable of giving my hand and helping those who actually care about Humanity as a whole, not just a single culture, group or whatever. Yet, Zionists like you have made me think and whisper to myself, out of anger, out of control and heat of the moment for seeing something so blatantly evil like Zionists celebrating the deaths of babies or Palestinian children, attacking Ms Rachel, dude, Ms Fucking Rachel; it’s like attacking Elmo, which you’re also doing because he did this…, you have made me think: “What if Hitler was right? What if Hitler was the good guy? What if Nazis, who are bitter they lost, who got recruited by the USA through Operation Paperclip, etc., put Netanyahu there to make Jews look bad and further discredit and attempt to destroy the culture in the long-term?” and so much nonsense like that, and for that, fuck you.

    The entire world hates you and you just suffered what you call “the worst crime against Humanity, ever,” the Holocaust, no more than 100 years ago; so, you took all that rage and resentment on your smaller, vulnerable brothers, the Arabs and Muslims, through the Nakba, 2 years after the Holocaust ended. Only 2 years later and you were already cosplaying the mustache yourselves. Only 2 years and the rape victim became the rapist like Psychology says it happens. You have never attacked or done anything to the Germans, and I always found that weird. You behave like chimps or apes who respect the “strongest” and attack the weak to climb ranks. It’s pathetic, and so is religion, which is being used as an excuse for a lot of this behavior. “This land was promised to us!” my balls, it was not. Jesus never meant that, no holy book implies that shit either. It was some stupid random British politician whose name I forgot who said that to win your vote. And it worked so well, you decided to carry that lie and repeat it until it sounded confidently real so you don’t have to admit that you were fooled.

    The only culture I have respect for is the entirety of Humanity. If you are someone who wants to see only one culture thrive over others, be it the American one, Mexican, Canadian, English, African, Russian, Jewish, Indian, Chinese, Japanese… Whichever it is, you fucking suck and I think you are worthless. You are not a human being to me unless you are someone who doesn’t give a fuck about borders or nations anymore. They are just lines and pieces of land people decided to mark because we are still not ready to live as a community, we still are an empire, divided and whatnot. It sucks, but I understand Humanity is also like an entity, like a person. We all make up its personality, we are all a “piece of God’s personality.” If we all died, there would be no one to praise God, and if he replaced us with new humans, that’d not be real love. So, we are God. Heaven and hell are what we make Earth to be. And to me, cultures and societies can be analyzed the same way you analyze a human being: when they are children, they are more prone to making mistakes and also come across as cold or brutally honest, because children don’t know how to measure right or wrong yet. Today, countries seem to behave like edgy teenagers.

    Imagine a caveman during the first years human beings existed or appeared, when there was no language. We were fucking violent, we would rape, pillage, kill; but even those cavemen realized that forming communities and villages was the right answer to survive and live a better life, and thanks to those peaceful, better-hearted cavemen, today we have cities, better tech, air conditioners, computers, videogames, etc., instead of still living in caves like dumb violent animals. It was thanks to those human beings with a drive to build that we are here, not those who only want to destroy, like Zionists or Nazis, who are eugenicists with extra steps. You want to get rid of all black people, brown people, Muslims, Arabs, Africans, Asians too. You want everyone to be white and the same as you. That leads to inbreeding, though. That leads to a boring world with no diversity, no variety, no colors; and you’d still have the exact same problems you have today, but no more Muslims or immigrants to blame because you killed them all, so, you start creating divisions among yourselves: the tall vs the short, hairy vs bald, those with blue eyes, those with certain tones of white skin, etc. You are fucking pathetic, and I am tired of tolerating pathetic intolerant fucks like you. The reality is that, good people need to grow a pair of balls and learn how to be more harsh and punish those who are dragging us back so much, like Netanyahu. If we actually lived in a utopia, someone like Netanyahu would’ve been punished very harshly by the entire world already.

    But it’s us. We haven’t really punished anyone in the Epstein files, or give a fuck enough to at least listen to what the scientists of Wuhan have to say about the accident they had with Covid, which ended killing what some sources say was minimum 7+ million people around the globe, with others saying it’s actually 16 - 35+ million, because it became so hard to report accurate numbers during the pandemic… People still cannot decide whether it was a bat, or an accident in the lab. And if it was an accident in the lab, how come we are not questioning or putting more attention on every single employee of that lab? It’s so crazy how easy it was to convince people to ignore such a massive punch. Did we even interview them? Ask them what they think about having caused maybe 30+ million deaths? That is 5x times the Holocaust, in just 2 years mind you, around the entire globe. We are not even sure or heard if they will do something so that doesn’t happen again, what the fuck? We let them go so easily, so peacefully, why?

    Just accept the fact that Zionism is going to die. No way that garbage, along Judaism, Christianity, maybe Buddhism and all religions will die or become the next Santa Claus, one we use to teach good manners and values to children, but then tell them it was fake or forced. “God is what we make it to be,” “you don’t need religion to be a good person,” etc. I keep hearing nothing but negative things about religions everywhere, everyday. They create idiots that behave like MAGAs. They make religious people sound like perpetual Ruby Frankes. F off

    • panthera_@lemmy.today
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      49 minutes ago

      Show me where I approved of Israel killing 72,000 Gazans. My proposal would end the Israeli Palestinian conflict with no casualties.