NYT: An Israeli-Born Scholar of the Holocaust Mourns for His Country

Jennifer Szalai writes:

What makes the current catastrophe so tragic, he says, is that it was far from inevitable. Bartov discusses the Nakba, the violent displacement of Palestinians in 1948. From the beginning, he emphasizes, Zionism had two faces: one that was liberatory and pluralist, the other ethnonationalist. Over the decades, the emancipatory element receded while the ethnonationalist element was elevated to a “state ideology.”

The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”Hamas does not lack information about Israelis. Settlers in Hebron do not lack information about Palestinians. The IDF officer who runs operations in Gaza has read enough about Palestinian suffering. Knesset members who back the Smotrich and Ben-Gvir line do not wait for a good book. Each side has a coherent picture of the other and a coherent picture of what it wants. The pictures cannot both win on the same land.
Bartov’s training as a Holocaust scholar pushes him toward the lesson that recognition prevents catastrophe. That lesson fits 1930s Europe, where the targeted population had no army, no state, no allies, and little information about what awaited them. It fits poorly in a setting where two nations with armies, intelligence services, foreign sponsors, and decades of contact compete for the same territory.
The honest questions are coalitional. Which side wins, which loses, what costs each side will absorb, and what an outside power decides to enforce. Bartov gestures at this when he credits Trump’s pressure on Netanyahu and says change will come from outside.
Why is there such an enormous demand for this shoddy thinking by elite media?
Elite media serves a particular readership. That readership is educated, liberal-leaning, often Jewish or Jewish-adjacent, embedded in institutions that punish coalitional honesty. The reader wants to criticize Israeli conduct without joining the right or the campus left. He wants to mourn Palestinian deaths without abandoning the Holocaust frame that has organized his moral world for sixty years. He wants to feel serious without paying coalitional costs.
Bartov delivers the product. Israeli-born, IDF veteran, Brown professor, family in Israel. Critics cannot dismiss him as ignorant or antisemitic. He keeps careful distinctions. He cites the legal definitions. He hopes books can help.
The “more understanding” frame does heavy work for elite media. If conflicts come from ignorance, the cure is reading. The reader who buys the book and discusses it at dinner joins the solution. The reviewer who explains the book does moral labor. The newspaper that prints the reviewer fulfills its civic role. The pipeline acquires moral weight from the premise that knowledge prevents catastrophe.
If conflicts come from coalition competition over land, water, demographic survival, and external sponsorship, the pipeline collapses. Books do not settle those questions. Power does. Sensitive readers do not influence Smotrich or Sinwar’s successors. The reader’s moral seriousness becomes a private hobby with no civic function.
The Holocaust frame gives elite media its strongest justification. Treating every conflict through “never again” elevates the stakes of media work to existential weight. It also flatters the reader, who casts himself as the alert citizen who will catch the warning signs the appeasers missed in the 1930s. Books like Bartov’s keep the frame alive even when applied to fights that have nothing structural in common with 1930s Europe.
The alternative is harder to sell. Saying the war is a coalition contest with winners and losers, that outside powers determine outcomes, that humanism has no purchase on Hamas’s leaders or the settler movement, removes the reader from the story. It also collapses the moral architecture of liberal humanism, which holds that decent people informed by good books can change history. That architecture is what elite media sells.
Bartov’s career illustrates the coalition logic. He criticized Israel from a position protected by his credentials, his IDF service, his family ties, his Holocaust scholarship. The Haaretz response from his fellow scholars did not engage his evidence. It accused him of inflammatory speech. He survived because Brown and the NYT sit inside a different coalition than Haaretz contributors. The same essay from an Arab scholar at a state university might have ended a career. The system rewards particular people for particular criticisms made in particular venues.
The supply of Bartov-style books exists because demand is steady. Editors commission them. Reviewers praise them. Readers buy them. Each link in the chain depends on the premise that understanding produces peace.