Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.
Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.
Bartov did more than simply apply the word genocide to Israel’s actions: he shouted it from the establishment-media rooftops, making the case in a lengthy July 2025 essay in the New York Times titled: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. (He had addressed some of the arguments in a Guardian essay the year prior.) Bartov’s declaration cost him several close relationships, he told me, even though subsequent events have not only validated his analysis but further demonstrated the lack of concern for Palestinian suffering that has become prevalent in Israeli society.
His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, is an attempt to explain that indifference. The book, which was published on Tuesday, is a detailed account of how Israel was transformed from a hopeful nation that in its founding document promised “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex” into one intent on what he bluntly terms “settler colonialism and ethno-nationalism”.
This is a fun fantasy, maybe the US can redeem itself as well… just kidding, they are going to double down just like Israel.
The pendulum will swing! Of course it just keeps swinging to the right and not left. How strange.
It is almost like a powerful group of well insulated people are calling the shots and they are determining societal movements through propaganda.
If you think countries have morals and feelings then you’re a lost cause. Countries have always and will always purely act in their best self interest.
History shows otherwise. All societies go through cycles where the ruling party, ideology, or system gets replaced by something fundamentally counters it when it no longer holds up the social contract it promised.
Welcome to human history
Gentleman’s bet: US and Israel will not have a leftist resurgence in policy anytime soon.
We will see the wealth gap continue to grow and accelerated environmental degredation.
Propagandist will try to convince people otherwise but the truth will always be in the policies and not the feels.
I think there’s a flaw in your bet. Societies have to be viewed in their relative context, you can’t apply some arbitrary standard that’s based on your subjective whims. Each society has a different overton window and different issues. However, they all have an internal left and right wing.
For example, if the Democrats win in 2028 and they manage to reverse 70% of the major Trump fuckups in policy and pass a few of major policies like universal healthcare, abortion rights, or raising the minimum wage. That’s a pretty substantial policy shift, but that’s still not a communist revolution that’s overthrowing capitalism. Would you call this shift in policy left wing or slightly less right wing? If it’s the former, then I would take you up on your bet because societies do go in cycles of going from one end of their mainstream political spectrum to the other. If it’s the latter, then I can’t take you up on your bet because nothing will ever satisfy your condition. Nothing will be leftist enough.
You believe that societies naturally drift left and right. I believe that policies not perception determine this drift.
The current issue that is dragging the entire world right is accumulation of money. This isn’t changing without a revolution. This is not going to happen.
All the major super powers will continue to pass policies towards authoritarianism. There will be no drift to the left except for propaganda that leftist will eat up while policies will dictate the future not feelings.
Our last best chance was before the Internet got locked down by governments and corporations. The information revolution came and it did not end up benefitting left thought or even policy much at all.
While I am optimistic about people, I believe reality is painting a very different picture than you are seeing in regards to society as a whole. I do hope your are right, but if I was a betting man (I am not, it is a gentleman’s bet) I would have to say there will be no left revolution in policy anytime soon.
I think a fair judgement of this would be seeing a decrease in the wealth gap. I don’t think other measures of temporary rights or entitlements (think abortion or food stamps) are actually a good way to show a leftward policy change. These things are temporary and can be withheld or taken away.
It is kind of like adding a sail to a car that is broken down. Sure you could get it to move if the wind is blowing right, but it is still broken. Universal healthcare has not stopped the rightward drift of Europe, why would it for the US. Isreal has Universal Healthcare and they are about as far from left as you can get.
I believe you are making an ideological assessment, I am not. My assessment is historical. If you look at any society in history, you’ll see that nothing is ever truly static. Societies evolve to their circumstances. There’s always cycles of growth and cycles of contraction. There’s cycles where a society is open, progressive, and tolerant relative to its past and cycles of isolation, conservatism, and exclusion. There’s no reason to think that we live in a time where this is any different.
In the US, for example, political cycles last about 50 or so years before they go through a major transformation. The current cycle started with Ronald Reagan back in the 80s. If you think what politics was like 50 years before then, it was the politics of FDR that started in the 1930s. Before that it was the corrupt Gilded age presidents like Cleveland that started in the 1880s (which is very similar to the politics of today in a lot of ways). Before that it was the Republicans that wanted to end slavery. I think you get the idea. The point is we’re at a time where existing one political cycle and entering another. These are always turbulent times. However, history indicates that the new cycle runs counter to previous one. We’re leaving a political cycle that was centered on gutting regulations, cutting taxes for corporations, free trade, anti unions, pro immigration, and so on. If we follow the pattern, the next cycle should be similar to the one started with FDR in the 1930s. There’s going to be a real push for a lot social programs, raising the minimum wage, massive housing build outs, taxing corporations, and going after things like monopolies.
We’re already starting to see this now with people like Bernie gaining national traction and Mamdani getting elected mayor. There’s still pushback, so the new cycle is not yet calibrated, there some positions that the public doesn’t agree with that need to change. But for the most part? That seems to be the next phase of American politics. MAGA appears to be the final chapter of the Reagan era cycle of politics because nobody wants its continuation, people are eager for the next thing that will come after it.
All assessments are through an ideological lense. I explained my lense which is examining policy and where it is heading. I also took a stab at yours which you have confirmed. It amounts to a societal pendulum, which is of course is my very reductionist view of it.
It is a common but misleading trope on many levels but does have some validity depending on how you look at it. While on the surface this may may often seem true the devil is in always in the details.
Take the forward march of progress on something like slavery. There are more slaves today than at any time in history. This is also discounting indentured service and a more extreme leftist viewpoint like underemployment or even wage slavery.
There are numerous examples of this and I think they would challenge your worldview. Take another example like environment degradation. Even though the US has the strongest environmental laws in history (discounting this most recent administration) they still have managed to poison every human with forever chemicals and micro plastics. Not to mention other future catastrophic calamities like the oceans dying off or global warming set to displace billions of people.
This raises an important criticism of a policy based perspective. Policies are not always enforced and can be also be used for nefarious purposes. Take the War on Drugs for example. Under the guise of a public health emergency the US grew their prison population to encompass 20% of the world’s total declared prison population but only having about 5% total of the world’s population. Of course, we later came to realize that it really was an attack on minorities which amounts to a slow burn genocide by the white nationalists.
History teaches nothing about the computer or what things like the military industrial complex has achieved through rampant fascism around the world. While it can serve as a predictor of some human behavior it can’t explain how to handle AI. I think this is where history can’t help us even if it is fascinating to study.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with looking policy or the direction it’s heading. It’s an okay standard to hold. However, the standard doesn’t actually contradict my point which is that societies aren’t static. I disagree with the notion that it’s pendulum. Societies do shift back and forth from have more progressive governments to having more conservative governments. However, the iterations of each of those can be vastly different from their predecessors.
For example, FDR styled US politics in the mid 20th century and radical Republican styled US politics in the mid 19th century are both technically left wing, but they’re incredibly different from each other and they have very different views and platforms. However, I think that’s besides the point which is that change is inevitable. I think you can agree that this something that’s difficult to argue against.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with this statement in of itself, I do think it applies to you in this comment quite a bit. All of the examples that you provided are missing a lot of important context.
This is true, but only because there’s that many more people today. In the 1800s, the world only had 1 billion people, today there’s 8 billion. At the peak of the Trans Atlantic trade in the early 19th century alone somewhere around 12 million to 15 million Africans were enslaved. Keep in mind, at the time there were other major slave trades that were just as big like the Indian ocean slave trade and the Arab slave trade. Today, most estimates put the number of slaves at 50 million people. So by absolute numbers, yes there’s more slaves, but by the share of the population slavery is actually much lower than what it was back then.
The vast majority of plastics and forever chemicals are produced in Asia. Asia is also the biggest polluter of both by a big margin.
Trying to blame this on the US is just silly. Global warming is the result of industrialization which most of the world has gone through. US emissions have actually be steadily going down for decades now. Once again, Asia is the biggest polluter of greenhouse gasses, and the rates are actually increasing there. There’s a reason why global warming has to be a global effort.
Which is why you need to verify policy with actual data. Policy is still useful as it can tell you the political leanings of a society and the desires of the public. However, data shows how serious that society is about something or what the results were.
While there’s no denying that there a lot of racist motivations behind the war on drugs, I think the use of genocide here is inappropriate. Genocide is a very specific term that describes a very specific event. This term cannot and should not be used to describe any act of injustice or violence. That just devalues the weight behind it.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what history is as a subject. We don’t study to predict the future, we study history to understand the past. By learning about what the people before us did, what they went through, and what they achieved we can better understand ourselves by learning from their mistakes, their knowledge, and their success. We can recognize patterns from history that we can extrapolate on to the present to make educated guesses as to why things are happening as they are or what will happen because of what we’re doing now.
Obviously history says nothing about computers or AI. However, history is filled similar situations that we can draw patterns and lessons from. Take for example, the light bulb. Before them, cities you used to rely on oil lamps for light. Each city had a team of lamplighters that would go from one streetlamp to the next lightening them on fire and making sure they have fuel. This was an entire industry and a lot of people made their livelihoods from this. But when the light bulb came around, it was simply a superior option that was brighter, more reliable, cheaper, and much easier to maintain. When cities decided to electrify their street lights, there was an insane opposition to it by lamplighters and their industry. They feared that their jobs would be automated away and they did everything in their power to oppose it. There was a lot of lobbying to ban light bulbs, a lot strikes and protests, there were even instances of lamplighters breaking electrified streetlights to send a message that they were not welcome. Obviously with time, they lost that the battle and electrified streetlights are now the standard. However, even today there are some towns and cities in Europe that still have lamplighters as remnants of the opposition at the time.
The point we have examples in history of groundbreaking technologies that revolutionized the world. We’ve seen how these intentions disrupted established industries and how much they hated and resisted it, how it gave rise to new industries, and how these inventions automated away the jobs of a lot of people. We can look to history to see what lessons we can take to best handle our present day groundbreaking inventions and how they’re going to disrupt people’s lives. I think it would be foolish to disregard history because there aren’t exact examples. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.