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”.
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.
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?
How arrogant. That land isn’t ours to give.
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.
