In 1987 the First Intifada broke out after an Israeli truck in the northern part of the Gaza Strip struck and killed four Palestinians in what Israelis described as an accident, but many Palestinians believed was a deliberate act. The revolt quickly spread to the West Bank, and Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defense, publicly spoke of “breaking the arms and legs” of Palestinians in order to crush it.
A few months later, the Israeli philosopher Yehuda Elkana, a survivor of Auschwitz, published an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the title “The Need to Forget.” The memory of the Holocaust, he argued, had become so deeply embedded in the Israeli consciousness that, for most Jewish Israelis, the slogan “never again” had been reduced to the idea that it must never happen to them again. “We must learn to forget!” Elkana wrote:
Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied from morning to night with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust.
He added: “The very existence of democracy is endangered when the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process. Fascist regimes understood this very well and acted on it.” The fact that public memory of the dead becomes politicized is inevitable and in itself doesn’t need to be a problem. It creates unity, a shared identity, but the question is, in the name of which ideology? At times, the dead are invoked to legitimize new massacres.
“The debate about whether the Holocaust is unique is a non-debate. It had unique aspects. What is unique about Gaza is impunity.”
Someone who has spoken about these same themes, and continues to do so, is the Israeli historian Omer Bartov. Born on a kibbutz in 1954, he has lived and taught in the United States for many years, and in his 1996 book, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, he distilled Elkana’s argument even further: “A people that chose to call one of the central events in its recent history the Disaster [Shoah] is naturally prone to paranoia, anxiety, hysteria, and manifestations of brutality.” The cliché holds that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Presumably the reverse is also true: those who obsessively and eagerly remember past catastrophes are condemned to repeat it at breakneck speed.
Wanting to understand how Israeli memory can become a stranglehold, and how one is then supposed to forget, I found myself standing in front of Omer Bartov’s apartment in a quiet and unremarkable street in Cambridge, MA, in May. Bartov became well known in the early 1990s with a study of the Wehrmacht’s complicity in war crimes, particularly in Eastern Europe. In part due to the decision of the Nuremberg trials not to declare the Wehrmacht a criminal organization, the “ordinary” army of the Third Reich was long regarded as precisely that: ordinary. Bartov’s work contributed to the insight that underpinned a notorious Wehrmacht exhibition shown from 1995 onward in more than thirty German and Austrian cities—after which Germans and Austrians had to accept that their fathers and grandfathers had not been such ordinary soldiers after all.
A young woman with a child in her arms opens the door and says that Bartov lives upstairs. After a while he comes down, a small man with a measured voice. He makes espresso, notes that my first name is Israeli, and asks whether I might speak Hebrew. I reply that my Hebrew is barely sufficient for working in hospitality, and maybe not even that.
“Then English,” he says.
Bartov’s most recent book carries the simple title Israel: What Went Wrong? “My book is being published in various countries,” Bartov says, “except in two: Israel and Germany. That is shocking, and also a bit sad. My German publisher, Suhrkamp, published my previous two books and will publish the next one, but they did not want this one.”
“Did they give a reason?”
“Yes,” Bartov says. “My previous book didn’t sell very well, et cetera. That kind of thing. It has to do with the fact that I address the subject of genocide.”
“According to the Germans, there is only one genocide, the genocide they themselves committed,” I say.
“And you are not allowed to say anything bad about the Jews,” Bartov adds. “That is one thing Germans and Jews agree on.”
I try to nuance this. There are always dissidents, however few. According to Bartov’s book, in the spring of 2025, 82 percent of Israeli Jews supported the plan to deport Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Bartov continues: “Many of my Israeli friends who consider themselves left-wing say: ‘Yes, there were war crimes, of course, and that happens in all wars, there are radical elements in the army, but . . .’ Then comes the big but. But if you say ‘genocide,’ there can be no more ‘but.’ That is why I insist on using that word.”
In his book, Bartov writes that, as an expert on genocide, he came to the conclusion, after careful consideration between October 2023 and May 2024, that the Israeli army in Gaza is guilty of genocidal operations. He bases this judgment on statements by certain politicians (intent), the cessation of humanitarian aid, and the displacement of the population from northern Gaza (ethnic cleansing). During our conversation, he stated that he no longer wishes to spend time on further evidentiary argument.
“If you use that word,” I suggest, “no one can still claim to be an innocent bystander. Is that why the word is so important to you?”
Bartov nods. “Has the association of Israeli doctors spoken out about the torture? No. Have the lawyers spoken out about human rights violations? No. A thousand Israeli academics signed a letter, that’s it. Society as such is complicit, either by doing something or by failing to do something. And that is what is interesting about genocide: it seeks to make everyone complicit. Moreover, there exists a Genocide Convention. Israel, Germany, France, America, all of them have signed that document. If you sign it, you are obliged to prevent genocide. And if you cannot prevent it, you are obliged to punish the perpetrators. But the international community does nothing. Trump does nothing, and Biden did nothing.”
“And the EU is powerless,” I say.
“No, not powerless. Now that Orbán is gone, things are happening, sanctions against some settlers, although that mainly concerns the military-approved violence of certain settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians. They should have done it ten years ago anyway. And then there is the whataboutism. Somalia. Russia. China. Myanmar. The crucial difference is that Israel is supported by the countries that claim to uphold international law. Myanmar is not. The genocide in Gaza is the first genocide since 1945 that is openly supported by the West. It is a unique genocide.”
“I thought you didn’t like the word ‘unique’ when it comes to historical events,” I say.
“I think the debate about whether the Holocaust is unique is a non-debate. The Holocaust had unique aspects. It was the only genocide with extermination camps. That has not happened since. What is unique about Gaza is impunity.”
I am reminded of a conversation I had earlier with the Israeli education scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan. “Look at history, look at the present,” she had said. “There is only one lesson to draw from genocide: you get away with it.”
“Let’s talk about memory,” I say to Bartov. “In your book you write: ‘Eventually the catastrophe of the Holocaust became, for most Israelis, a vast fig leaf, its lamentable effect to combine self-victimization and self-pity with self-righteousness, hubris, and the euphoria of power, with one side of the equation justifying the other.’ Where and how did memory become derailed?”
Bartov gets up to close some windows because he feels cold, or because he is worried that I do. Then he answers: “At the beginning of the 1970s I studied German military history in Germany. Auschwitz was not in the textbooks. The Holocaust only became important in education in the late 1970s, early 1980s, not only in Germany, also in Israel. I learned German in Murnau, Bavaria; my teacher had served in the 18th Panzer Division. ‘Omer, none of us wanted to go to Russia,’ my teacher said. They did not want to, but they went. The Wehrmacht exhibition was a shock. Hannah Arendt had visited Germany shortly after 1945 and described the prevailing ‘nihilistic relativism’ insightfully: the difference between opinion and fact had completely disappeared. Germans felt entitled not to know. Understandably. These are your fathers, your sons. The same applies now to the IDF. I served in that army during the Yom Kippur War. And I wrote a letter to Rabin in the late 1980s when he began talking about breaking arms and legs. ‘I have studied the Wehrmacht,’ I wrote, ‘and under your leadership the IDF is going down the same slippery slope.’ Rabin was furious with me. Elkana said this earlier than I did. He was a seer. And as for paranoia: I have nothing against paranoia in itself. If a Jew in New York suffers from paranoia, he goes to his therapist. A Jew in Israel who suffers from paranoia joins the army. That is the problem.”
I say: “In your book you write that Zionism should have been relegated in 1948, because the State of Israel was declared and Zionism had thereby fulfilled its historical function.”
Bartov replies, “In 1948 there were about 600,000 Jews in Israel, many of them survivors or children of survivors. In the war that followed the founding, about 1 percent of the Jewish population was killed. My father told me that commanders communicated with their soldiers in Yiddish, because they did not yet know Hebrew. My parents spoke about the people they had lost until the end of their lives. It is too simplistic to view history as if the genocide in Gaza was inevitable from the very beginning of Zionism, but that experience—the war—closed the door to coexistence. And Israeli Jews remained in denial about the Nakba; they had seen the atrocities, they participated in them. And yet those people, my parents and their friends, would never have spoken of ethnic cleansing or defended frivolous violence. Zionism was an ethnonationalist movement functioning as a colonial movement, but there were also idealistic elements in it. The possibility of justice was real for my parents. That is why I call my father the last Zionist. After that, hafrada, separation, became a mantra of the progressive camp: the two-state solution, with a large wall in between. That is a consequence of 1948. I still defended that separation at the beginning of this century. I would not do so now. You have to understand that the land is filled with Jews and Arabs, and they must learn to live together. A wall is simply another way of channeling violence.”
“You say we have to go back to 1948 to solve the problems. In your book you write that one of the major problems is the absence of an Israeli constitution.”
“Ben-Gurion postponed the constitution indefinitely, officially because the Orthodox Jews opposed it, saying: ‘We don’t need a constitution, we have the Torah.’ But the Orthodox Jews were then a small minority, and Ben-Gurion did not care at all about the Torah. The reason there was no constitution was the elephant in the room: the relationship between Jews and Palestinians. The Declaration of Independence says that Arabs have equal rights and are full citizens, but while that was being written, ethnic cleansing was already taking place. And that declaration never became law. There is still no constitution. There is, however, a Supreme Court, and it has consistently provided legal justification for the country’s wrongdoings. For example, in 1948 it applied the concept of ‘present absentees.’ These were Arabs who were on Israeli territory and therefore entitled to an Israeli passport, but who had not been in their village or home at the crucial moment because they had been expelled, and thus lost their property rights. This led to the dismantling of hundreds of Palestinian villages until 1966. Some Palestinians went to the Supreme Court but received nothing. The Supreme Court legitimized the settlements and allowed Jews in the West Bank to fall under Israeli law while Palestinians fall under military law, arbitrary law. In short: an apartheid regime. The Supreme Court has refused to rule on Gaza, claiming it is a political issue. In the year preceding the Hamas attack in October 2023, my left-wing Israeli friends in Tel Aviv and elsewhere protested fiercely against Netanyahu’s dismantling of the Supreme Court. But while they did so, they were defending their own privileges.”
“Your book is, despite everything, somewhat surprisingly not despairing. You write about the possibility of a confederation between Israel and Palestine. By whom will Israel be liberated?”
“If a Jew in New York suffers from paranoia, he goes to his therapist. A Jew in Israel joins the army. That is the problem.”
“Liberation is a complicated concept. Do you think the Germans in 1945 thought they were liberated? They were defeated and humiliated. No one thought they had been liberated by the Red Army—not the Poles, certainly not the Ukrainians, not the Latvians. Only the Jews thought so. In 1985 President Richard von Weizsäcker had to remind the Germans that they had been liberated in 1945. Of course I hope Tel Aviv will not suffer the fate of Hamburg or Dresden. The answer lies in Washington. One of Trump’s advisers told him he is the last pro-Israel president. This development will be accompanied by more antisemitism. For American Jews this may therefore not be good news; for decades they have imagined themselves as white, and that whiteness will slowly come to an end. Look at Tucker Carlson. But the time when Israel had a blank check to kill in the name of the Holocaust is over. One genocide cannot be used to legitimize another. The Zionism that still exists today is a racist ideology of Jewish supremacy, and that ideology, like the ideologies of the twentieth century, must end up in the dustbin of history. Israel will have to reinvent itself. Whether it will be a Jewish state is not so important. There will be many Jews living there. It is profoundly sad that eighty years after the end of the genocide from which Israel emerged, the country has become so violent, vulgar, and indifferent, even toward its own citizens. The moral abyss is real, and it is an abyss all Jews are confronted with, if only because Israel claims to speak on behalf of all Jews.”
“You end your book with the genocide in South West Africa, present-day Namibia, carried out by the German army in 1904, the prelude to the Holocaust. Why?”
“In the area I write about lived the Herero, who made their living from cattle. German settlers took over the land, depriving the Herero’s cattle of grazing grounds. An uprising followed; the Herero organized an attack. Their leader said they should spare women and children, and they most likely did. About a hundred Germans were killed and several farms were burned down. Then the German army arrived. The Herero were driven into the desert, where they starved, and slave camps were established, precursors of the concentration camps. All this because of the Herero attack, yet German generals spoke of protecting civilization. Netanyahu said in America that his war against Hamas was an attempt to protect civilization. You can always justify it for yourself. You kill other people’s children and say you must do so to protect your own. Eliminate the barbarians—Joseph Conrad already wrote about it. Execute all Herero men and call it the protection of civilization.”
“You called Elkana a seer, but Elkana believed Israelis should learn to forget. How do you forget?”
“Israel is by now no longer a secular state in any meaningful sense; it has redefined Judaism into a Jewish-supremacist and messianic ideology, and yes, also through the continuous mobilization of memory. The point is to remember in such a way that you can also forget. Otherwise, memory becomes, on the individual level, an obsession; on the societal level, a form of fanaticism. The point is to prevent the memory of past genocide from being mobilized in order to justify present-day violence and genocide.”
“What should we hope for?” I ask. “International law? In 1995 Bosnian Muslims began calling the United Nations ‘United Nothing’—a phrase first used by Dutch peacekeepers themselves.”
“International law, the international organizations meant to enforce it, are imperfect, but the alternative is raw power politics. The jungle. Young people have a right to hope. My students have a right to hope.”
A Dutch version of this interview appeared in Trouw on May 23.
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
Omer Bartov is Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. His many books include Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, and, most recently, Israel: What Went Wrong?.
Arnon Grunberg is a Dutch journalist and writer of novels, essays, and columns. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Le Monde, Die Zeit, The Guardian, and many other publications.