What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines ‘what Zionism became’

In his new book, Omer Bartov tracks how a liberatory strand of Zionism transformed into an extremist ideology that he sees as responsible for genocide in GazaFormer 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.Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was perhaps less a change of heart than one of strategy, as his senior adviser later , the lyric became a byword of Israeli politics, an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.