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”.
All assessments are through an ideological lense. I explained my lense which is examining policy and where it is heading. I also took a stab at yours which you have confirmed. It amounts to a societal pendulum, which is of course is my very reductionist view of it.
It is a common but misleading trope on many levels but does have some validity depending on how you look at it. While on the surface this may may often seem true the devil is in always in the details.
Take the forward march of progress on something like slavery. There are more slaves today than at any time in history. This is also discounting indentured service and a more extreme leftist viewpoint like underemployment or even wage slavery.
There are numerous examples of this and I think they would challenge your worldview. Take another example like environment degradation. Even though the US has the strongest environmental laws in history (discounting this most recent administration) they still have managed to poison every human with forever chemicals and micro plastics. Not to mention other future catastrophic calamities like the oceans dying off or global warming set to displace billions of people.
This raises an important criticism of a policy based perspective. Policies are not always enforced and can be also be used for nefarious purposes. Take the War on Drugs for example. Under the guise of a public health emergency the US grew their prison population to encompass 20% of the world’s total declared prison population but only having about 5% total of the world’s population. Of course, we later came to realize that it really was an attack on minorities which amounts to a slow burn genocide by the white nationalists.
History teaches nothing about the computer or what things like the military industrial complex has achieved through rampant fascism around the world. While it can serve as a predictor of some human behavior it can’t explain how to handle AI. I think this is where history can’t help us even if it is fascinating to study.