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”.
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_Empire
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?