By Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University
Copyright: Mohammed Salem/Reuters
Editor’s Note: Omer Bartov's essay will appear in the next issue of TSLR, scheduled for publication in Spring, 2024. This next issue features two new elements: first, it will be the journal’s first themed issue, with the theme being the concept of Flux; and, second, it will include a new section on Criticism, featuring non-fictional essays on timely topics. Omer Bartov’s essay is one of four pieces that will appear in the next issue’s Criticism section, but given the unusual timeliness of its subject matter, we are pre-publishing the essay here. - Carlos Rojas (Duke)
We are currently living through a period of unprecedented chaos and confusion in the Middle East. As some have predicted, there are signs that the turmoil is spreading ever wider. Yet no formulas have as yet been proposed as to how to put the genie back in the bottle. Violence, strife, and war have a logic of their own. Without conceptualizing concrete political goals, they will keep expanding, feeding on the rage, sacrifice, and vengeance they produce, until at least one of the parties is either exhausted or wiped out.
The situation of flux in which we find ourselves at the moment in the Middle East is just one component of a general sense of confusion and uncertainty in the world, rooted in various factors ranging from economic uncertainly, distrust of political leadership, massive displacement of populations, the long-term effects of the Covid-19 epidemic, and the ongoing climate crisis.
In the face of such an array of threats and fears, one is tempted to simply withdraw into the private sphere, shut out the news, and engage as best one can with the pleasures, or at least the more manageable affairs of daily life. The problem with this choice is that—just as in the case of avoiding political speech on, say, university campuses, for fear of being immediately labeled as supporting one camp or another—it creates a vacuum, which tends to be swiftly filled by the extreme voices. In other words, silence, unclarity, confusion, and passivity themselves generate polarization, whose outcome is ever more strife and violence.
In what follows, let me try to bring some order to the chain of events happening in Israel and Gaza. This can only be done by examining the immediate, as well as the deeper roots of the current crisis. It also calls for dispelling some of the false analogies that have only led to obfuscation by all parties involved. Once we have done that, it will be easier to understand how one might emerge from the turmoil. To be sure, sketching a potential resolution of the crisis in no way assures that the parties involved will grasp it. But it should provide a horizon of hope and opportunity that disrupts the grim logic of the current mayhem.
The more immediate cause of the October 7 attack and the war currently underway can be traced to the attempted judicial “overhaul” by the newly installed Israeli government, which began in February 2023. Led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under indictment for corruption, and heavily influenced by powerful ministers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who represent the extreme right, Jewish supremacist, and annexationist wing of the settler movement, the government aspired to mortally weaken the supreme court, the last bastion of democracy and the rule of law in Israel, as a crucial phase in the absorption of the West Bank and the potential ethnic cleansing, or at least total repression, of its Palestinian population.
The attempted governmental coup encountered massive opposition from the more liberal sectors of Israeli society, who felt that their own rights and privileges as Jewish-Israeli citizens were threatened. But by and large, the Israeli public as a whole refused to acknowledge the link between the so-called reform and the brutal occupation of millions of Palestinians that was staring them in the face. The majority of Israelis in fact bought into the argument made for decades by Netanyahu that the Palestinian issue could be managed rather than resolved, knowing that its resolution could only be accomplished through territorial compromise.
The months-long protest movement, which included warning by fighter pilots and members of elite units that they would refuse to volunteer for reserve service, tore the country apart and created the impression of growing vulnerability, as social cohesion disintegrated and the consistently denied the rising security threats. Bending over backwards to please his extremist coalition partners for fear of losing his government and facing time in jail, Netanyahu allowed them to stage ever more provocative events in the West Bank, which in turn necessitated transferring security forces needed to protect civilian settlements bordering the Gaza Strip. None of this, it appears, was unnoticed by the leaders of Hamas in Gaza.
Finally, in order to prove his assertion that the Palestinian issue could be indefinitely swept under the rug, on the eve of the Hamas attack Netanyahu appeared to be heading toward a comprehensive agreement with Saudi Arabia, arguably the most important Arab state, that might have culminated in a peace deal and a far-reaching economic initiative, brokered by the United States, stretching from India to the Mediterranean. Hamas leaders watching these developments from across the multi-billion security barrier installed by Israel, must have thought that this was the last opportunity to disrupt Israeli plans and bring the Palestinian issue back to the fore. The timing of the attack, which had been planned for at least a year, was likely determined by these factors. The fact that Israeli intelligence, including the prime minister, knew about these plans, but chose to ignore them, is proof that for the second time in its short existence, Israel fell victim to the same euphoria of power that led it to disaster fifty years earlier, on October 6, 1973. And euphoria, as we know, is the mother of nemesis.
The deeper roots of the current crisis, however, go back to the very birth of the state of Israel in 1948. The year before, the United Nations had proposed partitioning mandatory Palestine (the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea) into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. While the Zionist leadership agreed to the plan, the Palestinian leaders rejected it, not least because it gave large tracts of territory with Arab populations to the projected Jewish state, since Jews constituted only a third of the overall population of Palestine. This was followed by intensifying clashes between Palestinians and Jews, and later by the invasion of Arab armies seeking to help local Palestinians destroy the Jewish state. The bitter and costly war ended with an Israeli victory. It also resulted in the expulsion or flight of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel, which now ruled over a much larger area than had been allotted to it in the partition plan. The remaining 150,000 Palestinians, who became Israeli citizens, were swiftly put under military rule for the next two decades, and much of their property and lands were expropriated by the state. This is how the goal of creating a Jewish majority state, which had eluded Zionism until then, was finally accomplished.
In 1967, shortly after military rule over Israel’s Palestinian citizens was lifted, Israel won a lightning victory over its Arab neighbors and occupied the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, as well as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where many of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 were living. Initially, these newly-conquered territories were seen as bargaining chips for a peace agreement in the region. But as time went by, Israelis got used to their much larger country, and a trickle of settlers, initially along the Jordan Valley, and later also in the heartland of the West Bank, began staking a claim for permanent rule over the land and thereby also over its Arab population. The War of 1973, which the IDF barely won, showed the limits of Israeli power, and forced Israel to hand back the Sinai as the price for a peace agreement with Egypt, the most powerful and populous Arab country. But this agreement also facilitated holding on to the West Bank under the fiction of giving its Palestinian population eventual autonomy.
Years of growing Jewish settlement, land expropriation, and policies of repression, produced two contradictory processes: resistance and negotiations. As had always happened in the past, Israel considered compromise only under pressure. The outbreak of the first Intifada (uprising) in 1987 revealed that the fable of Israeli enlightened occupation was a lie, and the sight of Palestinian youths throwing rocks at heavily armed IDF troops demonstrated the vast asymmetry of power and the rage of a population subjected to ongoing humiliation and expropriation. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were an attempt to finally address the question of Palestinian statehood in view of the realization by Israeli leaders such as Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres that continuing occupation was too costly politically and morally.
But settlement and resistance also resulted in growing extremism on both sides. The settler movement sprouted a new version of messianic, violent, Jewish supremacist extremism, that gradually seeped into more and more sectors of Israeli society, eventually infecting also the political and military elites. These religious nationalists seek to create a religious Jewish state from the river to the sea and to empty it of its Arab population. Similarly, opposition to the compromises made by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), including the recognition of the state of Israel, and the ongoing settlement project, transformed the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas from a largely peaceful organization dedicated to caring for the poor and the needy into an extremist militant group determined to replace Israel with an Islamic Palestinian state.
With the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995, despite some clumsy efforts by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO leader Yasir Arafat, the peace process came to a violent end with the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000. The result of the hundreds of Jewish victims of suicide bombings by Hamas militants and the killings of thousands of Palestinians by Israeli security forces was a dramatic shift to the right in Israel and growing support for Hamas among Palestinians. The lack of peace prospects produced extremism and violence, just as previously such prospects had the effect of diminishing extremism and violence. This is why militants on both sides reject any calls for compromise, and why the silence of those who wish to see a better world feeds the radicals. This was also how the Zionist goal of creating a Jewish majority state was lost. For today seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians live, often side-by-side, between the Jordan and the sea. Only the Jews live under a democracy and have full rights, although at the moment even their rights are being threatened by their own government.
Which brings us back to the present crisis, how we understand it, and what are the future prospects for ending the violence and resolving the conflict. Let me begin with what I find to be unhelpful. Because of the violence this crisis entails, politicians, propagandists, media outlets, and often the public at large, not least on social media, have resorted to a terminology which, however inaccurately it describes the reality on the ground, appears to best evoke the horror of the events.
Thus, for instance, talking heads on the Israeli media repeatedly refer to Hamas as Nazis. The very argument—not necessarily accurate—that not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been slaughtered as in the October 7 attack, draws a clear connection between the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the massacre by Hamas. Similarly, almost from the very beginning, Israeli military operations against Gaza have been described as genocidal. Rhetoric employed by Israeli leaders, which indeed often called for “flattening” and “eradication,” was swiftly described as Nazi-like, and said to reflect the very nature of Zionism as a form of violent, expansionist racism, reminiscent of the Nazi empire of racial supremacy.
As a general rule, analogies with Nazism should be avoided. Nazi evil was so extreme, the number of the Third Reich’s victims was so enormous, and the devastation it left behind was so unprecedented, that any use of Nazism as a measuring rod for other regimes or ideologies is bound to put Hitler and his gang far in the lead. But this is also why there is such a temptation to use Nazism as shorthand for whichever objectionable regime and policies one wishes to deride or expose. The more this term is used without any connection to the historical phenomenon itself, the less meaningful it is, ending up as nothing more than a propaganda slogan.
The same goes for the term genocide, which all too often is popularly used to describe any kind of mass killing, without the slightest effort to examine whether such crimes correspond to the United Nations definition of genocide. And yet, this is the only definition that matters as far as international humanitarian law is concerned. In other words, regimes engaged in various types of crimes and oppression are called “Nazi,” and wars in which many civilians are killed are called “genocidal,” because referring to such regimes as merely criminal, or dictatorial, and depicting conflicts in which war crimes or crimes against humanity are committed as anything but genocidal, has come to be considered insufficient and feeble, even apologetic.
This is obviously an unhelpful way to understand reality, but an efficient means to stir up rage and self-righteous indignation, at times giving apparent license to the same kind of violence against one’s real or alleged enemies. Nonetheless, are such terms applicable in any way to the current state of affairs in the Middle East?
It is true that the Hamas charter of 1988 borrows whole chunks from such antisemitic fabrications as the “protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and that it calls for the destruction of Israel. It is also beyond doubt that the Hamas attack of October 7, in which women, children, old people and the handicapped were brutally murdered, at times after being raped, and over 200 persons, some of them in their eighties, were taken hostage, appears to merit investigation as a war crime, a crime against humanity, and potentially a genocidal act.
But this does not make Hamas a Nazi organization. Hamas does not follow a Nazi ideology and does not want to establish a Nazi state of Aryan supremacy. Moreover, Hamas represents a Palestinian population that has been besieged by Israel for 16 years under conditions of deprivation, despair, and humiliation, and that has lived for many more decades under Israeli occupation. One can object to Hamas ideology and murderous methods, yet support the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Similarly, the many Israeli governments led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have done all in their power to entrench the occupation, expand the settlement of Palestinian lands, and make life increasingly unbearable for Palestinians. There are also strong indications that in its assault on Gaza, the IDF has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. At the moment the IDF appears to be engaging in ethnic cleansing of part if not most of the Gaza Strip.
But is the IDF engaged in genocide? That is yet to be determined, and in many ways depends on whether the fighting is brought to a quick end and people can return to their (largely destroyed) homes, or are forcibly and permanently removed from much or all of the Gaza Strip. Be that as it may, IDF commanders and the Israeli political leaders conducting this brutal war in Gaza should be brought to account, as should those Hamas operatives and commanders who planned and executed the October 7 massacre. It is unfortunately rather unlikely that either will happen.
At present, it appears that the IDF operation in Gaza has been unsuccessful, as many had predicted before it was launched. After almost eight weeks of fighting by a modern military, equipped with state of the art aircraft, artillery, and armored vehicles, employing hundreds of thousands of troops against several tens of thousands of lightly armed guerrillas, the two stated goals of the campaign, destruction of Hamas and release of the hostages, have not been accomplished. About half of the hostages were freed, but only thanks to a temporary ceasefire and an exchange of prisoners. Several thousand Hamas militants, and a certain number of middle-ranking commanders, have been killed. But there are still some 130 hostages in Hamas hands, and the Hamas leadership’s hold on power, as well as its fighting ability, has hardly been dismantled.
Instead, the IDF has killed close to 15,000 civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, displaced the vast majority of the population, demolished a high proportion of their homes, and orchestrated a humanitarian disaster that is getting worse by the day. For all this destruction the Israeli military has been unable to ensure the safety of its own civilians around the Gaza Strip and in the north, where Hizballah has maintained a daily barrage of rockets. Tens of thousands of Israeli citizens have been displaced and are unwilling to return to their homes, many of which have been destroyed, without assurances that attacks from Gaza and Lebanon will cease.
Where, then, is all this heading? The expansion of the conflict is a distinct possibility, as the engagement of Iran and the Yemenite Houthis clearly indicates. Ongoing settler violence and IDF killings on the West Bank may trigger another uprising there, followed by attempts at ethnic cleansing by settlers and allied military units. Escalating attacks by Hizballah may unleash another IDF ground attack, which is likely to bog down as the one in Gaza. In short, the potential for growing regional chaos and endless cycles of killing and destruction is very high. Many observers and commentators train their eyes on all these frightening scenarios and largely miss the main point of it all.
What is the main point? For that, we have to go back to the beginning. The attempt to manage and marginalize the Palestinian issue has clearly failed in the most spectacular way. Israel has not been as insecure and vulnerable as it is now since 1948. Yet the means to reverse this situation are clearly at hand. What is called for is a change of the political paradigm, namely, a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between the 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians who live between the river and the sea. For now, neither the current Israeli government of extremists, nor the radical Hamas leadership, are capable of such transformational thinking. But both leaderships have been deeply discredited, and there is a good chance that sooner or later they will be removed. Hence the need for an alternative way of thinking about the future.
Such rethinking of the political paradigm is also bound to bring about a change in the immediate situation on the ground. From a desperate effort to restore the balance of terror between two devastated populations, one could imagine a path toward an entirely different future. From harebrained notions of removing the population of Gaza to sites of exile across the globe, one could imagine developing Gaza into the Dubai of the Middle East, as had been envisioned all those years ago during the Oslo negotiations. From thinking how to protect Israeli settlements along the Gaza strip with more and more walls and fences and electronics, one can think of coexistence with the Palestinians, as had in fact been the case in the past, to both sides’ mutual benefit.
What would such a future scenario entail? How can this land be shared by two groups with such a long history of conflict and bloodshed? There are many such plans, and we do not have the space here to elaborate them all. But one of them, A Land for All, appears to me to be the most appealing, original, and feasible. Very briefly, the plan entails the establishment of two states along the 1967 lines, in confederation with each other, each fully independent and sovereign, based on a right of self-determination and a right of return, with a common capital in Jerusalem. What makes this plan different from the defunct two-state solution is that the confederation would make a distinction between rights of citizenship and residence, so that Jews and Palestinians could be citizens of one state but reside in another. Hence settlers who would choose to remain in a Palestinian state would be allowed to do so, yet would vote for the Israeli Knesset, and commit to adhere to all the laws of the Palestinian state. And Palestinians living in Nablus, or returning from exile, would be allowed to reside in Israel, but vote for the Palestinian parliament and commit to obey the laws of Israel. Obviously, the numbers of foreign residents on both sides would have to be controlled and monitored, but the borders would be open rather than separating the populations with a maze of walls, fences, and minefields. Since the entire land is already inextricably connected as far as much of its transportation, energy, water, cyberspace, and other infrastructure is concerned, the confederative institutions would control these links as well as the entity’s external borders.
How all this would function in detail is still a work in progress and we cannot anticipate it happening in the near future. But as a horizon of political hope and promise, as a path out of destruction and violence, this plan, or others like it, can change the trajectory of both politics and people’s imagination. Instead of heading down the path to nowhere, the region will set out on a path of reconciliation and coexistence. There is, in fact, no other way forward, if we are not to accept the grim logic of the fanatics and the extremists and keep seeking the destruction of the other, even if at the price of our own annihilation. At this moment of extreme crisis, it is time to imagine and plan for a different future for generations to come.
Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. His early research concerned the crimes of the German Wehrmacht, the links between total war and genocide, and representation of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. More recently he has focused on interethnic relations and violence in Eastern Europe, population displacement in Europe and Palestine, and the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel. His books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). Bartov is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine.” His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in 2023 in the United States and Israel.