The “Good,” the “Bad,” and the Privileged

Why it’s high time to stop listening to “good” Israelis

Let’s engage in a little alternative history: Here’s the part that is history as it happened and we know it: The year is 1943. The German genocide of the Jews, the Holocaust, is underway and millions are being murdered by the Germans and their collaborators.

And now, just as a thought experiment, imagine something that is different from the history that actually unfolded: Imagine that – for some reason or other that is irrelevant here – the US has stayed out of World War II. Imagine further that US media – at that time, newspapers, magazines, the radio, and cinema newsreels – are receiving detailed information about the Germans’ mass murder, atrocities, psychotic violence, and mass delight in sadism and perversion.

Imagine further that these media are reporting on all of it. Imagine that all of the above provokes public debate in America and beyond. And, finally, imagine that one constantly recurring set of voices, receiving special attention every time they speak up, in that debate comes from Germans. Perhaps, for instance, in our alternative history, there also are German exiles in the US and elsewhere, “good Germans,” so to speak, who had to run from the Nazis, just as happened in real history.

Maybe one of those “good Germans” gets to publish a long op-ed in our alternative-history New York Times. He – or she – explains that it has taken them – raised as German nationalist and former German officer – a while to face it and it’s painful, but they are now ready to recognize what their fellow Germans are doing back in Europe.

Perhaps, too, there are whole organizations of “good Germans” – now we would call them NGOs – that also take their sweet, long time but, by 1943, years into the German slaughter of the Jews (and many others as well), come out and announce that now they, too, believe that these crimes are real and need to be acknowledged.

What would you feel if you were part of the American audience in that alternative history? Would you highlight these “good German” voices because now, finally, you as well can fully recognize the ongoing genocide as a fact, since compatriots of the German perpetrators – if only a few – are doing so?

Or would you feel confused, uneasy, maybe even appalled, thinking that there is something off, perhaps even revolting about these Germans given so much say about a genocide committed by Germans? Perhaps you would write some letters to some editors protesting that you are tired (or even sick) of hearing so much from Germans about German crimes and demanding to hear instead much more from representatives of the victims and those fighting and resisting on their behalf?

I am, among other things, a historian of World War II and the Holocaust. Much of my first book deals with World War II as experienced in one city in eastern Europe; the longest chapter in that study addresses the Holocaust. That may be the reason why I had to think about the above alternative history scenario, while observing our collective response to the Gaza Genocide currently being committed by Israel and the West together.

Everyone who is not a fool or a monster knows that – apart from those who protest, resist, and get punished for it – almost everything is wrong with that response. In essence, where the countries of the world have an obvious moral and legal obligation to come together in order to stop the Israeli perpetrators (including very much by military force) and help the Palestinian victims, most of the world has chosen a criminal de facto “neutrality.” And the single most powerful part (alas, still) of the world, the West, has joined the perpetrators. The world of the Gaza Genocide is not “merely” evil; it is insanely, satanically evil.

But there also is an issue that is less obvious and, in effect, more insidious: the constant and, as it were, default privileging of Israeli voices during a genocide committed by Israelis. And in this case, I am not talking about the usual suspects, the evil “Hasbara” clowns whose ceaseless, crass lying our mainstream media have long rammed down our throats.

No, this is not about the obviously bad – and they are very, very bad indeed – Israelis, such as Danny Danon and Eylon Levy, or even their vile Western surrogates, such as Alan Dershowitz and John Fetterman. This is about the “good Israelis,” those who – to some extent or the other but almost never enough – criticize or oppose their own country’s crimes. Or to be precise, it is less about these “good Israelis” but us, the audience, who – in the West, at least – has an extremely problematic (this is the kind way of putting it) way of privileging these “good Israelis.”

Take two recent examples: First, B’Tselem and the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights have just made headlines because they have explicitly recognized the fact that Gaza is the target of an Israeli genocide. That acknowledgement is a good thing. That it happens almost two years into the ongoing genocide is a scandal.

Second, the well-known historian Omer Bartov has published a long article in the New York Times under the title “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” The gist of this text is that Bartov details his learning curve – slower than with many others, faster than with some – to reach the firm insight that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Bartov also spends some time on himself. He explains that “having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful [my emphasis] conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

Given Bartov’s special scholarly expertise – which is great indeed, as he makes sure to let us know – it is odd to find him writing here about his “pain” and not his shame for resisting so long. What is the Gaza Genocide about? Omer Bartov’s Bildungsroman?

To his credit, much of the rest of his long article explains the nature and history of the crime of genocide and details why we must acknowledge that this crime is being committed by Israel against Gaza. Bartov also recognizes that Israel is using the history of the Holocaust to dehumanize its victims and to deflect from its crimes.

And yet, read attentively, his text is appalling – full disclosure, I used to have respect for the scholar Omer Bartov and by extension for the human, moral being; the latter at least is now gone – because after letting us in on his very own “pain” while his country is committing genocide, Bartov concludes his essay not with a question about the victims, the Palestinians, and their country, Palestine, which his country, Israel, has stolen.

No, for him it seems obvious that the question to ask is how “Israel’s future” will be affected by its “moral reversal”?

(And I will pass over his grotesque centering on yet another “future” that gravely concerns him, namely that of the academic pursuits of genocide studies and Holocaust studies, which might – oh, dear! – drift apart. If only the Palestinians knew what we, the academics of the West, whose universities have not been bombed to dust, are suffering now.)

I literally cannot think of a more dishonest framing. First, there is no “reversal.” What is happening now is not a fall from post-Holocaust, Zionist grace, which Bartov clearly still ascribes to Israel, but a continuation of the brutal settler-colonial injustice that it and its making have always been – and before the Holocaust, by the way, as well.

Bartov, moreover, is a historian of the Holocaust and thus of Germany, too. Does he not even notice how close his miserable thinking here is to the argument of postwar/post-Holocaust Germans who wanted to see Nazism and its crimes as a “Betriebsunfall” (in essence, an untypical accident) of German history. Here the “Betriebsunfall” for Germans too cowardly to face the full truth; there the “moral reversal” for Israelis.

Secondly, no, it is not Israel’s future we must worry about. Enough already. It is that of Palestine. Bartov’s conclusion is an example of what happens when you put the perpetrators first. He writes:

“Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner.

This will do nothing [my emphasis] to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share [my emphasis] the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning.”

So, if a “new generation of Israelis” gets its psychotherapy out of its genocide – people usually only get worse, actually – then that is a “light” at the end of this tunnel called genocide? “A valuable thing”? Because the perpetrators and their descendants will be “healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent”?

And a “just reckoning”? For the surviving Palestinians to “share” the land with these mass murderers? Is this author insane or merely blind with national narcissism? “Sharing” with your murderers is neither a “reckoning” nor “just.” What abysmal settler-colonial arrogance Bartov is revealing.

Bartov’s text is intellectually and morally perverse. I felt sick reading it. Yet one self-important academic is not the issue. The issue is us, the audience. It is high time that we stop privileging the one-eyed among the blind; those Israelis who can – oh what a feat! – recognize a genocide when their compatriots are perpetrating one – even if with delay – just because they are better than those committing it gleefully.

We need to stop paying attention to not only “the bad” but “the good” Israelis, too. They do not deserve this privilege and they distract us – as does Bartov exemplarily – from finally focusing on the Palestinian victims and resisters and what they have to say.

Here’s a practical rule: I, for one, will not give any Israeli voice a hearing anymore except three conditions are met at the outset: Condemn Israel (no, not only Netanyahu and not only Zionism either), acknowledge that the crime called Israel must end, and recognize that all Israelis who have committed or abetted crimes must face Palestinian courts, not psychotherapy.

Say that and I will listen. Don’t say it, and I have nothing to discuss with you because you are not “good,” just a little bit less bad and revoltingly arrogant to believe this gives you a right to be heard.