As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel

Als je werkelijk wil weten hoe ‘destructief recht’ werkt en je een inzicht wil krijgen in de gruwel van Gaza momenteel, moet je zoals steeds de zeer verstandige Omer Bartov lezen. Verdoe je tijd dus niet met Grunberg- en Brusselmans-gezever. Lees deze absolute must long read!

Christophe Busch, directeur Hannah Arendt Instituut

“This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood.”

This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree.

On 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be’er Sheva,Israel.

My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned.

When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp-message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: “We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!”

The message went on to allege that I had signed a petition that described Israel as a ‘regime of apartheid’ (in fact, the petition referred to a regime of apartheid in the West Bank). I was also ‘accused’ of having written an article for the New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide.

On this, I was guilty as charged. The organiser of the event, the distinguished geographer Oren Yiftachel, was similarly criticised. His offences included having served as the director of the ‘anti-Zionist’ B’Tselem, a globally respected human rights NGO.

As the panel participants and a handful of mostly elderly faculty members filed into the hall, security guards prevented the protesting students from entering. But they did not stop them from keeping the lecture hall door open, calling out slogans on a bullhorn and banging with all their might on the walls.

After over an hour of disruption, we agreed that perhaps the best step forward would be to ask the student protesters to join us for a conversation, on the condition that they stop the disruption.

A fair number of those activists eventually walked in and for the next two hours we sat down and talked. As it turned out, most of these young men and women had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip. This was not a friendly or ‘positive’ exchange of views, but it was revealing.

These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country.

I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live.

Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing.

In deliberating these issues, I cannot but draw on my personal and professional background. I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander.

During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods. Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of ʿArīsh – which was then occupied by Israel – pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.

Military service is mandatory for Jewish Israelis when they turn 18 – though there are a few exceptions – but afterwards, you can still be called upon to serve again in the IDF, for training or operational duties, or in case of emergencies such as a war.

When I was called up in 1976, I was an undergraduate studying at Tel Aviv University. During that first deployment as a reserve officer, I was severely wounded in a training accident, along with a score of my soldiers. The IDF covered up the circumstances of this event, which was caused by the negligence of the training base commander.

I spent most of that first semester in the hospital of Be’er Sheva, but returned to my studies, graduating in 1979 with a speciality in history.

These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight?

In the decades after the Second World War, many American sociologists argued that soldiers fight first and foremost for each other, rather than for some bigger ideological goal. But that didn’t quite fit with what I’d experienced as a soldier: we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies.

By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible.

Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the Eastern front in the Second World War.

What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 1980s understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a ‘decent’ war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide ‘behind its back’. It took Germans many more years to realise just how complicit their own fathers and grandfathers had been in the Holocaust and the mass murder of many other groups in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of Defence, to the IDF to “break the arms and legs” of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops.

I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path.

As my research had shown, even before their conscription, young German men had internalised core elements of Nazi ideology, especially the view that the subhuman Slav masses, led by insidious Bolshevik Jews, were threatening Germany and the rest of the civilised world with destruction, and that therefore Germany had the right and duty to create for itself a ‘living space’ in the east and to decimate or enslave that region’s population.

This worldview was then further inculcated into the troops, so that by the time they marched into the Soviet Union they perceived their enemies through that prism. The fierce resistance put up by the Red Army only confirmed the need to utterly destroy Soviet soldiers and civilians alike, and most especially the Jews, who were seen as the main instigators of Bolshevism.

The more destruction they wrought, the more fearful German troops became of the revenge they could expect if their enemies prevailed. The result was the killing of up to 30 million Soviet soldiers and citizens.

To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one-line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military. This gave me the opportunity to write him a more detailed letter, explaining my research and my anxiety about using the IDF as a tool of oppression against unarmed occupied civilians. Rabin responded again, with the same statement: “How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht.”

But in retrospect, I believe this exchange revealed something about his subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognise that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political and moral price of the occupation.

Since 1989, I have been teaching in the United States. I have written profusely on war, genocide, nazism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, seeking to understand the links between the industrial killing of soldiers in the First World War and the extermination of civilian populations by Hitler’s regime.

Among other projects, I spent many years researching the transformation of my mother’s home town – Buchach in Poland (now Ukraine) – from a community of inter-ethnic coexistence into one in which, under the Nazi occupation, the gentile population turned against their Jewish neighbours.

While the Germans came to the town with the express goal of murdering its Jews, the speed and efficiency of the killing was greatly facilitated by local collaboration. These locals were motivated by pre-existing resentments and hatreds that can be traced back to the rise of ethnonationalism in the preceding decades, and the prevalent view that the Jews did not belong to the new nation states created after the First World War.

In the months since 7 October 2023, what I have learned over the course of my life and my career has become more painfully relevant than ever before. Like many others, I have found these last months emotionally and intellectually challenging.

Like many others, members of my own and of my friends’ families have also been directly affected by the violence. There is no dearth of grief wherever you turn.

The Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel has lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people – many killed in the cruellest ways imaginable – and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children.

The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity – with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border – is profound.

Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme.

The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction.

The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation.

The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage.

Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were ‘liquidated’.

References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.

Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name.

In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF.

Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.

Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness.

Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject.

The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.

In an interview conducted on 7 March 2024, the writer, farmer and scientist Zeev Smilansky expressed this very sentiment in a manner that I found shocking, precisely because it came from him. I have known Smilansky for more than half a century, and he is the son of the celebrated Israeli author S. Yizhar, whose 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh was the very first text in Israeli literature to confront the injustice of the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948.

Speaking about his own son, Offer, who lives in Brussels, Smilansky commented: “Offer says that for him every child is a child, no matter whether he is in Gaza or here. I don’t feel like him. Our children here are more important to me. There is a shocking humanitarian disaster there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages … There is no room in my heart for the children in Gaza, however shocking and terrifying it is and even though I know that war is not the solution”.

“I listen to Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents [murdered by Hamas on 7 October] … and who speaks so beautifully and persuasively about the need to look forward, that we need to bring hope and to want peace, because wars won’t accomplish anything, and I agree with him.”

“I agree with him, but I cannot find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity, I cannot … It is not just Hamas, it’s all Gazans who agree that it’s OK to kill Jewish children, that this is a worthy cause …”

“With Germany there was reconciliation, but they apologised and paid reparations, and what [will happen] here? We too did terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on 7 October. It will be necessary to reconcile but we need some distance.”

This was a pervasive sentiment among many left-leaning, liberal friends and acquaintances I spoke with in Israel. It was, of course, quite different from what rightwing politicians and media figures have been saying since 7 October.

Many of my friends recognise the injustice of the occupation, and, as Smilansky said, profess a ‘love for humanity’. But at this moment, under these circumstances, this is not what they are focused on. Instead, they feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out, and in the struggle between one just cause and another – that of the Israelis and that of the Palestinians – it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price. To those who doubt this stark choice, the Holocaust is presented as the alternative, however irrelevant it is to the current moment.

This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October. Its roots are much deeper.

On 30 April 1956, Moshe Dayan, then IDF chief of staff, gave a short speech that would become one of the most famous in Israel’s history. He was addressing mourners at the funeral of Ro’i Rothberg, a young security officer of the newly founded Nahal Oz kibbutz, which was established by the IDF in 1951 and became a civilian community two years later. The kibbutz was located just a few hundred metres from the border with the Gaza Strip, facing the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja’iyya.

Rothberg had been killed the day before, and his body was dragged across the border and mutilated, before being returned to Israeli hands with the help of the United Nations. Dayan’s speech has become an iconic statement, used both by the political right and left to this day:

“Yesterday morning Ro’i was murdered. Dazzled by the calm of the morning, he did not see those waiting in ambush for him at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.”

“We should not seek Roi’s blood from the Arabs in Gaza but from ourselves. How have we shut our eyes and not faced up forthrightly to our fate, not faced up to our generation’s mission in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of lads, who dwell in Nahal Oz, is carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart – have we forgotten that?…”

“We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells.”

“Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people. But beyond the border’s furrow an ocean of hatred and an urge for vengeance rises, waiting for the moment that calm will blunt our readiness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call upon us to put down our arms …”

“Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.”

The following day, Dayan recorded his speech for Israeli radio. But something was missing. Gone was the reference to the refugees watching the Jews cultivate the lands from which they had been evicted, who should not be blamed for hating their dispossessors.

Although he had uttered these lines at the funeral and written them subsequently, Dayan chose to omit them from the recorded version. He, too, had known this land before 1948. He recalled the Palestinian villages and towns that were destroyed to make room for Jewish settlers. He clearly understood the rage of the refugees across the fence.

But he also firmly believed in both the right and the urgent need for Jewish settlement and statehood. In the struggle between addressing injustice and taking over the land, he chose his side, knowing that it doomed his people to forever rely on the gun.

Dayan also knew well what the Israeli public could accept. It was because of his ambivalence about where guilt and responsibility for injustice and violence lay, and his deterministic, tragic view of history, that the two versions of his speech ended up appealing to vastly different political orientations.

Decades later, after many more wars and rivers of blood, Dayan titled his last book Shall the Sword Devour Forever? Published in 1981, the book detailed his role in reaching a peace agreement with Egypt two years earlier. He had finally learned the truth of the second part of the biblical verse from which he took the book’s title: “Knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end?”

But in his 1956 speech, with his references to carrying the heavy gates of Gaza and the Palestinians waiting for a moment of weakness, Dayan was alluding to the biblical story of Samson. As his listeners would have recalled, Samson the Israelite, whose superhuman strength derived from his long hair, was in the habit of visiting prostitutes in Gaza.

The Philistines, who viewed him as their mortal enemy, hoped to ambush him against the locked gates of the city. But Samson simply lifted the gates on his shoulders and walked free. It was only when his mistress Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair that the Philistines could capture and imprison him, rendering him all the more powerless by poking out his eyes (as the Gazans who mutilated Ro’i are alleged to have also done).

But in a last feat of bravery, as he is mocked by his captors, Samson calls for God’s help, seizes the pillars of the temple to which he had been led, and collapses it on the merry crowd surrounding him, calling out: “Let me die with the Philistines!”

Those gates of Gaza are lodged deeply in the Zionist Israeli imagination, a symbol of the divide between us and the ‘barbarians’. In the case of Ro’i, Dayan asserted, “the longing for peace blocked his ears, and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and brought him down.”

On 8 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog addressed the Israeli public, citing the last line of Dayan’s speech: “This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.”

The previous day, 67 years after Ro’i’s death, Hamas militants had murdered 15 residents of the Nahal Oz kibbutz and taken eight hostages. Since Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja’iyya facing the kibbutz, where 100,000 people had been living, has been emptied of its population and turned into one vast pile of rubble.

Omer Bartov

Dit is het eerste deel van een long read door Omer Bartov die op 13 augustus 2024 werd gepubliceerd in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Het tweede en laatste deel volgt in Nieuwsbrief#56 van oktober 2024.

The Guardian: “The conflict in the Middle East continues to destroy countless lives. The scenes since 7 October from Gaza and Israel have haunted millions around the world and the crisis is being felt with an increasing intensity in Lebanon and the West Bank. As the war reaches a new stage, understanding what is happening – and what comes next – is more important than ever.”

Lees verder (inhoud september 2024)