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”.
What kind of a delusional alternate reality do you live in? This is literally false. I’m literally from the region. I lived in Iraq and Syria. The religious groups in the middle east have never gotten along. They always hated each other and whichever one is ruling, they take it upon themselves to segregate, oppress, and ethnically cleanse the other religious groups under them.
Also antisemitism is literally codified in islam, it is NOT a European concept and never was. This is such an ignorant statement that’s it’s bordering on being historically illiterate. islam is very explicit about its hatred of Jews and it’s also very explicit about how non muslims are inferior to muslims and that they need to be put in their place by being subjugated under islam. This means either forcefully converting or being treated as second class citizens under islamic law. How do you think a place that was known as Judea became muslim? Why do you think the Al Aqsa mosque is built right on top of the ruins of the Jewish temple? Why do think there is such a big diaspora of Jewish people? That’s how islam operates whether it’s in India, Africa, Europe, or elsewhere.
Antisemitism has been there since Judaism became a thing. This is really not some secret, you could easily look up the extremely long and extensive history of antisemitism. It doesn’t matter who controlled the region, whether it was the British, the Ottomans, the Malmuks, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Romans or the Crusaders. They all were antisemitic.
Also, Amin al-Husseini, was NOT antisemitic because of Europe. He was antisemitic because the environment who grew up in was. He allied the Palestinian movement with the Nazis at the time because Hitler stood for everything he believed in. They both believed themselves to be superior, they both wanted to exterminate the Jews, and they both wanted to kick out the British. Thinking that the world or that history revolves around Europe is just some white supremacist notion.