It’s February 18, 2025, and I am walking towards Tyler Tallman-Hall in Sloan, the music library located at Davidson College. I entered the auditorium and was presented with a small room, staged in an auditorium style. The stage is set with a podium and two chairs, ready to be filled with conversation. All students and teachers had been instructed to sit in the first two rows. The room was stimulated with intellectual curiosity and excitement, because Omer Bartov was scheduled to give a lecture at Davidson for the first time since 1995. Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian at Brown University and is known for his expertise in Holocaust and Genocide studies. Omer Bartov has published fourteen books dissecting the Holocaust, the Creation of Israel and Zionism, Israel/Palestine conflict, and World War II.
Keeping this information in mind I was looking forward to seeing how he would tie together Jewish history with current events happening in the middle east today. Coming into this experience I had a lot of questions related to Zionism and the creation of Israel, a political ideology which seemed the direct result from years of displacement and the rise of nation-states. Bartov started off by talking about the current book he is writing since the attack by Hamas on October 7th. This book wouldn’t answer every question about Israel but he hoped it would be a start to conversations around Zionism and how it has transformed from a movement “that sought to emancipate European Jewry and liberate it from oppression and persecution into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism increasingly focused on the expulsion and violent domination of Palestinians under Israeli rule.” This was the basis for Bartov’s talk and would be how he formed arguments around the immense human rights violations that Israel has committed. Bartov would call what Israel is dong a form of Genocide, which is a perspective I had never considered. This is because the collective memory used to define a Genocide would be the Holocaust and because that memory seems unrepeatable, individuals don’t recognize the factors of Genocide withtin other humanitarian crisises.
Another aspect of Bartov’s lecture was the personal stories he intertwined into his commentary. This individual perspective may seem unimportant and yet it was his experience that describes and relates to so many other Israeli stories. Bartov’s grandfather and father were born in Poland and immigrated into Israel. They were low income and didn’t necessarily do better after moving and yet this would be a decision that saved their lives. Bartov spent his life in a socialist commune, in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a neighborhood that was “built right next to or over the remnants of Palestinian homes.” Bartov studied in Oxford and served in the Israeli military for much of his life. His opinions of Israel began to change as he noticed that the Israeli people began to move with the weight of shock and trauma that plagued the creation of Israel into a nation-state. It seems from Bartov’s lecture that many Israeli people justify the oppression of Palestinians due to a traumatic Jewish past, pushing the narrative of self preservation.
A history as harrowing as the Holocaust is a hard part to separate from the identity of Zionist and Israel. In fact I’d argue that it needs this lachrymose version of history in order to justify the importance of having a secular Jewish state, but is it possible for a country created in response to Genocide to exist peacefully? Bartov replied to these questions with 2 solutions. The first is that Israel will continue to empty Gaza of its residents with the support of the United States and eventually reach a point of isolation. The second is that Israel and Palestine will come to a compromise and find ways to make citizenship inclusive, which according to surveys seem to be what people would actually hope for, they just don’t believe it’s possible. With these two solutions in mind I believe that the second option would be the best, and yet I have never heard of the establishment of a nation state that hasn’t been sustained without the displacement of others.
As this talk concluded I was left with the final question of, “was this all inevitable?” Israel was born out of the trauma of Jewish people and the need for a nation state that centralizes and priorities the Jewish identity. A framework that was adopted from already settled and growing nations. The world is only growing more segregated, along with the fear of the “immigration crisis” that seems to be causing every government to want to tighten their borders and prioritize their countries nationalistic rhetoric. The concepts of what makes someone a part of a collective identity is only going to get more restrictive which unfortunately seems to lean towards Bartov’s first forecasted solution, and yet I hold out optimism that there will one day be an understanding of nationalism being a fictive identity and not something that confirms or denies citizenship.
Work Cited
Bartov, Omer. “Israel: What Went Wrong?” 18 Feb. 2025, Davidson College. Davidson College. Lecture.