A State in Denial: Israel - What Went Wrong?

Israel – What Went Wrong?

By Omer Bartov

Fern Press / Penguin Random House India, 243 pp., Rs 999 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-911-71770-6

For decades, the cause of Palestinian statehood had turned and twisted in limbo while Israel’s control over historical Palestine steadily strengthened. The “peace process” was on death watch. Jewish settlements in the West Bank expanded aggressively, leaving place only for Palestinian Bantustans; Gaza, under Israeli siege, resembled a crammed, open-air prison. Periodically, Hamas launched rockets into Israel; Israel responded with large-scale aerial bombardment, killing and wounding thousands, the majority civilians: this was cynically termed as “mowing the grass”. The international community regularly applied the salve of the two-state solution to its conscience. American presidents dared do little on the ground to ease the occupation. Israel’s engagement with the world steadily increased; the carpet of the Abraham Accords appeared large enough to hide forever the Palestinian aspirations.

The Hamas attack, of 7 October 2023 on Israel, gruesome as it was, flung the chess-board sky-high. Israel’s overweening sense of invulnerability and military dominance was shattered. The far-right Israeli government went into vengeance mode, flattening Gaza to rubble. The West Bank is being torched by aggressive settler gangs. Israel stands accused of genocide and the most flagrant breaches of international humanitarian law. A regional war has brought its own complications. There are open calls for removing the last Palestinian from Eretz Yisrael – the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – in the view of the religious Zionists. And few among the Israeli people have said “not in my name”.

These developments have brought the Palestinian issue into international focus like never before and also raised fundamental questions about Zionism, antisemitism, Holocaust memory and Israel as a Jewish and/or democratic state. None of these – particularly those dealing with Jewish identity and memory – are easy questions and any argument will certainly find its counter. But the arguments become more credible if they come from within.

Omer Bartov cannot be accused of being an outsider; he is, rather, an estranged insider. Born in a family of staunch Zionists, he served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years including in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide at Brown University and hence an acknowledged authority on these subjects. But today he finds the country of his birth a different, strange and threatening place, whose people…have been transformed, perhaps irretrievably. It is a country trapped in its own sense of shock and trauma, in deep denial of the crimes being committed in its name by its people, including the children and grand-children of those who, at other times under different circumstances, would have easily been able to perceive the horrors they now accept, refute, or strive to ignore.

This transformation is troubling and to understand it, Bartov trains a sympathetic but honest lens on some fundamental aspects of Israeli polity and society. He argues that Zionism was not always the ethno-nationalist, expansionist and messianic ideology that it appears today. It was a genuine political movement based on historical necessity aimed to resolve the “Jewish question” and “to liberate Jews from persecution, exclusion, and violence”, something that could be only achieved in their own homeland; the Holocaust provided the final argument in favour of a Jewish nation-state. That Zionism, Bartov contends, combined the objective of Jewish self-determination with aspirations of democracy and social justice, even as he acknowledges that Israel’s formation was accompanied by the 1948 Nakba and the expulsion of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians.

It was only after 1967, when Israel took over total control of Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem, that Zionism was increasingly corrupted by the inherent injustice of permanent occupation, settler expansion and ethno-nationalism. To such an extent that today, instead of becoming the intended safe haven for traumatised Jews, “Israel has become the most unsafe spot for Jews anywhere on the globe, with the desire of the Palestinians to return to their homes, and Israel’s adamant refusal to share the land, at the core of the violence.”

But Bartov still bears a hope that Zionism is redeemable: only it needs to be fundamentally reinterpreted in a framework of equality, democracy and equal rights — a framework that sounds impossible in present-day Israel. Bartov’s benign view of early Zionism has been challenged among others by Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy who argues against any perceived “golden age” of Zionism; an ideology that subscribes to racial, national and religious superiority is illegitimate ab initio; “Zionism did not become something else,” says Levy, “it was always like that.”

Zionism, it needs to be recalled, rose in the face of antisemitism, particularly in East and Central Europe. The vileness of antisemitism is undeniable: what is at issue is the cynical accusation, often employed reflexively, that critics of Israel – even those who mean well – are impelled by deeply ingrained antisemitism. To question the validity of such an accusation, Bartov examines the various definitions of antisemitism.

Interestingly, he points out that American policymakers, who will ultimately find it difficult to avoid complicity in the Gaza genocide, have chosen to adapt the widest one, the one endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016 which “was the product of a European effort to promote Holocaust remembrance and education…but it has nevertheless morphed into an instrument for silencing criticism by law and duress”. This definition conflates virtually any criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Hence the denunciation by President Biden of college protests as antisemitic: the students, like much else of the civilised world, including several Jews like Bartov, were simply shocked by the ferocity of the wanton destruction of Gaza and the clear intent of ethnic cleansing. That these actions may lead to a rise in antisemitic feeling is true; yet, criticism of such acts is not antisemitic in and of itself. Bartov’s conclusion is convincing:

Defining criticism of Israel as antisemitic is the best way to help the current Israeli leadership practice unchallenged extremist, racist policies. It is also a convenient way for extremist, bigoted, racist, and, yes, also antisemitic American, European and other leaders around the world to look squeaky-clean… anti-antisemitism has become the new tool to muzzle opinion, silence speech, and curb academic freedom.

Bartov examines closely the related “use and abuse of the Holocaust as a historical event, a traumatic memory, and a warning to future generations”. What exactly was meant by “never again.”? To be sure, the Holocaust, once considered a marginalised, shameful and embarrassing part of Jewish history is today “a ubiquitous reference point” in Israeli thought, “a mechanism of integration and social solidarity”.

Although there have been other genocides in the 20th century, the Holocaust is considered as singularly unique: its centrality in the global perception, its scale, Jewish power and European guilt all may have something to do with that. In Israel it serves as an ever-present threat as well as a justification – including for the occupation – and a permanent IOU on the world. From this rises a mindset that Israel is exceptional, that the world has no right to impose normal rules on it and the Jewish state is entitled to do whatever it needs to, however ruthless that may be, to ensure the fulfilment of the pledge of “never again”.

Of course, what exactly was meant by “never again” is debatable. Does it mean never again the Holocaust, or never again a genocide of the Jews, or simply never again a genocide? After all this pledge gave rise to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention and subsequently led to the imperfect edifice of international humanitarian law, which today lies in tatters at Israel’s hands. The annihilation of Gaza is seen by most Israelis through the “distorting lens” of the Holocaust as just, and necessary “to prevent the repetition of another Auschwitz”.

Bartov’s conclusion is uncomfortably honest. Eventually the catastrophe of the Holocaust became, for most Israelis, a vast fig leaf, its lamentable effect to combine self-victimization and self-pity with self-righteousness, hubris, and the euphoria of power…

The Holocaust mentality, and “the internalised, irrational, and misleading terror of another” justifies the “lashing out, pressing down, breaking in, and blowing up both of one’s own doubts and unease and any real or perceived external threat”. Given this mindset, any reconciliation, or tolerance of a neighbouring state of Palestine is difficult to even imagine.

Omer Bartov’s is a brave book that takes on much more than this review has touched upon. The issues it raises will not be accepted by all, particularly in Israel. But argument, debate and disagreement are an essential part of ancient Jewish traditions of learning and inquiry and of the fractious Israeli polity. The book may yet be a timely contribution aimed to better the lives of all the people who live between the river and the sea.