The descent of Israel

Israel: What went wrong?

by Omer Bartov

Published by Penguin

243 pages ₹999

  This book was written before the United Nations (UN) Commission of Inquiry reports unequivocally described as genocidal Israel’s targeted destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza. As the interrogative title of this book indicates, its author Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, came to this conclusion long ago. 

Dr Bartov’s forcefully written treatise argues that Israel strayed far from its founding ideals from the get-go, establishing the extremist state that precipitated the October 7 Hamas attacks (which he condemns) and Tel Aviv’s disproportionate response. He writes not as an ivory tower academic but as someone with deep roots in pre-Israel Palestine. His father, a committed Zionist, was born in the mid-1920s in Mandatory Palestine (territory administered by the British after World War I). His mother’s family, also staunchly Zionist, emigrated from Poland in the 1930s. Dr Bartov was the first generation born after the state’s creation. 

 

Growing up in a “resolutely left-wing kibbutz”, he never questioned the narrative that he was the first generation of his people’s resurrection. But, “… over time, even as the visible signs of the destruction of Palestinian culture all around us were gradually demolished or covered over, some of us became increasingly aware that our resurrection had come at the price of another people’s catastrophe.” 

Initially, that dim awareness created a contradictory “mental landscape” of “guilt, regret, negation and denial”. His mandatory four-year service in the Israeli Defence Forces changed his outlook. Seeing action in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza exposed him to “the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods”. He understood “what it meant to occupy another people”. 

This insight, enhanced by his study of the Nazi indoctrination of the German army, led him by steps to grasp the nature of the Israeli state as it evolved from overlapping currents of European antisemitism and Zionism. Much of this history is familiar, including the irony of the United States (US) and Europe’s indirect and direct complicity in the Holocaust. This book’s value lies in its examination of how Israel has become increasingly brazen in its destruction of the Palestinians. 

One method is the deployment of Holocaust memory. As Dr Bartov writes, “critics, including many Israelis, have long argued that Israel has politically instrumentalized the Holocaust” by cynically employing memories of the programmatic murder of six million European Jews to portray critics of Israel’s flagrant breaches of international law as antisemites. 

The “best tool” for this diversion from criticism comes from a globally accepted definition of antisemitism endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016. The IHRA provides 11 examples of antisemitism, which include denying Jews the right to self-determination, accusing Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust or drawing comparisons between Israeli and Nazi policies. This definition has eclipsed competing framings such as the Jewish Declaration of Antisemitism and the Nexus Document that distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. 

Such manufactured impunity — visible in US campuses and, sadly, in India — has encouraged the repressive nature of the state. In “The Missing Constitution” — the book’s best chapter — Dr Bartov examines the evolution of this extremism. Soon after the British mandate ended and 85 per cent of Palestinians in the newly conquered state had fled, Israel drew up a Declaration of Independence mainly to gain UN admittance and serve propaganda needs. Its omissions are revealing. Feverishly crafted through 13 drafts, the Declaration, which has no clear legal standing, asserted the right of a Jewish state in the Biblical land of Israel. But the term “democratic” was omitted because it was associated with social justice and minority rights. A reference to equality before the law was dropped for the same reason. No less fatefully, the Declaration omitted the definition of Israel’s borders, allowing it to conquer territory without hindrance. As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, elliptically put it, “We left the issue open to developments.” 

This open-ended approach was not accidental. As Dr Bartov writes, “Ben-Gurion opposed adopting a constitution, which is why none exists.” The Knesset came close to articulating constitutional principles by passing two Basic Laws in 1992 — one protecting human dignity and liberty, the other freedom of occupation. But those principles foundered on the Supreme Court’s consistent evasion of a “response to the question of the settlements’ legality under international law and also by allowing settlers to keep seizing land from Palestinians…” 

Dr Bartov concludes that Zionism, the ideology that underpins Israel, is flawed. The “liberal-secular definition of Zionism was as exclusionary as the religious one,” and “its professions of equality and democracy for all were repeatedly negated by its focus on privileging one ethnicity over another”. Until the West calls the Israeli state to account and withdraws vital material support, the 21st century will continue to witness its collusion in the wilful destruction of a people — including such travesties as Donald Trump’s UN-endorsed 20-point Gaza Plan.