Loading summary
Transcript65 lines
- [00:00]
Hulu Reality TV Announcer
Drama, romance, competition, Chaos. Welcome to Reality TV with Hulu on Disney featuring the hottest reality TV Every day turn on larger than life docusoaps like season four of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the hit new series Love Thy Nadir featuring superstar model Brooks Nader and her sisters. Obsess over the seasons of iconic dating shows like Love Island UK and Farmer Wants a Wife. Get hooked on irresistible food competitions like MasterChef. Dive into hit game shows like Celebrity Family Feud and revel in show stopping fashion competitions including the one and only Project Runway. It's the very best of reality tv. Every single day all in one place. Every tear, every triumph, every jaw dropping twist. This is where reality lives. This this is where Hulu gets real. Stream now on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers terms apply.
- [01:01]
Wayfair Commercial Announcer
Ready or not. Summer is coming and Wayfair's Memorial Day Clearance is on now. Right now through May 25th get up to 70% off everything home at Wayfair plus score amazing doorbuster deals all sail long and surprise flash deals on Memorial Day. We're talking thousands of products at every style and budget. Now is the time to save big on must haves for your patio, backyard and beyond. These savings won't last, so don't wait. Shop Wayfair's Memorial Day clearance now through May 25th.
- [01:29]
Hulu Reality TV Announcer
Wayfair Every Style, Every Home History as
- [01:33]
Martin DeCaro
It Happens May 15, 2026 Zionism and
- [01:37]
Narrator/Reporter
Israel's Self Destruction A landscape of complete and utter devastation.
- [01:44]
Omer Bartov
This neighborhood was once a big part
- [01:46]
Martin DeCaro
of nearby Gaza City. Two years of war have left it
- [01:49]
Narrator/Reporter
nearly lifeless, a devastated wasteland where there's
- [01:53]
Martin DeCaro
neither all out war nor anym could
- [01:56]
Narrator/Reporter
call peace and where Gaza's children continue to be killed.
- [02:00]
Commission Representative
The commission concluded that Israel has committed genocide.
- [02:05]
Narrator/Reporter
The number of children that have had one or both legs and arms amputated is greater than in any other conflict this century.
- [02:13]
Israeli Official or Military Representative
We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel's other enemies for decades to come.
- [02:20]
Martin DeCaro
Is Zionism? Was Zionism in 1948 fundamentally incompatible with peaceful coexistence with Palestinians? Incompatible with liberal democracy today? Historian Omer Bartov contends Zionism is irreparably broken and needs to be discarded because, he says of the genocide in Gaza and the dehumanizing turn in Israeli society that sees Palestinians as less worthy of life. Bartov's new book is what Went Wrong. That's next as we report History as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:54]
Historical Figure or Archive Recording (David Ben Gurion)
In our revival, we have been inspired by the message of our Bible and by the traditions of our ancient history which elevate the dignity of man and the principle of justice in which command us to love our neighbor as long
- [03:11]
Omer Bartov
as he doesn't come to the conclusion that it has to change the entire political paradigm under which both Israeli Jews and Palestinians have lived since 1948 to find a way to share the space. This violence will continue.
- [03:31]
Historical Narrator
In New York City in May of 48. American Jewry joins the freedom loving peoples of the world to celebrate the thrilling news. United nations laws have established Palestine as a free and independent state to be known as Israel.
- [03:47]
Martin DeCaro
5-15-78 years ago today Coincidentally, I didn't plan it this way. 78 years ago, David Ben Gurion proclaimed Israel's independence as the British departed the Mandate. The declaration referenced the spiritual father of the Jewish state, Theodore Herzl, who proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country. A right recognized in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917 and reaffirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations, which in particular gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its national home. And as Omer Bartov notes in his new book, the Declaration of Independence promised to guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture. Could a state that privileged one ethnicity over another also guarantee equal rights for all? A constitution and a Bill of Rights would have helped, but Ben Gurion opposed the writing of a constitution and he also refused to recognize Israel's borders. These decisions solidified over time and became permanent, planting the seeds for decades of conflict and bloodshed. But maybe it was hard to see all that coming in Israel's early years, as when in 1951 Ben Gurion visited the United States.
- [05:23]
Historical Figure or Archive Recording (David Ben Gurion)
I bring to the American people the warm greetings of the people of Israel and our gratitude for the unfailing sympathy of America with our efforts for independence and regeneration. The friendship between your great republic, vast in area and population, rich in resources and experience, and the very young and infinitely smaller democracy which I represent, is rooted deep in a common spiritual heritage. Our war of independence, fought after 6 millions of our people have been exterminated by the Nazis, proved once again that the cause of justice, faithfully pursued, must triumph in the end.
- [06:16]
Martin DeCaro
So in his new book, what Went Wrong? Bartov goes on to say, when thinking of the limitations that were enforced on Israel's Palestinian citizens for decades after the establishment of the state which curtailed these very freedoms, meaning freedom of religion, conscious language, One cannot but assume that Ben Gurion never intended to include them in any document. His entire approach to the declaration, as far as issues of equality and freedoms were concerned, was focused on adhering closely enough to the demands of the UN in order to gain admission. In other words, says Bartow, the fact that Ben Gurion issued a declaration with no clear legal standing and then blocked the adoption of a constitution suggests that he intended the eloquent document largely to serve foreign policy and propaganda needs.
- [07:02]
Historical Narrator
But bounded on all sides by hostile Arab states, Israel calls its world's newest nationals to arms for infant Israel is threatened with brevity and the breaking of a promise that couldn't keep.
- [07:14]
Martin DeCaro
Today, Omer Bartov, the eminent historian of the Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, who was born in Israel in 1954, fought in the 1973 war. Today, he says, Zionism has to be discarded. What started as a national liberation movement for Europe's Jews has become a violent, racist, irrational state ideology, he says, whose citizens have become profoundly indifferent to the suffering of others. The Palestinians. Now there is hatred and lack of empathy on the other side of the security fence, of course, and Zionism is not the first ethnic nationalism to turn ugly. But it is the focus of Bartov's book and it'll be the focus of our conversation. Omer Bartov, welcome back. Thanks for having me and congratulations on your book. You're the man of the hour. I see you everywhere. CNN with Christiane Amanpour. You were on a podcast with my friend Jeremy Suri, but not in Israel. Book has not been published there.
- [08:12]
Omer Bartov
The book is not being published and I've made extra effort to try and find Israeli publishers. I've expressed my willingness to translate it myself into Hebrew. Up to now I haven't had any publishers and for me what was most interesting was responses from some self described left of center or leftist publishers who seem to have been a bit upset with my arguments and would like to argue with me because they feel that I'm criticizing the left, which is true.
- [08:46]
Martin DeCaro
Is your native country on the road to self destruction and what would that look like?
- [08:51]
Omer Bartov
It may well be. We have to. Yeah, we have to say what self destruction would look like. If it is not stopped, if it is not helped against its own internal demons, then it's well on the way to becoming a full blown apartheid state, an authoritarian state, a state ruled by religious fanatics who have turned Zionism into a state ideology of violence, exclusion, Jewish supremacy and genocide. And as such I think it will lose support even from its closest European allies. It will no longer be able to pretend to be the only democracy in the Middle East. And I think it will lose support of most of the Jewish diaspora because it's actually becoming a threat to Jewish communities by giving the best excuse for antisemitism around the world, which is growing. So as a full blown apartheid state, authoritarian state, will it be able to survive for a while? Yes, of course it would lose. It has lost already about 200,000 people, mostly professionals, who have left young people well trained with small children who don't see a future for themselves and their children there. But in the long run, I think it won't be able to survive as such. And it will have to go through possibly something similar to what happened in South Africa, but it might be much more violent. South Africa was relatively lucky to produce the kind of leaders who managed to maneuver it from apartheid to democracy.
- [10:30]
Martin DeCaro
That might be what it takes to have positive and lasting reform that's been decades overdue. I mean, especially here in the United states. Loss of U.S. support.
- [10:40]
Omer Bartov
Yes, and my sense is, you know, I may be wrong, of course, but my sense is that a US Policy will eventually come to reflect this changing sentiments in the American public, both on the left and on the right in the United States. And this Israel will find itself having to exist without being given total license by the United States. I'd say where decisions are made, we'll have to go back to Jerusalem rather than to Washington, D.C. and once the limits on Israel's power are determined in Jerusalem, then Israel will have to stop using only bombs, but actually go back to politics, to diplomacy and to reconciliation. But that could take several years, and those may well be very violent and bloody years. And one hopes that there would be more pressure in Israel from those who actually care about it, from its European allies, and from the United States to make those changes now rather than to wait for all hell to break loose. Although it's already quite a hellish situation.
- [11:51]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I mean, the people who claim to be the most ardent defenders of Israel today or supporters of Israel, are backing policies that are bad for the country. It doesn't need to be this way. And the American public has gotten there, but the political class in our country still hasn't quite gotten there. And to your point, if the United States were to follow the law finally and condition military aid to Israel on its following the law, not using bombs and missiles indiscriminately against civilians, well, Israel would not be able to conduct itself this way. It would not be able to invade Gaza, west bank, attack Iran, go into southern Lebanon and obliterate villages without US Support? I don't think there's any question about that.
- [12:34]
Omer Bartov
Yes, I mean, this is part of the problem that in the name of supporting Israel, blindly supporting it, and in the name of defending Israel and Jews from anti Semitism, criticism of Israeli policies is being silenced and support is being given to the people who are now in charge in Israel, who are very violent, racist, expansionist, and couldn't care less about human life, including often Israeli life, conducting totally irresponsible military operations. No one is yet to explain what Israel is doing in Lebanon and what its goal is. And Israel never defined its political goals in Gaza either. In a sense, if the United States already, as I wrote a long time ago, already in November or December 2023, put a halt to Israel's operation in Gaza, we might have said that it was a very bloody operation. Thousands of people were killed. It almost became genocidal, but it was stopped by President Biden, and the US didn't do that. And it's not serving Israeli interests. It's making it all the more possible that Israel will become an authoritarian, violent state, also toward its own citizens, its own Jewish citizens, its Palestinian citizens, are already not really living under democracy. And that state would be one that nobody would want to defend.
- [14:03]
Commission Representative
The commission concluded that Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
- [14:11]
Narrator/Reporter
We are told that the number of children that have had one or both legs and arms amputated is greater than in any other conflict this century. Certainly we know the number of children who have lost one or both parent. The trauma, the psychological trauma for children will last their whole lives.
- [14:32]
Martin DeCaro
On a personal note, has this been difficult for you? You are an IDF officer. You were born in Israel, first generation, post1948, as you note in your book. Was this hard for you to conclude that your home country commits genocide?
- [14:46]
Omer Bartov
Well, of course, yes. It's been a very difficult period, not just writing about it, but just living through it.
- [14:53]
Martin DeCaro
And more than the military campaign. Sorry to interrupt, Omer. Really, the question is, was it hard for you to come to the conclusion that Zionism is something that has to be done away with?
- [15:03]
Omer Bartov
It's not that it's been difficult to come to the conclusion. It's been difficult to see that happening, to be a witness to that. And in many ways, that's what my book tries to take me through and the readers through, to try and understand how an ideology that began as an ideology that was about emancipation, about liberation, about appeal to humanitarianism, about freeing people from oppression. People in Eastern Europe who were increasingly trapped there, couldn't go anywhere else, were looking for something to change their reality, how that ideology became one itself, of oppression and of violence and of racism against others. That transformation that I lived through myself and that my ancestors were part of. I mean, my grandparents came from Poland to Israel as Zionists, escaping antisemitism and violence in Poland. To see that ideology becoming so intolerant, so violent, and to see Judaism, the religion itself, becoming part of that ideology, becoming a Jewish supremacist in a way that certainly my Orthodox grandparents would never have recognized, turning Judaism into something that it hasn't been since the zealots fighting the Roman Empire. Of course, it's devastating to see that on a personal level, but also, just as you know, I do feel myself part of Jewish history, part of Israeli history. And to see this course of events which was not inevitable, unlike what some people say, and some critics of my book say that Zionism was always genocidal. It wasn't always genocidal. It had a potential for that, like all ethno nationalisms. But to see that being played out and to see Israeli society now in such deep denial of what was done in its name by its own people, it's very hard to experience that.
- [17:15]
Martin DeCaro
Well, there were Zionisms, fundamentally a Jewish homeland, a place for Jews to call home so they could be safe after what happened in Europe, not just during World War II, but for decades prior to that, pogroms in Russia, etc. And then on the other end of the spectrum was Jabotinsky and the revisionist Zionists. Right. So there were Zionisms, there was a spectrum there. But what it's become today is the worst of it all. So I guess that raises a question, or you raise the question in your book whether Zionism can be rehabilitated or whether it's fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy.
- [17:53]
Omer Bartov
I think if you go back, as I write in the book, to 1948, my view, and that's a view that I've developed over the last few years. In 1948, Zionism could have been consigned to the history books. It could have been put in the archive. The state was created. It was created violently. It was created through ethnic cleansing of the majority of the Palestinian population. But the Jewish majority state was created.
- [18:20]
Historical Narrator
During the mopping up operations, Haganah forces seek out every Arab, and barricades are set up to screen those who had not already fled the city. Everyone is searched with the relinquishing of the British Mandate. Palestine is rocked by full scale war and both sides mobilize. Arab captives are held for evacuation to Acre. Women flee with what belongings.
- [18:42]
Omer Bartov
And that state had to decide what kind of state it would be, what would be its borders, what would be its laws, what would be the framework, the political framework in which it operated. And he decided not to make that decision. And it instead made Zionism into the state ideology without a constitution, without defining its borders, without trying to find some kind of solution to the main issue of the state, which is the relationship between Jews and Palestinians in that part of the world. Everything that followed was not inevitable, but became increasingly likely and the alternatives became increasingly narrow. So Zionism could have been seen as an extraordinary national movement in some ways, by the way, similar to Palestinian national movement, which was also created from scrap, from catastrophe, from disaster of the expulsion of the Palestinians of the Nakba and the remaking of a Palestinian nation. In the 1960s and 70s, Zionism created a Jewish nation from a bunch of people who were living in Eastern Europe under very dire conditions. It could have been said to have succeeded and to have led to the creation of a state that, as many people believed, like members of my parents generation, would be a just society with many socialist aspects to it, to its own citizens, and would find a way to live together with Palestinians. There were many people, like my parents, who supported the binational state before 1948. So there was a potential. But today, today Zionism has become a state ideology that has to be discarded. It cannot be repaired anymore. I don't believe it can be repaired. The state has to reinvent itself, reinvent itself in a way that would make it possible for Jews and Palestinians to share that land between the river and the sea in whichever way they want, but to share it with equality and dignity for all. If it doesn't do that, then it will be what I described before. It will be a small, ruthless, mean, poor pariah's thing.
- [20:56]
Martin DeCaro
Have we gotten to this point because although Israel has been occupying millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West bank since 1967, the occupation's mostly been out of sight, out of mind.
- [21:12]
Omer Bartov
Yes, and that has become increasingly the case. So people still talked about the occupation all the way to the 1990s, to the Oslo Peace process, which had many problems to it. One of the main problems was that it refused to go back to 1948. It wanted to speak only about what happened after 1967 and not to recognize the Nakba, not to recognize Palestinian refugees, But at least it recognized the occupation, and he wanted to put an end to that. The occupation disappeared. It started disappearing after 2000, after the second intifada, when Israel started building separation walls and increasing checkpoints. And so Palestinians underwent social death. For most Jewish Israelis, Palestinians exist only as people to be controlled by. One generation after another of Israeli soldiers who go and break into their homes at 4 in the morning, who humiliate old people, break children's toys, who don't allow pregnant women to reach the hospital in time. That's what the occupation has become. Both increasingly oppressive and brutalizing and invisible to much of the population. If you go back and look at the election campaigns in Israel in the years leading to 2023, the occupation was not an item. Nobody spoke about it during the protest movement against the judicial overhaul in the months leading to 2023, if you recall, once the Netanyahu's last government was created, a government that is still in power, incredibly, after the fiasco of October 7, in the months between January and October 2023, when hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens were protesting against the attempt to change the rule of law in Israel, almost none of them wanted to speak about the occupation, about the elephant in the room. So the occupation disappeared. Now the Hamas attack, brutal and murderous as it was, brought it back. And although those leaders of Hamas are now dead and Gaza has been completely destroyed, the one goal that Hamas had, which was to bring back the issue of the Palestinians, has succeeded. They have succeeded in regionalizing the conflict. And Israel has gone straight into that. It's fighting in Lebanon, in the west bank, in Syria, in Iran, in Yemen,
- [23:39]
Martin DeCaro
everywhere in the name of security. But there's also something called Greater Israel ideology, fused with religious fanaticism and Zionism that sees these countries as really part of Israel. As you point out in your book, and this may be news to people who only casually follow this story, Israel never defined its borders and never wrote a constitution.
- [24:03]
Omer Bartov
So as I said before, in 1948, there was an opportunity. Israel proclaimed itself as a State on 14 May 1948, just as the British Mandate was ending and the British were leaving Palestine in its Proclamation of State, known in Israel as the Declaration of Independence, though it's not clear. Independence from what? Because the British were leaving anyway. It provided the Bill of Rights. It said that all Israeli citizens, no matter their religion or race ethnicity, would have equal rights, and it promised to issue a constitution by October of that year. But it never did issue that constitution, and it never defined its borders. Ben Gurion famously said, why should we define Our borders. Now let's see what happens. There's going to be a war. Let's see how the war ends. And indeed, the war ended with Israel having a much larger part of Palestine. There was allotted to it in the UN Partition resolution that recognized the Jewish and Arab state. Because the constitution was never issued, Israel never defined itself as a political system. By the way, the Declaration of Independence does not call it a democracy. It doesn't use the word democracy. It talks about a Jewish state. It didn't define what it means. When it says later on, a Jewish and democratic state. How do you address the balance between being Jewish and being democratic? And he never said what his borders were that could have been addressed. There were attempts to address that in the early 1990s. There were basic laws being passed by the Israeli Parliament, by the Knesset, that tried to create the building blocks of a constitution. And what we've seen most recently is actually an attempt to undo those attempts and to go back to the very beginning, to recreate the state as a state that is not a democracy, that would be a religious state in some way similar to the vision that Hamas has about a Palestinian Islamic state, to make it an only Jewish state, a state only for Jews with no Palestinians, and a state that would be a religious one, a Medinath Alacha, a state according to Jewish law.
- [26:17]
Martin DeCaro
The conversation with Omer Bartov continues in a moment, but you never have to listen to ads again. Tap subscribe now in the show Notes for ad free listening, bonus content and early access to every new episode of History As It Happens. Or go to historyasithappens.com to sign up. The Supreme Court justice who is behind those 1990 basic laws, Aharon Barak. You spend a chapter on him and his ideas. He's a towering figure in Israeli legal history. Even with him, he said that Israel had to be a Jewish state or a state of the Jews and democracy or equal rights for all people. Are those things compatible?
- [27:14]
Omer Bartov
Well, it turned out that they're not. And Barak heroically tried to find a way of defining it in a way that would make it possible. But even he admitted, as he said in one of his articles, he said, but it is true, he said, that the Jews hold the key to the land. What he meant by that was that Israel has a law of return. So any Jew around the world who wants to come to Israel and become an Israeli citizen can do so. It's a very easy process. But if you're a Palestinian, you cannot come to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. And if You're a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and you leave the country, you have a very good chance of not being able to come back to it. And so the fundamental concept of citizenship divides between Jews and Palestinians or those who are citizens. And in 2018, that became the law of the land. In 2018, the country passed a basic law, which was response to Barak's basic Laws of the early 1990s on the state of Israel being the nation state of the Jews. So it basically put legally Palestinians and the Arab language into a second class citizenship.
- [28:34]
Martin DeCaro
And he wasn't even talking about the occupation, where millions live, no rights at all.
- [28:39]
Omer Bartov
Correct.
- [28:40]
Martin DeCaro
So earlier when I asked you if this was a difficult process for you, what I meant by that was, I guess I was thinking about myself 25 years ago. After 9 11, I had some historical awareness. I feel like I'm less ignorant today than I was then. Maybe some of my listeners disagree, but even then I had some historical awareness that the United States had made mistakes in the past, but I considered myself a patriotic American who believed my country was a force for good in the world. So after 9 11, I was like a lot of Americans, I kind of lost my mind and I wanted revenge and I wanted to pursue what Dirk Moses calls permanent security. We're going to go into these countries and wipe out every last sob that would do us harm. So I often wonder if there's anything to that comparison, the way Americans felt after the shock of 911 and how Israelis felt after the shock of October 7, 2023. And I don't know if that comparison holds up, because even though you can go back and probably find a lot of statements by people in this country saying, you know, bomb them back to the Stone Age, the histories are so different, the sets of circumstances are so different that maybe the comparison doesn't work. I don't recall Americans saying they want to expel all Afghans from Afghanistan or kick all the Iraqis out of Iraq. It was more about liberating them. As violent as that process turned out to be, both wars were a disaster. I'm not defending them. So maybe that comparison doesn't work. Because I think one of the main points in your book, Omer and I'll be quiet and I'll listen to your answer here in a second. These genocidal attitudes and genocidal conduct that has emerged since October 7 had deep roots in Israeli society.
- [30:19]
Omer Bartov
It's a complex question you couldn't ask.
- [30:21]
Martin DeCaro
It may have been the longest question I've ever asked on my podcast. But go Ahead.
- [30:26]
Omer Bartov
Well, you read my book, so you obviously have many questions, which is a good thing, I hope, for the book too, you can make some analogies. You can say that the US after all itself was a settler colonial state, and that it conducted the genocide against the native populations here. And it's never really come to terms with that. It's still generally in denial of that. You can say that the US after the shock of 9 11, responded with great violence, obviously to its own detriment at the end and much more to the detriment of others, which is what Joe Biden, President Biden, was telling Netanyahu when he famously went to Jerusalem and he said, we made a mistake after 9 11. Don't repeat that mistake.
- [31:11]
Joe Biden
Justice must be done. But I caution this. While you feel that rage, don't be consumed by it. After 9 11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes. I'm the first US President to visit Israel in time of war. I made wartime decisions. I know the choices are never clear or easy. For the leadership, there's always cost. But it requires being deliberate, requires asking, asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you're on will achieve those objectives.
- [31:55]
Omer Bartov
So you could make some analogies along these lines. But as he was saying, there's a difference between the US Going to Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands of miles away from the US and the US Itself being a continental state. And Israel, which is a very small state, it's about the size of New Jersey, I think, fighting a war on its own borders, on a land that many Israelis and certainly the current political leadership think belongs to them and has always belonged to them and is biblically their right to own. And yet in a situation where today you have equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians living between the river and the sea, they have 7 million of each. So from that point of view, of size, of demography, but also of a kind of historical sense, both by Palestinians and by Jews, of rightly belonging to the place, I think it's quite different. And that sense of justice and injustice, that sense of victimhood and victimization is much greater. The US can fight a war in Afghanistan and then forget about it. The US can go and destroy Vietnam, and now Vietnam wants to have good relations with the US that's very different when you're an empire like the United States and when you're a puny little state like Israel, the limits of whose power are defined by the United States and not by Israel. The genocidal aspect of this goes back a long way. Now, I'm not one to say, and I would not agree that Zionism from the very beginning was a genocidal ideology. I don't think that my grandparents came to Israel with genocide of their minds. They came because they were escaping antisemitism and oppression and lack of any chances in Poland. And they couldn't go to any other country, really, because the US had already closed its gates in the early 1920s for Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and other European countries were closing their gates. And so there was Zionist. But they also didn't have much of a choice but to go there. So I wouldn't say that Zionism begins as a genocidal ideology. I agree with that particular dynamic. And the dynamic was Zionism wanted to create the Jewish majority state. Zionism spoke about that. There's a famous phrase in the Bible, Am levadish kon. It's a psalm. The people shall dwell on its own, that the Jews will live among the Jews. They will no longer be a minority. They'd lived for 2,000 years as a minority. Didn't work out. Wasn't good. People were turning against them. Now they'll have their own place, they'll have their own government, their own police, their own army. They'll be on their own. But of course, they couldn't be on their own. They came to a place that was populated already. And that created the dynamic of violence. Resistance obviously justified resistance by the indigenous population that didn't want to take over, and a sense by Jews not only that they were escaping violence from elsewhere and had no choice, but many of them believed that they were coming home, that they were coming to their ancestral homeland. So the two perspectives were completely different. And the populations became inextricably mixed in a way that was both inseparable and had endemic violence in it. And the state of Israel never decided how it's going to resolve this issue. How would that space be shared? And from 1948 on, it's the Jewish state, it's Israel that has the power to make that decision. One has to remember the last war that Israel fought, which was a real War, was 1973, the war that I was in. That was a war between the Israeli army and Arab armies, well armed, with air forces, with artillery, with tanks. After that, Israel never fights a war against armies. It fights a war against insurgents. This is a war that it can't lose and it can't win. They can't destroy the state of Israel and The fantasy or the propaganda that they are an existential threat to the state is only that it's propaganda. But they can't win that war either. You cannot win a war when you are oppressing half of your population. 7 million people are under the boot of the Israeli state. You cannot win that unless you kill them all or you throw them all out.
- [36:32]
Martin DeCaro
And that feeling of being on the verge of annihilation, that is fueled, of course, by the rhetoric in the charters and the conduct of Hamas and Hezbollah. But there's also the history of the Holocaust. This is another major theme in your book and how you say, and I happen to agree with you, Holocaust memory. Holocaust history has been abused. It's been destroyed, in my view. Same for the definition of antisemitism. This does not minimize, again, what Hamas and Hezbollah would like to do if they had the power. We also have to place them into a context here. Hezbollah only comes along after a 1982 invasion by Israel in Lebanon. Hamas grows out of the resistance to the Israeli occupation of the west bank in Gaza. Hamas doesn't come along until the late 1980s, 20 years after the occupation begins. So can you address that now, how Holocaust memory is being abused in the minds of some Israeli Jews? If we don't annihilate our opponents, they're going to annihilate us, just like the Nazis did.
- [37:36]
Omer Bartov
Yes. And, you know, that was a process because when I was growing up in Israel, the Holocaust was really more of an embarrassment. Early education, in the early years of the state, there was this sense that the Jews in Europe went like sheep to the slaughter. And we, the young Israelis, were a different breed of people, and we would never let that happen again. And so there was a sense of discomfort. We basically studied only about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, about all those heroic young men and women who fought and died. But the rest was almost derision about it. Now, that changed over time. It started changing with the Eichmann trial that exposed many people of my generation. We were now 6, 7, 8 years old listening to it on the radio. At the time, we had no TV. Much more so after the wars of 67 and 73, these wars were experienced as an existential threat. We forget that the weeks before the war of 67, there was a fear that the state would be wiped out. That's, by the way, a moment in which many Jewish communities around the world that were not particularly interested in Israel suddenly felt that they were fearful that that Jewish state would disappear. And it began a sort of attachment to the state, to Zionism and to the memory of the Holocaust. But you know, ultimately it's the rise of the right in Israel after the war. At 73 in 1977, the first right wing government is created in Israel under Menachem Begin. He is the man who in 1982, during the invasion of Lebanon, says that Arafat, who was then hiding in besieged Beirut, is like Hitler hiding in his bunker.
- [39:28]
Menachem Begin
I have read in some newspapers in this great country that Israel invaded Lebanon. This is a misnomer. Israel did not invade any country. You do invade a land when you want to conquer it, or to annex it, or at least to conquer part of it. We don't covet even one inch of Lebanese territory and willingly. We will withdraw our troops, all of our troops, and bring them back home as soon as possible.
- [40:00]
Omer Bartov
These analogies, increasingly between Israel's war's campaigns against Palestinians and the Holocaust become more and more common. And the Holocaust comes to be a kind of social glue in Israeli society between hostile parts of the Jewish population in Israel, between the religious and the secular, between those who came from the Middle east and North Africa and European Jews. That we are all not only committed to remember the Holocaust and to commemorate the Holocaust, but that the Holocaust is in fact in imminent danger. And if the Holocaust is in imminent danger, and if that danger emanates from Palestinians, what are you supposed to do about this? If they are preparing Auschwitz against you, what are you to do with that? You have every right then to wipe them out. As the Holocaust recedes in time, as fewer and fewer people ever experience it, and as Israel becomes indisputably the military hegemon in its region, the fear of Auschwitz, the fear of the Holocaust comes to play a different role. It comes to give license for unlimited violence.
- [41:17]
Martin DeCaro
I try to tread cautiously when discussing this issue. Not just because I'm not an Israeli Jew and wasn't living in Israel after 10 7, because Israel does have enemies. We're not talking about phantoms here, but the response to those enemies, well, it's been counterproductive to say the least. And we are way past the point of self defense in Gaza now. What is going to happen in Gaza, the situation there currently is atrocious. It looks like Israel is going to reoccupy at least a good part of the territory militarily and cram the remaining Palestinians into a small part of it, hoping that by depriving them of food, water and medicine, they'll go away. But where are they going to go?
- [41:59]
Omer Bartov
So first of all, right now, the IDF behind the Yellow line that separates them from Hamas controlled territory is controlling more than half of the Gaza Strip. So an area that was one of the most congested areas in the world before October 7th now has a population living in only half of it unhoused, mostly an area that has been completely devastated without any humanitarian infrastructure. That's the reality of the moment. Where is that leading? I have a sort of rather hellish scenario in mind. If you go back to President Trump's 20 point plan and you try to think, what does it mean? And all the ideas there were before the Iran war were sort of being shown on all kind of AI produced imagery, then you will see that the plan was to create an ideal city along the coast, wonderful coastal area to build like 140 steel and glass towers for the rich and powerful from Europe and the United States to be funded by rich Arab states. And where would the Palestinians go? The Palestinians would be enclosed in so called humanitarian cities, which would really be internment camps. And they would be those who would build that futuristic city and they would serve those people who would go to have a good time there, would wash the dishes, clean the toilets, who would be the water carriers of that. So that's an image of genocide, whereby Israel not only got away with genocide with total impunity and of course, assistance from its European and American allies, but also everyone would benefit from it. The US Real estate moguls such as Jared Kushner and Woodcoff and Mr. Trump and his family will all benefit. The Gulf states would benefit because they'd be on the good side of the United States. And those who were victimized in the genocide would continue to be victimized as a quasi slave population, maintaining that Riviera along the coast. Whether that will happen or not, I don't know. But if it does, it bodes ill not only for Palestinians, but for anyone who's contemplating genocide in the future, that you can both conquer and inherit, that you can carry out genocide and continue benefiting and nobody will pay a price. There will be no accountability whatsoever.
- [44:51]
Martin DeCaro
Because genocide is a process, right, that plays out over time. And I think what we've seen here is a process playing out that may not have been genocidal at first. You address this question in your book, but it's certainly become one in my view. And that image you just described is a monstrosity and brings us back right to where we were on the eve of October 7, 2023, turning Gaza into an open air prison. Rather than dealing in good faith with the Palestinian leadership, such as it is to try to reach a lasting peace agreement.
- [45:23]
Omer Bartov
Yes. And I think, look, as long as Israel doesn't conclude, and he won't, without massive external pressure, which means sanctions, military supplies, economic and political, as long as he doesn't come to the conclusion that it has to change the entire political paradigm under which both Israeli Jews and Palestinians have lived since 1948, to find a way to share the space, this violence will continue.
- [45:51]
Israeli Official or Military Representative
This signing of the Israeli Palestinian Declaration of Principle here today. It's not so easy, neither for myself as a soldier in Israel's war, nor for the people of Israel, nor for the Jewish people in the Diaspora who are watching us now with great hope, mixed with apprehension. It is certainly not easy for the families of the victims of the wars, violence, terror, whose pain will never heal. We have come from Jerusalem, the ancient and eternal capital of the Jewish people. We have come from an anguished and grieving land. We have come from a people, a home, a family that has not known a single year, not a single month in which mothers have not wept for their sons. We have come to try and put an end to the hostilities so that our children, our children's children will no longer experience the painful cost of war, violence and terror. We have come. We have come to secure their lives and to ease the sorrow of and the painful memories of the past.
- [47:35]
Martin DeCaro
That was Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, at the signing of the Oslo Accords at the White House in 1993, he would be assassinated by a Jewish religious fanatic two years later. On the next episode of History As It Happens. Were the Nazis socialists? Why does that matter? We'll be joined by the great Roger Griffin now. Next, as we report History As It Happens and make sure to sign up for my free newsletter, just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.
- [48:09]
Orderlymeds Commercial Announcer
When people turn to healthcare for weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderlymeds.com orderlymeds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide, enterzepatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience. And all shipped directly to your door in discreet packaging. Do your research, ask questions, then visit orderlymeds.com podcast for an exclusive offer. That's orderlymeds.com podcast. Individual results may vary. Not medical advice, eligibility required. See Cite for details.
- [48:40]
Wayfair Commercial Announcer
Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host, you seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.