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”.
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.