A Review of Omer Bartov’s Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine: First Person History in Times of Crisis
For historian Omer Bartov, the memory of the Shoah has overshadowed the Nakba and contributes to the continuation of the Palestinian catastrophe: in his latest book, he seeks to place them within the same historical and moral context. Eva Illouz offers us her interpretation of this endeavor, which questions Bartov’s political blinders: to what extent is comparison reasonable and does not distort the subjects it seeks to compare?
This book is many books at once: historiographic, a political plea, and personal testimony. It challenges the exceptionalist interpretation of the Holocaust and the reduction of it to a single instance within the broader framework of colonial genocide. Instead, Bartov invites us to approach the Holocaust through the productive tension between its singularity and its comparability to other forms of genocide while accounting for each genocide specific attributes. In the context of postcolonial studies which have rejected the claim to singularity of the Holocaust and treated it as one instance among others of European colonial massacres, this is a welcome suggestion. It has the merit of maintaining its uniqueness without yielding to its weaponization in victimhood contests.
A history of the Shoah at the local level
The best chapters deal with the examination of the geographical and cultural specificity of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, a task which had been most notably advanced by Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands (2010), but one in which there is still much to be done within Holocaust historiography. Particularly useful is the attention to the dynamics of locality: in Bartov’s account, the Holocaust is not an industrialized mass murder executed by bureaucrats but an intimate and communal event, tightly embedded with interethnic relations of neighbors and even with the proximity which Nazi occupiers built with their Jewish victims. Here, Bartov’s work intersects with Jan Gross watershed Neighbors (2000) which explored the massacre of 1600 Jews in Jedwabne in 1941, with the active and enthusiastic participation of their neighbors. Bartov concentrates on Buczacz in Eastern Galicia (from which Bar-Tov’s own family originates ) and exhumes the many ways in which its 60,000 Jews were exterminated, despite minimal German presence. Through the lens of microhistory, he shows that at least half of Jewish victims were murdered in or near their homes, not in camps and not by orders but by people they knew. This account in turn challenges the common perception that the Holocaust was an anonymous, bureaucratic killing and highlights the role of community dynamics in its implementation. Particularly useful is his notion of “sites of non-memory,” such as synagogues which have been left to decay, slowly erasing the memory of former Jewish presence.
Bartov is a rigorous historian and uses the testimonies of survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. He is not the only one to follow the path of testimonial history (see Saul Friedlander’s Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997); Jan Gross’s Neighbors (2000); Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl (2009) Christopher Browning’s Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (2010)) but he is particularly thorough and meticulous at it. In paying careful attention to lived experiences and concrete interactions, such history from below offers a more multi-dimensional history of a catastrophe whose magnitude has too often been reduced to its official machinery (revising and displacing Hannah Arendt’s conventional view). It makes far more intelligible a phenomenon which has stunned the mind by the scope and scale of its irrationality.
In Bartov’s account, the Holocaust is not an industrialized mass murder executed by bureaucrats but an intimate and communal event, tightly embedded with interethnic relations of neighbors and even with the proximity which Nazi occupiers built with their Jewish victims.
The analysis of courts after the War paves the way for the second theme of the book, namely the construction and uses of distorted memory. In the aftermath of the war, German courts helped evade responsibility and often viewed perpetrators as clogs in a vast machine, as no less than victims themselves, thereby eschewing the question of their complicity. They also questioned the victims’ testimonies. The courtrooms, still packed with former Nazis, thus helped forge a selective memory and false collective narratives about guilt and accountability. This in turn provides the ground for discussing countries which have practiced selective memory, most notably in Ukraine, Poland, Turkey and Israel. All of them have in common that they passed laws criminalizing certain memorial narratives (Poland’s 2018 “Holocaust law” suppressed the role of Poles in the destruction of the Jews; Ukraine glorifies fighters who were accomplices of Nazis, Turkey forbids mention of the Armenian genocide, and Israel’s Nakba Law criminalizes the commemoration of the Nakba). These laws, Bartov argues, help these nations evade their moral responsibility in ethnic cleansing or genocide.
When memory becomes political
The last part of the book — which compares Jewish survivors displaced from Europe with Palestinians displaced by the Nakba (1948) — is awkwardly connected to the previous ones, because it aims to build a connection between Holocaust Germany and the Middle East through the problem of memory. Here, Bartov crosses the line from careful archival research to more controversial political statements. Chapter 10 reads as an intimate essay, tracing Bartov’s trajectory. A child of Holocaust survivors in Israel, he became a historian of the Wehrmacht, showing that it was complicit in Nazi crimes and of his mother’s hometown, Buczacz. It is probably this interest in the Wehrmacht which prompted him to write a letter to Itzhak Rabin in 1987 (then minister of Defense) during the first intifada warning him that the Israeli army was at risk of undergoing a moral and ethical “barbarization” similar to that of the German army during the Nazi era (he quotes this letter very often in a variety of writings and interviews). In his view, the years running from the end of the second World War to 1948, the creation of the state, were fateful. It was here that Jews, who were persecuted, took for themselves the right to persecute the natives of the land. The uprooted became uprooters. It was, says Bartov, a war of revenge for acts committed by others. They thus appropriated the land, erased the presence of others, later known as Palestinians. This was viewed as justice by Jews, but as expropriation by Palestinians. Yet, Bartov tells us, “repressed pasts rarely go away” and the road to hell is paved with forgetting. The remnants of the Palestinian past have been erased from Israel, as they have been from Ukraine or from many Polish villages. There is another even more fundamental parallel Bartov draws, most notably between the inhumanity of a Nazi soldier who demonizes a Jew as a threat to the world, and the inhumanity of the Israeli soldiers fighting Palestinians during the Intifada or, as he said in recent public pieces, during the Gaza war. He thus calls for a radical empathy, on seeing the world through the eyes of that which you have erased, whose voice can no longer be heard. According to Bartov, the double displacement of Jews and Palestinians anchors their identity in loss and makes each one’s claim to land intractable. The final chapter is a collection of impressionistic and well-meaning declarations about the necessity of giving voice to the Palestinian Nakba narrative. Only when doing so, will a plausible future for the region emerge, one which acknowledges both the Holocaust and the Nakba.
In Bartov’s view, the years running from the end of the second World War to 1948, the creation of the state, were fateful. It was here that Jews, who were persecuted, took for themselves the right to persecute the natives of the land. The uprooted became uprooters.
There is much to commend in this book as it provides a lucid summa of Bartov’s historical work and justifies the high reputation he has gained among historians. But there is also much to object to and debate with.
This book should have been two different books and is thematically disjointed. It is also disarticulated in tone: The scholarly distance uncomfortably cohabits with the vituperations of the “prophet on the mountain.” More disturbing: Bartov writes as if being a historian of the Holocaust gives him a special and unique authority to speak on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His worry about “dehumanization” seems to serve as a bridge between two vastly different historical eras and geographical domains. But even a good historian of the German genocide does not have a privileged sky-high standpoint to arbitrate about the most politically fraught conflict of the planet. The Holocaust was not a territorial conflict and cannot shed any light on the intricate century-long armed confrontation between two people. Nor is the Shoah narrative responsible for the perpetuation of this conflict, as this book sometimes suggests. Because it lacks analytical force, the last part of the book reads like a collection of admonitions and pious wishes.
The pitfalls of collective memory
Collective memory works like personal memory. Endless research in cognitive psychology shows that it is highly selective. To remember is to misremember and to erase whatever inconvenient or painful fact threatens personal identity. Like individuals, groups typically write and rewrite the past to build a coherent narrative in which they can appear alternatively as heroes and victims. This narrative becomes the foundation of their identity. We can deplore the fact that memory does a typically poor job at being a good historian, but regretting it will not do much to change this state of affairs. Because memory is so central to identity, it is always partial, in both meanings of the word. This is why we need historians: to rescue memory from its failings by unearthing forgotten facts and by documenting the institutional mechanisms and the agents who operate the selective erasures. Once this unearthing of uncomfortable truths is done, groups will do what they can with them. Sometimes they will come to a reckoning, sometimes they won’t. One wonders whether chiding Yad Vashem for “serving the Zionist narrative” while neglecting the Nakba is the most productive or morally astute way to move forward in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. All groups (Jews included) construct their identity around a thread of their history and neglect others. France, Belgium and Germany wrestled and reckoned, sometimes only partially, with their genocidal pasts only long after the violence they inflicted ended. Israel is still involved in a bloody conflict. Why then demand from Israel what no other country has been able to achieve, namely represent, during an ongoing war, simultaneously two morally and politically conflicting narratives or, even more challenging, compose a big polyphonic narrative with contrapuntal voices and plots? Israeli Palestinians can and must tell their story and history, but many Israeli Jews may not be ready to hear it, not because they are brutes, but because war always implies a commitment to one’s own national narrative. Rather than rebuking Yad Vashem for its omission of the Nakba, it would have been more pertinent to criticize it for a far more blatant obliviousness: the museum hardly refers to the unfolding of the Shoah in Arab countries nor does it address the Farhud, a brutal and devastating pogrom against Jews in Iraq in 1941 inspired by an Arab regime closely aligned with the Nazis, thus excluding the non-European dimension of Nazism. This critique would have been more adequate, as it would have showed Yad Vashem to be orientalist in its failure to be what it purports to be, namely a museum commemorating the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole — and it would have complicated Bartov’s story of the Nakba by placing it within a broader Middle Eastern context of expulsions of Jews from Arab countries.
To remember is to misremember and to erase whatever inconvenient or painful fact threatens personal identity. Like individuals, groups typically write and rewrite the past to build a coherent narrative in which they can appear alternatively as heroes and victims.
There is another and broader problem, which ties back to the legitimacy of the Zionist and Shoah narratives and to their erasure of the Palestinian one. Following decolonialist views, Bartov avers that Shoah-based Zionist collective narratives are an ideological machine which produces a sense of exceptionalism and is a blindfolder of Israel’s crimes and Palestinian suffering. In The Problems Of Genocide (2021) Dirk Moses had similarly argued for a nonhierarchical view of memory, and for dethroning the Holocaust from its central position in European memorial culture. This approach is also defended by Achille Membe for whom the Holocaust is one event in a continuum of colonial violence, therefore unworthy of the central place it has come to occupy.
I would understand the objection to the exceptionalist view of the Holocaust far better if it had managed to take into account the uniqueness of the Jewish predicament and if it had made a sharper distinction between exceptionalism and historical singularity. Zionism was the ideological and existential response to the understanding that the Enlightenment failed to erase violent persecution of Jews and bring a solution to their predicament (1881-1882 pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus affair and the post World War I Ukraine pogroms concurred together to produce that understanding). Furthermore, the state of Israel was born in the aftermath of the spectacular Nazis’ success in eliminating the Jews; Nazis had intended not to stop there but to “finish the job” in Palestine and wipe out the Zionists; Arab leaders of that period were aligned with Italian fascism and with German Nazism. Some called for the annihilation of Jews and refused any compromise. Add to this the fact that the English did not side with the Jews. The full restitution of these events and the acknowledgment of the singular vulnerability of the Jews is not a plea for exceptionalism but for historicity.
Soon after the creation of the state, in fact, after the Six-Day War, under the concerted efforts of the Soviet Union and Arab states, the international arena became rife with a questioning of the legitimacy of the Jewish state (see for example the 3379 UN resolution of 1975 declaring Zionism to be a form of racism; or the 2001 Durban Conference which repeated the claim). It is not the Occupation of the West Bank, the Golan and Gaza which consolidated the Shoah narrative, but the increasing sense that Israel’s legitimacy was no longer taken for granted. Reproaching Israel for taking world leaders on state visits to Yad Vashem seems both petty and unfair. The decolonialist and progressive relentless suspicion that the Shoah narrative is uniquely instrumentalized, ends up, in fine, undermining the intelligibility of Zionism. Perhaps the accusation of instrumentalization is itself instrumentalized by the many political actors who were and still are openly committed to Israel’s disappearance (the former Soviet Union planted the seeds, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Jihad continued). This discussion would have been clearer if Bartov had distinguished between exceptionalism and historical singularity, between unacceptable and ordinary political instrumentalization of collective memory (Gilad Erdan arriving with a yellow star at the UN is grotesque; taking leaders to Yad Vashem is politics as usual).
The decolonialist and progressive relentless suspicion that the Shoah narrative is uniquely instrumentalized ends up, in fine, undermining the intelligibility of Zionism.
More fundamentally: if there is a criticism of the instrumentalization of the Shoah narrative, why is the Nakba narrative above the same suspicion? Is there not also political opportunism in its use? Why do Bartov and other progressives exempt the “Nakba narrative” from the angry scrutiny they apply to the “Shoah narrative”? Here, then, is the obvious blind-spot in Bartov’s forced symmetry of memory narratives: one (the Shoah) is derided as a blunt political tool and the other (the Nakba) as the basis of unquestionable moral claims. Have not advocates and defenders of the Palestinians used and shaped symbolic and organizational resources for their political goals? Surely their narratives also contain erasures which prevent them, like some Israelis, to reach compromise. As Mitchell Cohen reminds us, the word Nakba –disaster—was first used by Constantin Zurayk, a pan-Arabist, to lament the disaster of Arab disunion in 1948 in their effort to crush the Zionists. Moreover, pan-islamism, the 19th century religious revivalism which aimed to unify Muslims and fiercely opposed the West and Zionism, played a key part in the formation of Palestinian consciousness, manifest today in groups as the Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Should these facts be a part of the Nakba narrative? If collective memory is always a political weapon in ideological struggles and in the construction of identity – it almost always is – this is true for all sides. Putting one narrative in the realm of crass politics and another in the sky of high morality is either a conceptual contradiction or a discrimination.
As for the claim that the Nakba narrative has been erased, here too, there is much to object to. Despite the “Nakba Law” passed by Israel in 2011 – suspending funding to organizations which commemorate the disaster which befell Palestinians in 1948-49 – the narrative is well-known and even accepted by significant parts of Israel’s elites, notably through the work of “post-Zionist” historians. Outside Israel, the Nakba narrative is anything but suppressed. Indeed, it has achieved so much prominence that many believe it encapsulates all progressive struggles. It has been shaped through varied institutional channels and advanced by moral and intellectual entrepreneurs, whose efforts are also deserving of scholarly scrutiny. It even consciously modeled itself on the Shoah narrative seeking to present the displacement of 700.000 Palestinians in a war, as uniquely criminal in modern history. It is here that Bartov fails at his call to engage in comparative work. If genocides must be compared, surely this is true of ethnic cleansing as well. Following the Greco-Turkish War, about 1.6 million Orthodox Christians from Turkey and Muslims from Greece were forcibly exchanged under the Treaty of Lausanne. The Allied Powers expelled 12-14 million ethnic Germans, thereby redrawing boundaries to make Germany less likely to exact revenge. The whole postwar European map was drawn through vast forced movements of populations. If the Shoah can be compared to other genocides, then, tragic as it was, the Nakba should as well. Its causes, scale, political actors and strategies should be scrutinized. A miserable refugee problem was indeed created but it happened after 5 Arab countries declared war on Israel in 1948, when it had already been recognized by the UN. They refused all compromises. How does it compare to other cases where belligerents have lost the war? Where does that fact fit our political and ethical evaluations of this tragedy? Bartov doesn’t say. He also does not say if the fate of 700,000 Palestinians who fled to countries where they could speak the same language and practice the same religion can be put in parallel with the systematic eradication of a culture, language, and population from the face of the earth. Saying this is not to demand exceptionalism nor is it to dismiss the Palestinian tragedy. It is simply a plea to treat analogies with care and caution, lest they confuse, blur and render meaningless our moral landscape and analytical categories. Vague words as “dehumanization” and “loss” cannot do the heavy work of grasping the political and moral attributes of conflicts in which two people wish the other to disappear. Bartov’s analysis is at once too abstract and too personal to serve as a moral or intellectual guide. Our hearts bleed in front of any tragedy, whether it is a systematic genocide, expulsion or war, but tears cannot substitute for sober comparisons.
Putting one narrative in the realm of crass politics and another in the sky of high morality is either a conceptual contradiction or a discrimination.
Finally, if we denounce the fact that one narrative displaces others, this claim unavoidably reverberates on many other tragedies: hasn’t the Nakba narrative, which has moved to the center stage of public opinion, also rendered invisible the many millions of refugees elsewhere in the world—such as in Sudan and the Congo—whose tragedies are no less grave than that of the Palestinians? In saying this, again I do not intend to diminish or deflect the plight of the Palestinian people but simply wish to point out that the visibility of one tragedy almost always comes at the price of making invisible that of another. In the same way that Nazis destruction of Jews unjustly hid for too long the decimation of Romas, in the same way that the unique focus on the genocide of Jews has unjustly invisibilized colonial genocidal wars in Africa or Asia, we may wonder if the current Western focus on Palestinian memory has not blocked our moral commitment to other parts of the world, Africa most notably which needs our collective attention urgently. Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory – each collective memory drawing on others rather than competing with them – could have been the place to go, but the public sphere is overcrowded by groups who have the techniques and the financial resources to highjack public discussion to a single cause, thus making invisible other tragedies and reducing multi-directional memory to a pious wish.
My view of the way forward in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict profoundly differs from Bartov’s. Collective memory, like the personal one, is unstable, it changes either for opportunistic reasons or because of a better knowledge of the past, and is indeed often weaponized. For these reasons, it cannot be relied upon for such grand projects as peace and reconciliation, except when one side assumes, alone and unilaterally guilt and responsibility (as was the case with post-War Germany). Furthermore, almost by definition collective memory entrenches wounds and solidifies pain. We need to disentangle identity from memory and from woundedness. In cases where two populations must coexist—and only in such cases, as in Rwanda, South Africa, or today in Israel–Palestine— David Rieff’s injunction to forget rather than insist on memory is the wisest route (see In Praise of Forgetting, 2016). What Israelis and Palestinians need is not more collective memory but state-designed forgetfulness and, even, yes, forgiveness.
