Utolsó frissítés: 2026.05.26. — Szerző: Anti-Propaganda News Blog
A https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/21/omer-bartov-israel-zionism-genocide Hungarian translation:
**What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines "what Zionism has become"**
*In his new book, Omer Bartov traces how the liberationist wing of Zionism transformed into an extremist ideology that he holds responsible for the genocide in Gaza.*
**Written by Aaron Gell**
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon quoted a popular Israeli pop ballad when asked to explain the apparent U-turn that led him to support a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. „What you see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he reportedly underwent since coming to power.
Although the 2005 Gaza withdrawal was perhaps less a conviction than a change in strategy—as his chief adviser later acknowledged—the lyrics have become a byword for Israeli politics: an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.
Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov quoted the same line when asked how he came to see Israel’s violent assault on Gaza as genocide. He said living in the United States, where he has lived for more than three decades, gave him the distance he needed to see the destruction of Gaza for what it was. „I think it’s very difficult to be unbiased when you’re there,” he said.
Bartov did not simply apply the word genocide to Israel’s actions: he shouted it from the rooftops of the mainstream media, making his case in a lengthy essay in the *New York Times* in July 2025 entitled: *„I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”* (He had already addressed some of these arguments in an essay in the Guardian a year earlier.) Bartov’s statement cost him several close contacts, he said, even though subsequent events not only vindicated his analysis but also further demonstrated the insensitivity to Palestinian suffering that had become commonplace in Israeli society.
His new book, *Israel: What Went Wrong?*, is an attempt to explain this indifference. It is a detailed account of how Israel has transformed from a hopeful nation—one whose founding document promised „full social and political equality for all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, or gender”—to a country that, in the author’s blunt words, is pursuing „settler colonialism and ethno-nationalism.”.
The Brown University professor, who teaches a popular course on the Holocaust and the Nakba, is by no means an unbiased observer. Both of his parents were committed Zionists who fought in the 1948 war, and Bartov himself spent four years in the Israeli army (IDF), serving in the West Bank, northern Sinai, and Gaza, eventually commanding an infantry company. He then earned a doctorate in history from Oxford and became a renowned genocide scholar.
Bartov has spent decades researching World War II, anti-Semitism, Nazi indoctrination, and historical amnesia, and has published 10 books on the Holocaust. He speaks with considerable authority when he denounces the way the memory of the Shoah has been instrumentalized for political purposes, which has become, as he puts it in the book, „a giant fig leaf”: „the unfortunate effect of combining self-victimization and self-pity with complacency, hubris, and the euphoria of power.”
Bartov’s goal, of course, is not to trivialize the horrors of the Nazi campaign of extermination, but to show how this trauma was exploited to shape the Israeli psyche and political ideology. Although Zionism predates the Holocaust by decades, the murder of 6 million Jews made it a political project that could be realized from a wishful thinking perspective—one that always combined two key tendencies, Bartov said. „One is a settler-colonialist, ethno-nationalist movement, and the other is the liberation, emancipation, and salvation of a persecuted minority.” The argument went that if Jews had had their own state, they could have avoided this unspeakable horror, and „this argument was not entirely unfounded.”.
The problem, in his view, began after Israel declared its independence in 1948. „When the state decides that it will not be a normal state, will not have a constitution, will not define its borders, will not try to establish normal relations with its own Palestinian citizens, and will not make at least a gesture of reparation and reconciliation with the people it has expelled – when it does that, its nature changes,” he said.
Speaking via video call from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bartov’s reserved and modest white hair and scholarly demeanor provide a sober counterpoint to his fitted black T-shirt and stylish gray hoodie. Bartov’s insistence that Zionism was originally conceived as essentially a liberation movement helps explain why he refuses to call himself an anti-Zionist. „I don’t even know what that means,” he said, stressing that he believes Jews have a right to self-determination as long as they „don’t trample on the rights of others.” Accordingly, he declares that he is „totally, vehemently opposed to Zionism in the form that exists in Israel today.”.
Bartov knows full well that for the Palestinians and their supporters, his criticism does not go far enough. In the Journal of Genocide Research, human rights law professor Sonia Boulos accused Bartov and others of „applying the term genocide in a way that attempts to soften its edge,” in part by separating it from the broader colonization of Palestine since 1948. To such observers, „what went wrong” is no great mystery: Western imperialist powers unleashed a settler-colonial project that was designed from the outset to „exterminate, uproot, and murder” the Palestinians, as she summed up the narrative. He rejects this characterization as overly simplistic and not taking into account the aspirations of European Jewish refugees, but nevertheless acknowledges: „This is what [Zionism] has become.”
Exactly how this happened—and how things could have turned out differently—is the focus of the book. Much of *What Went Wrong?* focuses on what Bartov defines as the original sin of Israel’s founding: the resistance to giving substantive legal weight to the lofty words of the nation’s Declaration of Independence, and the founders’ subsequent failure to adopt a national constitution and a charter of fundamental rights. Bartov argues that if Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had pursued either of these approaches, the nascent state might well have developed into the liberal democracy it has long claimed to be, however falsely.
Despite his condemnation of current Israeli society, Bartov sees a narrow path to peaceful coexistence with the nation’s neighbors. Part of the book deals with a confederation plan advocated by an Israeli and Palestinian intellectual group called *A Land for All* – a version of which was originally considered by the United Nations in 1947. Under this system, a sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish state would exist side by side, divided roughly along the pre-1967 borders. Citizens of both entities would be free to live and travel throughout the unified territory, but would only be able to vote in their own national elections – similar to how an Italian citizen can live and work anywhere in the EU but vote in Italy.
Bartov acknowledged that the idea seems far-fetched as bodies are still being dug up from the rubble of Gaza and Israel is waging another bloody war. But he pointed out that the country’s preference for military confrontation over diplomacy is entirely dependent on American patronage, and that patronage is now being tested as never before. In the wake of the Gaza massacre, a clear majority of Democratic voters now view Israel negatively. More recently, the ill-conceived US-Israeli aggression against Iran has also significantly damaged the Republican Party’s (GOP) support. „The MAGA movement is becoming anti-Israel,” Bartov said, as „Netanyahu is leading Trump by the nose into a completely idiotic war.”.
Despite the alarming ethnic biases behind the view that wealthy and influential Jewish interest groups manipulate the US government, pointing to anti-Semitism has lost its effectiveness, in part because the influence of pro-Israel donors on American politics – and Israel’s campaign to convince the US to go to war with Iran – is undeniable. In addition, the charge of anti-Semitism has become hollow, Bartov said, because it is blatantly „weaponized,” as a „tool to silence people” while the state wreaks havoc among its neighbors. „Having claimed to be the definitive answer to anti-Semitism,” he writes in *What Went Wrong?*, “Israel is now the ultimate excuse for anti-Semites everywhere. A nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, its reliance on great powers and financial clout, and its constant invocation of the horrors of the Holocaust as justification for its unbridled violence against Palestinians, is causing even some of its former supporters to turn away from it with discomfort, or even shock and disgust.”
As a result, America’s tolerance of its longtime Middle Eastern ally may finally be reaching its limits. If the United States were to withdraw military aid—as a growing number of Democratic politicians are calling for—„Israel would have to go through a process of coming to terms with itself,” Bartov predicted. Under such circumstances, the country would have no choice but to pursue diplomacy. Ironically, this could be the so-called Jewish state’s best hope for a peaceful and prosperous future.
Bartov last visited Israel, where his son and grandchildren still live, in December 2024. It was not a pleasant trip. „It was hard even to sit in a cafe,” he recalled. „People were sitting there, having a good time, living normal lives, while a genocide was happening across the street. And I just couldn’t stand it, because if you’re there, you’re complicit. You can’t help it. It doesn’t matter what you think.”
His words had a price. Many of his best friends are in Israel – „at least until recently they were my best friends,” he said. „Now I don’t know. So there’s a personal sadness here. Because I’m in my 70s, and it’s good to have old friends, but I may have angered a lot of them.”
Bartov’s new book, he says, will be published in „nine or ten” languages, but Hebrew is not among them. Although he offered to translate it himself, he says, even left-wing Israeli publishers rejected it. „I think they felt offended because I don’t have a particularly good opinion of the so-called Israeli left, and I write about it,” he said. „They feel like I’m this Israeli living in an air-conditioned room in America, sipping espresso, as they say, while they suffer.”
There may be something to it. But on the other hand, if the Israeli audience can't read Bartov, how can they hope to see from there what he already sees so clearly from here?
