Daniel Ben Ami
Radicalism of Fools, Jan. 18, 2025
“Israel certainly defines itself as a Jewish state but it has a unique character as many of its inhabitants fled anti-Semitic persecution around the world. Imposing a label as a term of abuse means failing to grapple with its specific circumstances.”
Omer Bartov’s criticisms of Israel are important to examine precisely because they are relatively sophisticated. Better-known political figures, such as Owen Jones and Jeremy Corbyn, draw on the Israeli-American historian’s work in their own campaigning. It gives their dubious claims a coherence they would probably not have otherwise.
It is also worth noting that Bartov is a self-proclaimed leftist. Examining his arguments more closely help explain the left’s terrible trajectory on Israel and related questions.
As a reminder, Bartov’s allegation of Israeli genocide essentially relies on a two-stage argument. His starting point is to redefine genocide to mean something other than how most people understand it. He concedes that Israel was not trying to systematically eliminate the Gaza population so instead defines genocide as making the territory unliveable. It is no doubt true that living conditions for Gazan civilians are hellish but blaming Israel is another matter. Hamas deliberately provoked the conflict with its 7 October pogrom in southern Israel after painstakingly constructing the battlefield in which it would be fought. The Islamist terror group spent many years constructing a huge tunnel network which enabled it to shield its forces under the Gazan civilian population.
In a talk at Birkbeck University of London this week he outlined his argument for why in his view Israel acted so appallingly. The title, “Israel: What went wrong”, was a reference to what he regards as the long-term political degeneration of Israeli society since its foundation in 1948. He is in the midst of writing a book on the same theme.
It is worth noting that the title is a nod to a book by Bernard Lewis, a renowned conservative Middle East expert, published in 2002. Its concern was how the Islamic world had over a period of centuries failed to keep up with the West and so fell under its domination. The core of Lewis’s argument is available to read in an article published in the Atlantic. ….SOURCE