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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘INFINITE LICENSE’  
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Omer Bartov
April 24, 2025
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_ An Israeli-American historian of Holocaust and Genocide Studies
covers the dynamic of a Jewish state that has thrived on Holocaust
roots, how that legacy has been exploited becoming an apartheid state,
a practitioner of genocide of Palestinians _

Gaza City, Palestine, March 10, 2025, Mahmoud Issa/Quds Net News/ZUMA
Press Wire/Alamy // The New York Review of Books

 

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify
both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which
that violence has been met.

Books Drawn on for This Essay:

OFF-WHITE: THE TRUTH ABOUT ANTISEMITISM
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by Rachel Shabi
Oneworld, 281 pp., $28.00

GAZA FACES HISTORY
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by Enzo Traverso, translated from the French by Willard Wood
Other Press, 105 pp., $15.99 (paper)

BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A RECKONING
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by Peter Beinart
Knopf, 172 pp., $26.00

THE WORLD AFTER GAZA
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by Pankaj Mishra
Penguin Press, 291 pp., $28.00

TO BE A JEWISH STATE: ZIONISM AS THE NEW JUDAISM
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by Yaacov Yadgar
New York University Press, 215 pp., $30.00

WHAT DOES ISRAEL FEAR FROM PALESTINE?
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by Raja Shehadeh
Other Press, 113 pp., $15.99 (paper)

OCCUPIED FROM WITHIN: A JOURNEY TO THE ROOTS OF THE ISRAELI
CONSTITUTIONAL COUP
by Michael Sfard
Berl Katznelson Center, 181 pp., ₪50.00

THE BITTER LANDSCAPES OF PALESTINE
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by Margaret Olin and David Shulman
Intellect, 227 pp., $49.95 (paper)

THE MESSAGE
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 235 pp., $30.00

DON’T LOOK LEFT: A DIARY OF GENOCIDE
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by Atef Abu Saif, with a foreword by Chris Hedges
Beacon, 280 pp., $17.95 (paper)

MORAL ABDICATION: HOW THE WORLD FAILED TO STOP THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA
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by Didier Fassin, translated from the French by Gregory Elliott
Verso, 122 pp., $14.95 (paper)

 

On January 12, 1904, the Herero people of German Southwest
Africa—today’s Namibia—launched a series of attacks on scattered
German farms in the territory. The Herero, a pastoral group of about
80,000, depended on their vast cattle herds for their economic,
social, and cultural life, but the German settlers who had begun to
arrive in the late nineteenth century increasingly encroached on their
grazing lands.

The rebels destroyed many of the farms and killed more than a hundred
settlers, mostly sparing women and children. For the settlers the
rebellion served as a final proof of the need to eradicate the Herero,
whom they described as “baboons.” Unable to restore order, the
German governor appealed to Berlin, which sent some 10,000 soldiers.
By August they had crushed the Herero fighters. In October the German
commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, issued what has come
to be known as his _Vernichtungsbefehl_ (extermination order) to
those who remained:

The Herero are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen,
cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and
now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer…. The Herero nation
must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so
with the big cannon. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with
or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither
women nor children.

Most of the Herero were shot or died of thirst and hunger in the
desert to which they had been expelled. Several thousand were taken to
forced labor camps.

For many decades the public and historians alike ignored this first
genocide of the twentieth century. Germany’s
famous _Vergangenheitsbewältigung_ (coming to terms with or
overcoming the past) was about the Holocaust, not long-forgotten
colonial crimes. Only in 2021 did the German government officially
apologize for “the suffering, inhumanity and pain inflicted on the
tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children by Germany
during the war in what is today Namibia.” It also pledged over a
billion euros in reparations, although the distribution of this money
remains contentious, not least because the Germans negotiated with the
Namibian government rather than with the Herero themselves.

That remote genocide at the dawn of the twentieth century shares some
remarkable similarities with the campaign of ethnic cleansing and
annihilation prosecuted by Israel in Gaza. Israel saw the Hamas attack
of October 7, 2023, in much the same way that the Germans saw the
Herero attack 119 years earlier: as confirmation that the militant
group was utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli
occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s
Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral
universe of civilization. “Human animals must be treated as such,”
the Israeli major general Ghassan Alian (who is Druze) said shortly
after the attack, echoing several other Israeli officials, including
former defense minister Yoav Gallant. “There will be no electricity
and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted
hell, you will get hell,” Alian said in an Arabic-language video
message directed to Hamas as well as the residents of Gaza. Over the
next seventeen months Israeli forces killed more than 50,000
Palestinians, over 70 percent of whom are estimated to have been
civilians, maimed well over 100,000, and imposed on the remaining
population conditions of inhuman deprivation, suffering, and pain. A
cease-fire that went into effect on January 19 ended abruptly on March
18, when Israel refused to move on to the second phase of its
agreement with Hamas and launched a series of unilateral attacks that
have already killed hundreds more Palestinian civilians.

But from another perspective the events of 1904 and 2023 are less
symmetrical. The Germans could justify the genocide of the Herero
because they viewed them as savages, and they forgot about it because
it was perpetrated far from Europe on a group generally unknown
outside southwest Africa. The Israelis are perpetrating a genocide in
Gaza because they perceive Palestinians as savages, but they have
justified it as a response to another potential genocide that would be
akin to the Holocaust, carried out by Hamas militants who were
rehearsing for another Final Solution. Former prime minister Naftali
Bennett was one of many who insisted that “we are fighting Nazis.”
Dina Porat, a Holocaust historian, wrote in_ Haaretz_ on October 21,
2023, that Hamas “cultivates a burning hatred for the devil they
created in their imagination, as Nazi ideology did in its time.” In
a poll conducted in Israel in May 2024, more than half the respondents
said that the Hamas attack could be compared to the Holocaust.

The genocide of the Herero was part of the murderous violence to which
European colonizers subjected indigenous populations the world over.
As Aimé Césaire wrote in 1950, white Europeans paid notice only when
Hitler “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then
had been reserved exclusively for” colonized populations elsewhere.
They had “tolerated that Nazism…absolved it, shut their eyes to
it, legitimized it”—until it came to them as a _choc en
retour_ under Nazi rule.

...

It is a different matter whether Césaire’s disciple Frantz Fanon
was correct when he suggested that, though surely “the Jews are
harassed…hunted down, exterminated, cremated,” their genocide
could nonetheless be summed up as nothing more than “little family
quarrels,” a case of whites murdering whites. Quite apart from the
millions of Jews with non-European backgrounds, even Jews of European
descent were, and to some extent still are, not as white as other
whites, and their whiteness, for whatever it’s worth, may be tenuous
and conditional, as Rachel Shabi notes in _Off-White_. Even as many
“European-Jewish communities…have been folded into white
majorities across the West,” she argues, “there is a lingering
ambivalence.” The very fact of having been “separate at first and
subsequently soaked up into the defining majority” makes Jewish
whiteness feel “contingent and attenuated.”

Nonetheless, it was surely in part because the genocide of the Jews
happened in Europe and left so many visible traces that Germans and
other Europeans failed to repress and marginalize it as they had that
of the Herero—failed, that is, to draw what the Germans call
a _Schlussstrich_ (closing line) relegating it to the past. Instead
the Holocaust became the event that must never be forgotten and must
never be allowed to happen again. The process of confronting it both
created the mechanism for combating other atrocities, in the form of a
regime of international humanitarian law, and set a moral example. For
decades, the scholar Enzo Traverso writes in _Gaza Faces History_,
the “civil religion” of Holocaust memory

served as a paradigm for the remembrance of other genocides and crimes
against humanity—from the extermination of the Armenians to military
dictatorships in Latin America, to the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, to
Bosnia, and to the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda.

But at the same time it also offered a kind of carte blanche.
In _Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza_, a moving account of
his transformation from a strong supporter of Israel into a staunch
critic of Zionism, Peter Beinart suggests that in the aftermath of the
Holocaust a sense of “false innocence” came to suffuse
“contemporary Jewish life, camouflag domination as self-defense.”
For remembering must have consequences, especially when it comes with
an absolute commitment to “never again” allow a Holocaust to
happen. And when “never again” becomes not just a slogan but part
of a state ideology, when it becomes the prism transforming every
threat, every security issue, every challenge to the state’s
legitimacy or righteousness into an existential peril, then no holds
must be barred to defend those who have already faced annihilation. It
is a worldview, Beinart writes, that “offers infinite license to
fallible human beings.”

Once Hamas militants are seen as modern-day Nazis, Israel can be
imagined as an avenging angel, uprooting its enemies with fire and
sword. During my childhood and youth in Israel, the Holocaust was a
symbol of shame and denial, an event in which Jews went like sheep to
the slaughter. Over the years, as I have grown older, it has become
something else entirely: a story of solidarity, pride, and Jewish
heroism. It is this sense of “never again” that permits most
Jewish Israeli citizens to see themselves as occupying the moral high
ground even as they, their army, their sons and daughters, and their
grandchildren pulverize every inch of the Gaza Strip. The memory of
the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the
eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that
violence has been met.

If we take into account the killed, the wounded, the thousands buried
under the rubble, the thousands of “indirect” deaths due to the
destruction of most medical facilities, the thousands of children who
will never fully recover from the long-term effects of starvation and
trauma, we can undoubtedly conclude that Israel has deliberately
subjected the Palestinian people in Gaza, most of whom are refugees
from the partition of Palestine in 1948 or their descendants, to
“conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part,” as stated in Article II(c) of the
1948 UN Genocide Convention.  The rest of the world, especially
Israel’s Western allies and Jewish communities in Europe and the
United States, will have to grapple with this reality for many years.
How was it possible, well into the twenty-first century, eighty years
after the end of the Holocaust and the creation of an international
legal regime meant to prevent such crimes from ever happening again,
that the state of Israel—seen and self-described as the answer to
the genocide of the Jews—could have carried out a genocide of
Palestinians with near-total impunity? How do we face up to the fact
that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put
into place to prevent a repetition of this “crime of crimes”?

2.

The genocide in Gaza is the backdrop to but not necessarily the focus
of a series of debates that began before October 7 and have greatly
intensified since then. Some of them fixate on the
genocide-that-wasn’t rather than the one taking place before our
very eyes. The internal Jewish dispute over Gaza has torn apart
communities, families, and friendships. In the aftermath of the Hamas
attack, many Jews—not just in Israel but in the diaspora—feel that
they live under genocidal threat and perceive it as the worst form of
betrayal when anyone, let alone one of their coreligionists, says that
it is Israel, rather than the Palestinians, perpetrating genocide. To
understand the vehemence, rage, and sense of vulnerability engendered
by these disputes requires confronting the entire sweep of Israeli and
Palestinian history—a challenge that, in various ways, a number of
recent books have tried to meet.

In _The World After Gaza_, Pankaj Mishra begins as early as the
nineteenth century. He notes the atmosphere of betrayal and urgency
that marked Zionism in the decades before Israel’s creation,
empathetically invoking

the torments of the spiritually uprooted man, who according to early
Zionist Max Nordau “has lost his home in the ghetto, and…is denied
a home in his native land,” could only be healed among his own kind.

We would do well “to examine the condition of powerlessness and
marginality that Zionism originally sought to redress,” Mishra
writes. It is, he points out, “a condition more often found in the
histories of Asia and Africa than of Europe and North America, and
still painfully unresolved.” He identifies two conflicting vectors
in Zionism: an urge for emancipation, liberation, and dignity, and an
impulse toward ethnonationalism that found its expression in a settler
colonial project. Like “the Hindus and Muslims of South Asia,”
Mishra argues, “the Jews and Arabs of Palestine” might at one
point have had various “options of self-determination” at their
disposal, only to see them foreclosed by “all the calamities” of
the 1940s: “the Second World War, the Holocaust, the stateless and
universally unwelcome Jewish refugees, the exhaustion of the British
Empire and the nascent Cold War.”

These calamitous circumstances laid the conditions for the United
Nations’ partition plan, the war of 1948, the establishment of
Israel, and the Nakba—the expulsion of the vast majority of the
Palestinian population, about 750,000 people, from what became the
Jewish state.

 In asserting its historical and moral right to exist, on May 14,
1948, the new state issued a remarkable document, its “Independence
Scroll,” which promised equal rights and dignity to all citizens,
including what it termed the “Arab inhabitants.” Had a
constitution in the spirit of this declaration followed, it could have
created a state based on liberal and democratic principles. That, of
course, never happened. No constitution was ever agreed on, and the
legal standing of the Declaration of Independence is at best disputed.
Even as different versions were being frantically drafted and then
finalized by Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, Jewish
militias and later the IDF were engaged in turning the land’s
Palestinian majority into a minority through intimidation and violent
expulsion.

Zionism instead became Israel’s guiding ideology, under the
ambivalent definition the Declaration of Independence provided.
Israel, it announced, would be “a Jewish state” that would
nonetheless “ensure complete equality of social and political rights
to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”—a
promise, as far as Palestinian citizens were concerned, mostly honored
in the breach. Tellingly, the word “democracy” did not appear in
the declaration. Only in 1992 did the Knesset pass a Basic Law
defining Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, as part of an
incremental, uncompleted, and beleaguered effort by some Israeli
lawmakers and the Israeli Supreme Court to create a set of
constitutional laws in lieu of a constitution—a process arguably
reversed by the 2018 Basic Law establishing that “the right to
exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique
to the Jewish people.”

What, then, was the difference between creating a state for the Jews
and creating a Jewish state? In his provocative study _To Be a Jewish
State_, Yaacov Yadgar argues that in certain respects these are “two
distinct, contesting, and even contradictory political projects.” A
Jewish state is one whose character is defined through Judaism,
whereas a state for the Jews is simply one with a majority-Jewish
population, defined ethnically rather than by its relationship to the
Jewish religion. The state envisioned by the founder of political
Zionism, Theodor Herzl, would be liberal and could be secular. A
Jewish state, on the other hand, would profess the Jewish religion as
the very essence of its identity.

The contradictions between these two views of the state, as Yadgar
shows, became glaringly obvious in a famous ruling by the Israeli
Supreme Court justice Aharon Barak on the unconstitutionality of
allocating state land for settlements only to Jews. The ruling
asserted that “the return of the Jewish people to its homeland is
derived from the values of the state of Israel as both a Jewish and
democratic state”—values that “demand equality between religions
and nationalities.” How could such a ruling square with the fact
that Israel’s Law of Return, as elaborated by the Supreme Court,
privileges granting citizenship to Jews over all other religions and
nationalities, or with the fact that the same court sanctioned the
settlement project in the West Bank?

It is hard not to conclude that the liberal secular definition of
Zionism is as exclusionary as the religious one and that its
professions of equality and democracy for all have been repeatedly
negated by its focus on privileging one ethnicity over another.
Between the coming-of-age of the first generation of native-born
Israelis—to which I belong—and that of the present generation, the
state has become increasingly Jewish, as religion has assumed a larger
place in society, culture, and politics. But it has also become
progressively obsessed with being the state of the Jews—and only of
the Jews, as the 2018 Nation-State Law made clear. The result has been
the steady erosion of democratic values in public life, even among the
Jewish population—let alone Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

For all its sophistication, _To Be a Jewish State_ has very little
to say about Palestinians, who constitute about a fifth of Israeli
citizens; another five million live under Israeli occupation in the
West Bank and Gaza. And yet it is impossible to understand what it
means for Israel to be a Jewish state without taking into account that
equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians live in the territory of
“historic Palestine.” By now “the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict” is a misnomer for the relationship between them. As the
veteran Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh shows in _What
Does Israel Fear from Palestine?_, Israel grew increasingly unwilling
to make territorial concessions after the fall of communist
dictatorships in 1989, the dismantling of the apartheid regime in
South Africa in 1994, and the assassination in 1995 of Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin, who sought some form of compromise with the
Palestinians—however imperfect—and detested the settler movement
that has since come to dominate the country’s politics.

The Madrid Conference of 1991, which tried to revive the peace
process, offered a “glimmer of hope,” Shehadeh writes. But the
Oslo Accords that followed “proved to be a bitter disappointment,”
simply “repackaging the occupation” and “keeping the majority of
the land under Israeli de facto sovereignty.” Reading Shehadeh’s
book against Yadgar’s makes one wonder whether a Jewish state
extending from the river to the sea cannot but be an apartheid state
if it fails to realize the promise of its own Declaration of
Independence.

In his forthcoming Hebrew-language book _כיבוש
מבית_ (Occupied from Within), the civil rights lawyer Michael
Sfard—the grandson of the renowned Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman, author of _Modernity and the Holocaust _(1989)—explains in
great detail how he came to be convinced, after lengthy deliberation,
that the Israeli occupation is indeed an apartheid regime. As he
points out, under international law apartheid is a system of rule and
a crime. Historically it is related to the racist regime in South
Africa, but as a legal concept it does not necessarily rely on a
well-articulated racial ideology.

Instead the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International
Criminal Court, defines “the crime of apartheid” as

inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized
regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group
over any other racial group…with the intention of maintaining that
regime.

(Sfard explains that international law defines the term “racial
group” using sociopolitical rather than biological categories: it
includes not just race and skin color but also national and ethnic
origin.) Usually such regimes are maintained through systematic
discrimination over rights and resources. To designate a system as
apartheid, one needs to show that the “inhumane acts” in question
are not temporary but designed to perpetuate the control and
oppression of the inferior group—indeed to make them permanent.
“One must turn off the lights, block one’s ears, and lower all the
blinds,” Sfard writes, “to avoid the conclusion that Israeli rule
in the occupied territories” meets that definition. Having argued a
number of human rights cases before Israel’s Supreme Court, Sfard
also concludes that over the decades, that very institution has been
instrumental in implementing apartheid, not only “by consistently
evading a response to the question of the settlements’ legality
under international law” but also by allowing the settlers to
continue seizing land from the Palestinian population and by
sanctioning the blatantly illegal “diversion of the occupied
territory’s resources to the settlers.” The court, he writes,

sanctioned a policy of targeted assassination of (Palestinian)
terrorism suspects; it certified a widespread practice of expulsion of
(Palestinian) opponents of the regime, who fight against the
occupation, to Lebanon and Jordan; it allowed confiscation of land
(from Palestinian communities) on a vast scale in order to build
settlements; it certified hundreds of cases of collective, barbarous,
literary medieval punishment of the families of (Palestinian) terror
suspects by demolishing their houses…it certified thousands of
arrests without trial (of Palestinians); it determined that searches
(in Palestinian homes) and arrests of (Palestinian) suspects by
decision of an army commander without a court order are legal; it
enabled the maintenance of an administrative prevention of traveling
abroad for hundreds of thousands (of Palestinians); it sanctioned and
facilitated the cruel siege of almost two decades of the population of
Gaza (yes, yes, all Palestinian); and it oversaw the operation of a
separate legal system for Israelis living in the West Bank.

Margaret Olin, a scholar of religious studies and an accomplished
photographer, and David Shulman, a distinguished Indologist and
frequent contributor to _The_ _New York Review_, have spent years
engaged in grassroots activism to protect Palestinian shepherds and
farmers from Jewish settlers and the IDF, especially in the South
Hebron Hills. In _The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine_, they offer an
insider’s view of what is happening there.

 The book’s photographs show the beauty of the landscape, the
reality of the Palestinian lives in the region—which appear
organically connected to it—and the callous, brutal disruption of
those lives by the Israeli settlers and soldiers bent on eradicating
them.

The Palestinian shepherds bring to mind imaginary scenes of biblical
Israelites. The settlers look like hybrids of hooligans and religious
zealots, engaged in some divinely sanctioned rite of stoning and
beating the people of that land. The soldiers often look bored,
scrolling indifferently on their smartphones, but they are dressed to
kill in battle gear among the sheep and the ruins of the shepherds’
shacks.

The realities of such a system can appear with extreme clarity to
foreign visitors, unencumbered as they are by prior knowledge or bias.
The American Jewish Committee has attacked the American essayist
Ta-Nehisi Coates for comparing the Palestinian experience under
occupation to Jim Crow, arguing that he is not familiar enough with
the complexities of the region. But it did not take Coates long, when
he visited the West Bank in May 2023, to grasp that one population
there was living under democratic laws and another under arbitrary
military rule. Describing a visit to Hebron, he noticed how “Israeli
soldiers exercised total control over all movement through the
town…stopping and interrogating according to their whim.” At one
point, he writes in _The Message_,

I walked out to buy some goods from a shopkeeper. But before I could
get there, a soldier walked out from a checkpoint, blocked my path,
and asked me to state my religion. He looked at me skeptically when I
told him I did not have one and asked for my parents’ religion. When
I told him they were not religious either, he rolled his eyes and
asked about my grandparents. When I told him they were Christian, he
allowed me to pass.

That soldier, he notes, was Black. “In fact,” he points out,
“there were many ‘Black’ soldiers everywhere lording their power
over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen
as ‘white.’” This reminds him

of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken
about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that
race is a species of power and nothing else…. I knew here, in this
moment, how I would have fallen in the hierarchy of power if I had
told that Black soldier that I was a Muslim. And on that street so far
from home, I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as
through space.

In summer 2015 I went with my twenty-year-old daughter, who grew up in
the United States, on a trip to Hebron organized by the NGO Breaking
the Silence, a group of former IDF soldiers determined to expose the
evils of the occupation they had previously enforced. Save for a
single meeting with Jewish and Palestinian activists a few years
earlier, I had not been to the occupied territories since my army
service in the 1970s.

In Hebron we saw how the military had emptied the town’s
once-thriving center of its Palestinian population and blocked it off
for use only by the Jewish settlers who had taken over. We also saw
the contempt with which troops treated the local Arabs—the true
owners of the place—and the arrogant conduct of settlers protected
by heavily armed soldiers. In a park named after Meir Kahane, the
racist rabbi and founder of the fascist Kach party, we saw a shrine
built for Baruch Goldstein, a physician who in February 1994 massacred
twenty-nine worshipers and injured more than a hundred others in the
Cave of the Patriarchs, which also serves as a mosque—an event that
sparked the suicide bombing campaign Hamas launched that April. The
inscription on Goldstein’s grave enthuses that this mass
murderer—revered by Israel’s newly reinstated minister of national
security, Itamar Ben-Gvir—“gave his soul for the Jewish people,
its Torah and its land, ‘of clean hands and a pure heart.’”

For my daughter, who had internalized a quite different view of Israel
in the US, the sheer cruelty and heartlessness of the occupation was
simply shocking. A state that allowed this only a few miles from what
is supposed to be “the only democracy in the Middle East,” we
agreed, had lost its moral compass; a Jewish population that allowed
this abomination just across the “separation wall” had lost its
conscience. This was eight years before October 7.

3.

There is abundant information about what has been happening in Gaza
since that day, although reporting from the ground has been difficult
and hazardous. If you want a detailed, day-by-day account of how
the IDF’s bombing campaign and subsequent ground incursion into
Gaza has been experienced by the local population, Atef Abu
Saif’s _Don’t Look Left_ is essential reading. Even in the rare
mainstream American media reports that discuss Palestinians in Gaza
with relative sympathy, names and personal stories are rarely
mentioned—the precise opposite of reports about the victims of the
Hamas massacre and their families. Abu Saif fills that gap,
chronicling the random, cruel destruction inflicted by the IDF on
members of his family and his closest friends.

Abu Saif is a minister in the Palestinian Authority who was visiting
his childhood neighborhood of Jabalia with his teenage son when the
war broke out. Rather than writing any kind of remote political
history, he describes the daily lives and frequent deaths of regular
people—how they speak, what they eat, what they dream, and how their
lives, never comfortable or particularly hopeful, are shredded by
aerial bombs, warship fire, artillery shells, tanks, and drones. He
tells us, for instance, about Wissam, his twenty-three-year-old niece,
who lost both legs and a hand in a bombing attack on October 16 that
killed most of her family; after two months she and her sister Widdad
were finally evacuated to a hospital in Egypt.

Abu Saif and his son got out of Gaza at the end of December 2023. For
the next year the carnage continued throughout the Strip. In October
2024 the surgeon Feroze Sidhwa, who worked in Gaza for two weeks in
March and April, wrote in _The New York Times_ that he and
forty-three of his colleagues had seen multiple preteen children shot
in the head or chest. Israeli forces have targeted journalists and
media staff in Gaza—as of this March, 162 have been reported
killed—as well as medical professionals. The UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that by early December
2024 only seventeen of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals remained even
partially functional. By then, according to Doctors Without Borders
(Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF), over a thousand health workers
had been killed. By early January, the WHO’s register of detained
health workers was just shy of three hundred. Israeli attacks have
killed a total of nine MSF staffers since the beginning of the war.
On March 21 it was reported that the IDF had bombed the Turkish
hospital near the Netzarim Corridor, which separates North Gaza from
the rest of the Strip.

Several doctors, as the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights reported in September 2024, are known to have died in Israeli
detention. CNN reported that the head of al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest
hospital, claimed that he had been repeatedly tortured during his
seven months in Israeli detention. (He was eventually released with no
charges.) In December 2024 the IDF detained the director of Gaza’s
Kamal Adwan Hospital, Hussam Abu Safia, and took him to the notorious
Sde Teiman military camp, where, his lawyer told Al Jazeera, he was
subjected to various forms of torture and inhumane treatment. He still
has not been released from Israeli custody.

North Gaza, including Jabalia, has been turned into a sea of rubble
with US-made explosives, many of them two-thousand-pound “dumb”
bombs designed to inflict vast and indiscriminate damage. An Israeli
filmmaker who interviewed reservists returning from Gaza told me that
the devastation they saw reminded them of photos of Hiroshima. (He has
yet to find Israeli or European funding to finish the film.) Between
October 2024 and January 2025, the operation in North Gaza appeared to
follow the so-called generals’ plan, a proposal to empty the top
third of the Strip of its population using a combination of military
action and starvation. Reports emerged that the area around the
Netzarim Corridor had become a “kill zone” where IDF troops
would shoot anyone they saw. Many testimonies from the Strip describe
roaming dogs feeding on unburied bodies. When the former IDF chief
of staff and defense minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon described
this operation as ethnic cleansing, he was attacked by the right but
also by the opposition, whose leaders denounced him for suggesting
that the IDF could no longer be described as “the most moral army
in the world.”

But “ethnic cleansing” is not exactly an accurate phrase for
the IDF’s actions. The Strip’s population has been not only
deprived of food, water, medical care, and sanitation but continually
targeted: people displaced from one area end up in another, where they
are again attacked or displaced. Ever since the IDF marched into
Rafah in May 2024 and displaced about a million Palestinians yet again
to South Gaza, where hundreds of thousands still live in vast tent
cities without any reasonable infrastructure, it has been impossible
to describe the Israeli operation as anything but genocidal. The
repeated displacements, the ceaseless attacks on areas designated as
safe zones, and the systematic destruction of housing, infrastructure,
hospitals, universities, schools, places of worship, museums, and
other sites of collective memory and identity—all of this indicates
an intent, already expressed in the early days of the campaign, to
eradicate Palestinian physical and cultural existence in Gaza entirely
and make the Strip uninhabitable. Since the resumption of Israeli
military activities, reports have emerged that Israel may be planning
to take over the entire Strip and subject it to military rule,
possibly with support from the Trump administration, hoping to force
the population to leave altogether.

One afternoon in early December 2024 I was sitting with a friend of
many decades at a popular café facing the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv.
I looked around the busy café and asked, “What does a society
engaged in genocide look like?” “Like this,” we agreed. Some of
the younger men and women sipping espressos may have just come back
from service in Gaza or Lebanon. Some may have lost friends or family
on October 7 or in the subsequent fighting. They had all been
subjected to air-raid sirens in the middle of the day or while fast
asleep. On the surface, however, everything looked excruciatingly
normal, even though Gaza was only forty-five miles south.
 
Bi’r al-‘Id, a village in Masafer Yatta, West Bank, 2018;
photograph by Margaret Olin  (Margaret Olin  //  The New York
Review of Books)
I had come to Israel to visit my new twin grandchildren, born eleven
months earlier. But I also wanted to meet friends and acquaintances,
to gauge how the mood had changed since my last visit there in June. I
had been struck then by the almost total inability of Jewish
Israelis—not least liberal or left-wing people I have long
known—to even acknowledge the horrors that the IDF was
perpetrating in Gaza. Now I perceived a certain change. More people
seemed aware of the extraordinary devastation being wreaked there,
less often from the TV news than from newspaper articles and social
media videos posted by IDF reservists. The Israelis I talked to had
little desire for revenge or more violence. But neither did they
exhibit much empathy. In its place was a kind of resignation,
indifference, and despair.

Regular demonstrations still called for a hostage deal, and some also
opposed the government or advocated a cease-fire. But their numbers
had diminished, and the hope for change was largely gone. The focus of
the protests, in any case, had never been Palestinian deaths. In
December less than half of Israeli Jews supported an end to the war,
whereas after the cease-fire a majority supported ending the war in
exchange for the complete release of the hostages. Throughout this
time more have opposed Netanyahu than would support any territorial
compromise with Palestinians; more lament the trickle of Israeli
military losses than pay attention to the annihilation of the Strip.
During this second visit some friends gently chided me for speaking
too bluntly and publicly about the genocide, and in particular for
revealing in an English-language article that an old friend of mine
had told the Israeli media that there was “no room in heart” for
the fate of children in Gaza. Arab communities in Israel were fearful
and silent, subjected to unchecked gang violence and police
intimidation. But in Tel Aviv the restaurants and cafés were teeming,
the new light-rail was clean and efficient, and the promenade along
the beach was filled with walkers and joggers. There were also
noticeably more beggars on the streets.

There are opposition voices in Israel, more now than in the immediate
aftermath of October 7, but most of them feel hemmed in and vastly
outnumbered. On the initiative of the historian Amos Goldberg, I met
with a group of Jewish and Palestinian academics from Hebrew
University who told me they were trying to mobilize their colleagues
not only against the war and the government but also against a
university administration that has tried to stifle opposition and had
openly discriminated against one of its few Palestinian faculty
members, Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. It was a small group. I
was assured that they represented a larger number, but a couple of
them suggested that not everyone in the opposition at the university
had the same agenda. Some cared about the suppression of Palestinian
voices and Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank; others cared
about academic independence and freedom of speech for Jews.

Visiting Said Abu Shakra’s celebrated art gallery in Umm al-Fahm, a
Palestinian town within Israel proper, I was moved by a meeting with
young Jewish and Palestinian artists who work there together. Abu
Shakra argued passionately that we need to pursue art and fraternity
even in this difficult moment. But he conceded that times have
changed. The young artists were wary about speaking with me and
clearly felt vulnerable to any exposure. At the Haifa home of the
actor and theater director Sinai Peter, I met with several Jewish and
Palestinian friends who spoke about demonstrations and other forms of
opposition. A Palestinian surgeon said that he had asked to speak at a
protest about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. Initially encountering
resistance from the organizers, he was eventually allowed to make a
speech, not least because he is known as a soft-spoken and reasonable
man. He noted that some people left the smallish rally when he began
speaking about Palestinian suffering.

I also heard bloodcurdling stories from the people I met. I was told
of an army pilot who compared his job to that of a truck driver
handling an especially expensive piece of equipment. He takes off and
fires a missile far from the target he was given; perhaps the next day
the news will tell him what he hit. I heard of a drone operator who
abruptly left the country after it dawned on her how many people she
had killed. I heard of a left-leaning mother telling her son, fresh
from service in Gaza and shocked by what he had seen, that she did not
want to hear about it. I was told about a young officer who,
conducting a sweep of an empty building in Gaza, came across a teenage
Palestinian boy who had stayed to help his grandmother. The troops
found her hiding in the basement and, despite the officer’s orders,
shot her on the spot. There was nothing he could do about it, the
officer reportedly said. Another person told me, “If the IDF were
to kill a thousand dogs in Gaza, it would cause greater public uproar
than the mass slaughter of human beings.”

Several people I spoke with compared their sense of normalcy in
proximity to atrocity to the film _The Zone of Interest _(2023),
about the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss, who lived with
his family in a well-kept house just outside the camp.

 Some reservists, I was told, had returned from Gaza suffering from
severe PTSD and gotten no help. Some of them—according both to my
source and to reports in the Israeli media—have died by suicide. On
my trip I met with Lee Mordechai, a brave young professor at Hebrew
University who has compiled an immense list of crimes perpetrated by
the IDF, which he regularly updates and posts online. Like recent
reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and MSF, it
makes for chilling but necessary reading.

My son and his young family had just moved when I arrived. For the
past year, whenever the sirens went off, they had had to clamber down
two stories with their babies to the shelter in the basement. The new
apartment has a safe room, which typically means a higher rent or a
location farther from the center of Tel Aviv. My daughter-in-law’s
cousin and her daughters help take care of the twins. The youngest
daughter showed me happy video clips of her father, who was then still
being held hostage in Gaza. He was finally released, severely
emaciated, in February and is already fighting for the release of the
remaining hostages.

There is a nice park near my son’s new home. During my visit he
suggested we climb up a little hill known as Tel Napoleon to see the
view. As we walked up the slope the uneven ground and fragments of
walls provided telltale signs of destroyed houses. At the top of the
hill we saw a sabra fence, tall local cacti traditionally used to
demarcate plots of land—there must have been a Palestinian village
there. When I looked that hill up online the next day, I found that
Wikipedia mentioned archaeological excavations near the site of the
village of Jarisha but said nothing about what led to its
disappearance. For photos of the village and details about its
destruction in late March 1948, one must turn to the website of
Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that disseminates information about the
Nakba. Many of those expelled, especially from villages and towns in
the northwestern Negev and on the southern coast, ended up in the Gaza
Strip.

4.

In his powerful book _Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop
the Destruction of Gaza_, Didier Fassin explains why he took its
original French title, _Une étrange défaite_, from _L’Étrange
Défaite_, Marc Bloch’s account of the collapse of France in 1940.
Bloch’s book—written four years before the Gestapo executed him
for his activities in the Resistance—examined a military defeat;
Fassin’s engages with a moral one. “Consent to the obliteration of
Gaza has created an enormous gulf in the global moral order,” it
begins. “More than an abandonment of part of humanity…history will
record the support extended to its destruction.”

How is it possible, Fassin asks, that with rare exceptions, “for
political leaders and intellectual personalities of the principal
Western countries…the lives of Palestinian civilians are worth
several hundred times less than the lives of Israeli civilians”? How
do we explain why “demonstrations and meetings demanding a just
peace are banned”? Why is it that “without independent
confirmation, most of the mainstream Western media quasi-automatically
reproduce the version of events relayed by the camp of the occupiers,
while incessantly casting doubt on that recounted by the occupied”?
Why do “so many of those who could have spoken, not to say stood up
in opposition, avert their eyes from the annihilation of a territory,
its history, its monuments, its hospitals, its schools, its housing,
its infrastructure, its roads, and its inhabitants—in many cases,
even encouraging its continuation”?

“The paradox,” he goes on, “is that this moral abdication by
states has been justified in the name of morality.” European
countries proclaimed that they

had a historical responsibility towards Jews and must guarantee their
security. The 7 October attack was a monstrous act threatening the
very existence of Israel. Thus the Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF)
riposte became not only inevitable, but also legitimate…. The
destruction of Gaza and part of its population was essentially a
lesser evil for the sake of eliminating a greater one—namely, the
destruction of the Jewish state on which Hamas was intent. In these
circumstances, to speak of crimes being committed by the Israelis
attested to the most suspect form of racism: antisemitism. This was
especially true if genocide was invoked to refer to the massacre of
the Palestinian population, for it was intolerable that the
descendants of a people who had been the victim of the greatest
genocide should be accused of perpetrating one.

This is, of course, the way most Israelis see things today. By
uncritically accepting that argument and assenting to the eradication
of Gaza, the governments of the US and Western Europe have also
accepted and employed a false memory of the Holocaust and a distorted
understanding of its lessons for the present.

The long-term consequence of this travesty may, however, be that the
genocide in Gaza will finally liberate Israel of its status as a
unique state rooted in a unique Holocaust. This will hardly help the
tens of thousands of Palestinian victims or the victims of the Hamas
massacre, the dead and dying hostages or their broken families. But
the license that Israel, the land of the victims, has long enjoyed and
abused may be expiring. The sons and daughters of the next generation
will be free to rethink their own lives and future, beyond the memory
of the Holocaust; they will also have to pay for the sins of their
parents and bear the burden of the genocide perpetrated in their name.
They will have to reckon with what the great, often forgotten Israeli
poet Avot Yeshurun wrote in the aftermath of the Nakba, of which we
are witnessing a repetition, or continuation: “The Holocaust of the
Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of Eretz Israel are one
Holocaust of the Jewish people. The two of them stare each other
directly in the face. It is of this that I speak.”

_—March 27, 2025_

_[OMER BARTOV is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide
Studies at Brown and the author of Genocide, the Holocaust and
Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis
[[link removed]].
(April 2025)]_

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