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”.
and the 100 years of terrorism when they started moving back didn’t help
sigh
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”.
1945: A part of Germany should have been disposessed, a jewish state founded on this territory, and this Jewish state given nuclear arms, in case any fuckin Kraut ever had “ideas” again. End of story. Would have saved Jewish people and the Palestinian people a lot of horror. Would have saved me as a German many fuckin bonkers discussions with German bigots who all are so conveniently defending a jewish state (not on their land).
Israel didn’t form because of WWII or because of Germany. The big aliyah waves started in the 1800s, and the Holocaust just accelerated what was already in motion. The Soviet Union, the Ottoman Empire, the colonized Arab areas of North Africa were all extremely antisemitic, just as much as Germany. The only difference is that Hitler made mass murder industrial.
But it did… UK and USA created the state in 1948?
They wanted Israel before WWII, but US/UK/UN formed it, and they did so because of WWII. The Jews always wanted their Holy Land, of course.
Nope, Jews were living peacefully side by side Muslims in Arab countries in pre-Israel times. This is confirmed by Holocaust scholars like Omer Bartov. Antisemitism is historically something deeply European. It has been exported to Arab countries. Most notoriously via Amin al-Husseini. Israel would never have been founded the way it was, i.e. as a jewish ethno-state or maybe would not have been founded at all without the Holocaust.
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Sorry, but ethno-states are a flat-out bad idea.
Actually, the Palestinian people initially welcomed the Jewish diaspora with open arms and were totally willing to live alongside them. But Zionism is a fascist ideology, so of course the Zionists could not live equally, they had to have domination.
“Actually” what? I didn’t imply otherwise… if every Palestinian moved to Egypt tomorrow, the war would continue… Israel would continue to expand.
See “Greater Israel”.
Your comment sounded like you believe Jewish people couldn’t coexist in the region, which is untrue, the problem is the Israeli state, which exists to be a proxy for western imperialism.
My apologies if I misunderstood.
There’s definitely no good guys. If you read into the history of the region, you’ll quickly realize that there was never a “rightful” or “righteous” ruler. The ancient Persians, the Romans, the Turks, the Assyrians, the Arabs, the British, and the Israeli Jews have all been horrid. Genocide, oppression, slavery, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, deep seated hatred, and the idea of “if I don’t do fuck them over first then they’ll come after me” is the norm in this cursed region.
This is liberal whitewashing. There are colonisers and there are the natives who are being exterminated. Its that simple.
That’s precisely the issue though. You’re dismissing important nuance and context for an oversimplified soundbites. That’s just willful ignorance. If you’re not even willing to entertain the idea of being honest then this conversation is not for you.
Where is the nuance in the Nakba? Or the Deir Yassin massacre? or the Gaza Genocide? The Zionists stole the land and are exterminating the native Palestinians, either slowly, through apartheid and land seizures, or quickly, through mass murder and ethnic cleansing.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
I think you need to reread the original comment you replied to because you don’t seem to understand what my claim even was
Your original comment amounts to “they’re all as bad as each other so why even worry about it”.
Its another version of “its all so complicated” or “both sides are to blame” thats why I called it whitewashing
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thats BS. The turks made peace between a lot of tribes and kept the bloodshed down. Comparing them to Israel and pretending they are the same is way beyond the pale.
The Ottoman Turks? Are you an idiot?
The Ottoman Empire was one of the most violent and brutal empires in human history. They practiced slavery and had one of the largest slave trades in the world. They would go invade their weaker neighbors unprovoked to expand their empire. When they force the people they attacked into submission they’ll take “spoils of war” and distribute them among muslim soldiers and officials as instructed by islam. Therefore, they would steal the land, loot possession, and enslave people and hand them out as rewards for winning the war.
They would specifically kidnap and enslave young women and children either as servants or as sex slaves in harems. Everybody else gets a choice of either converting to islam or becoming a second class citizen under islamic law where you’re forced to have less rights, less freedoms, face more discrimination, and harsher punishments than muslims. Oh, and you have to pay an extra tax that muslims don’t have to pay (jizya) for the privileged of being oppressed.
They also colonize the lands that they conquer. They’ll kidnap and relocate the children elsewhere, they’ll give special benefits for muslims to settle the newly annexed lands, and they’ll forcefully exile or relocate the nonmuslims if they’re in the way of muslims colonizing the land. Oh, and the conquered people have zero representation at any institutional power if they’re not muslims, and they can’t hold a high ranking position if they’re not also Turkish. Therefore these nations were often ruled by muslim rulers who ruled had no interest or obligation for the natives, they were just there to serve and enrich themselves. Because of this, a lot of the conquered nations were subject some pretty horrid treatment.
Turkish rule is so brutal that Ottoman history was filled with conquered nations breaking out in revolts, some lasted centuries because they would rather fight to the death and than be ruled by the Turks. The thing is that the Turkish reaction to revolts is so extreme that it’s infamous in history. Instead of fighting to put down the revolt, the Turks would seek to genocide that society. They want to mass murder them, take their land, erase their culture, and pretend that it was always Turkish land. They did that with the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Jews, and Arab Christians.
The Ottoman genocides are some of the worst in history. The very concept of genocide was literally made to describe what the Turks did to the Armenians. This idea that the Ottoman empire was peaceful golden age is quite literally bullshit propaganda that’s funded by the Turkish government. There’s a reason why that empire collapsed, and there’s a reason why every single ethnic group in southeastern Europe, the Caucuses, and the Middle East despises it with a burning passion.
You would think that this something in the long past, right? But no. The Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides are barely a century old. Turkey today still officially denies these genocides. They’re still trying to genocide the Kurds to this day. Kurdish clothes, names, music, press, and language were outright banned until the 1990s. Even today, you can’t call Kurdish towns by their Kurdish names, they can’t speak Kurdish at any position in government, they don’t true Kurdish media, and Kurdish children can’t learn Kurdish in school. Not only that, but Turkey is also actively burning down entire Kurdish villages, they’re mass arresting Kurdish activists and journalists, they’re helping Azerbaijan invade Armenia, they’re invading and occupying the Assyrian and Kurdish parts of Syria, they’re literally illegally occupying and colonizing Northern Cyprus, they’re trying to steal Greek islands and maritime territory as their own, they’re constantly bombing Kurds in Iraq to keep them down, and the list goes on and on.
They’re the biggest menace in the middle east, and this is all just legacy that was carried over from the Ottoman Empire, who by the way is heavily supported and celebrated in Turkey. Not in some delusional sense where they have a different view from what it actually was, but not Turkish nationalists are actively proud of all the genocides, oppression, and conquering they inflected upon the world and they want to see Turkey do it again.
Thinking that the Ottoman Turks were peace makers is so fucking mind numbingly stupid that it’s painful to think that there are people this ignorant out there in the world.
Oh the long winded “Palestine desnt even really exist” zionist guy wants to spew comments. OK.
Give this a read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Ottoman_EmpireAnd you call out the Ottomans empires slavery. They abolished slavery in 1840. England in 1834. The US not till 1865 I think. You going to go after England and the US too then or is it only an issue in selective cases where its convenient for you?
Oh the long winded “Palestine desnt even really exist” zionist guy wants to spew comments. OK.
If that’s what you got from my comment then you really are an idiot.
Give this a read.
The article doesn’t contradict any of the points that I made.
And you call out the Ottomans empires slavery. They abolished slavery in 1840. England in 1834. The US not till 1865 I think. You going to go after England and the US too then or is it only an issue in selective cases where its convenient for you?
The Ottomans practiced slavery for 500 years and had one of the largest slave trades in history. Playing whataboutism doesn’t disprove my point, it just shows that you’re dimwit who’s engaging in bad faith.
Are you an idiot?
then you really are an idiot.
and you are a foul mouthed little bitch. I’m getting pretty sick of your constant ad homs in comment after comment. If you cant engage with words then be quiet. This place has rules for that sort of thing. You will follow them one way or another.
Israel was an insane ethnostate movement long before they even gained independence. There’s a reason why an overwhelming majority of former colonial states criticized Israel’s existence during its very inception.
Had the Zionist movement never taken off, Mandatory Palestine would probably have just become a regular old state like Lebanon or Jordan, Lebanon even has a pretty hefty Christian population right after Muslims, yet you don’t see them in some constant genocidal warfare campaign against each other.
Even weirder, Judaism itself was against the idea of forming a Jewish state without a Messiah for thousands of years, but at some point the radical branch became the overwhelming majority. Orthodox Jews are completely outnumbered by their Zionist counterparts which have transformed Judaism into a complete ethnic superiority cult akin to the Aryan superiority of the Nazis. You have to be born a Jew, you can’t just join because you want to (unless you dedicate your entire life into it, and still with caveats).
You’ll see thousands of comments like “Anti-Israel is not Antisemitism”, but at some point you need to address the elephant in the room. The current mainstream “Judaism” is very much an ethnic supremacy group by design. You can’t effectively criticize Israel without pointing out that its actions are overwhelmingly supported by their citizens because of their religion. Everything they do in their eyes is completely justified because they view everyone not in their ethnic group as subhuman.
Zionism was literally always a fascist project.
“Became”
This “what went wrong” line is liberal Zionists trying to launder the reputation of the colony.
Israel was founded on ethnic cleansing and atrocities like the Deir Yassin massacre. Zionists literally spelled out the need to “transfer” the indigenous population of Palestine in the early 20th century.
Zionists could rely on western media, policy makers search engine rankings and moderators to gatekeep and control the narrative and image of their colony. The difference now is that social media reveals everything directly to people.
It was a fascist ideology from its inception. We do you mean what went wrong with it?
Thank you, fkn terrorist-colonizers from the start. Churchill used them to terrorize the Irish before WWII and then sent them to Palestine.
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.
Better to say “has become”. The genocide is on going. We all just act as we can to try to stop it.
Always was.
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.
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?
He’s an expert based on his formal education, his extensive academic research, and his long coveted career in the field. He’s very clearly experienced and knowledgeable on the subject, and his words carry a lot more weight than some nobody on Lemmy who’s just mad that some Guardian headline didn’t meet your personal level of confirmation bias.
