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”.
Right, Israel is the original sin of the post war political nation state concept, established under misguided but understandable circumstances as the least terrible option among a host of really bad options. The current apartheid state was not an inevitability, even if it was predictable. The world isn’t perfect but it isn’t evil either, and the goal should always just be to do better, not worse.
This is why the current conversation about Zionism makes me uncomfortable. This awkward rhetorical alliance between the far right and far left is not helping anyone. At the same time, there are real and extremely serious problems which need to be discussed, but which are being blown out by the use of a completely overloaded term which has a long history I think many who throw it around simply do not appreciate. It’s simply unnecessary, as there are many easy to articulate criticisms of Israel which do not carry the same baggage.
Israel is subjugating Gaza, and arguably perpetuating a genocide, and that deserves a level of intellectual treatment which isn’t drenched in language historically tied to neo Nazis, and this seems like such obvious low hanging fruit that I can’t help but be concerned that it is intentional.