Is Omer Bartov the Jewish Thomas Mann?

One of the strongest weapons the enemies of Israel wield is Jewish anti-Zionists. They are celebrated and paraded as examples of a ‘good Jew’ — a Jew who understands the moral deprivation of his co-tribesmen and finds the moral courage to stand against it, a Jew who can be accepted into the Temple of Progressivism and admitted into polite society. Well, probably not all of them. The Neturei Karta types, while gleefully used as props against Israel, would likely be too weird for progressive circles, but the rest will pass muster. So, leaving the religious Jewish anti-Zionists aside (I am not qualified to wade into Jewish theological debates about Israel), one can identify three distinct groups of ‘good’ Jews. I like this term ‘good’ Jews — it carries interesting historical connotations, which form the backbone of this essay.

I remember a chance encounter I had many years ago in a public park in Queens, where I used to walk my dog, Xina. One day I met another dog owner, a woman, walking her dog. We started talking, the way only dog lovers can strike up a conversation with an absolute stranger. About fifteen minutes into it, the woman, who was in her seventies, revealed that she was ethnic German. Then, looking at my characteristically Jewish face, hastily added that she was a ‘good’ German.

So, getting back to the good Jews. As I said, they can be conditionally divided into three categories: Bundists, Internalizing Conformists, and Conscientious Objectors. The boundary between the latter two is rather porous, and one can find examples of people migrating between them, or belonging to both at once, but mostly the categorization holds. The first group is exemplified by Molly Crabapple, who achieved prominence with her recent book Where We Live Is Our Country. The second is mostly filled by student activists of Jewish Voice for Peace and similar youth groups, who want to fit in with the “popular crowd” but do not yet have the maturity to graduate to the Conscientious Objectors. The latter is populated by prominent academics such as Omer Bartov or Avi Shlaim.

I have always been fascinated by the motives of anti-Zionist Jews — how do they live with themselves, rejecting entirely their roots and their people’s historical experience after everything Jews endured in the twentieth century and the centuries before it? How do they justify joining forces with those who continue a long tradition of portraying the Jew as the metaphysical embodiment of evil, while seeking to dismantle the very state created to serve as a safe haven for the Jews?

The Bundists I dealt with in my recent essay, “Can Bundism Serve as Political Cover to Jewish Anti-Zionism?” Their motivation is purely ideological — they are still fighting the long-lost battle of the original Bund against Zionism, without recognizing that history is not a “Back to the Future” blockbuster, and that the ideology of the early twentieth century cannot simply be transplanted into the twenty-first. The Internalizing Conformists are not that interesting, they just want to be accepted by their peer group. So, my focus in this essay is on the Conscientious Objectors, the Jews who just want to be ‘good Jews.’

I want to be clear about what this essay is and isn’t. I am not going to offer a substantial critique of Bartov’s or Shlaim’s writing — Benny Morris has already done that, in “Omer Bartov: What Went Wrong?” and “From Zionist to Hamas Apologist.” I am certainly not qualified to add anything to Morris’s conclusions — his analysis of both Bartov’s and Shlaim’s views was quite thorough. Nor am I trying to psychoanalyze Omer Bartov or anyone like him. I have no access to his interior life and wouldn’t trust my own diagnosis of it if I did. What follows is a different exercise: an attempt to construct, as carefully and charitably as I can, the self-justification I would need if I held his position.

Stepping into Omer Bartov’s shoes, I find the example of the ‘good Germans’, the anti-Nazi German intellectuals, irresistibly attractive. If I needed to justify rejecting Israel’s legitimacy while preserving my moral self-image, Thomas Mann would be my quintessential “good German.” The appeal of the model is obvious: Germany’s most decorated living writer, telling his own people that their nation had made itself a moral abomination. The power of the gesture was that it cost him something real — exile, the loss of standing among his own, the risk of being remembered as a traitor rather than a prophet, a price he was willing to pay. If I were Bartov or Shlaim, this would be the model I would use.

Enter the Bartov/Shlaim composite character.

I am an Israeli, trained in Israeli institutions, a historian whose life’s work is the comparative study of mass atrocity, or the history of Israeli-Arab relations. When I say that what Israel is doing meets the definitional threshold of genocide, or that it is a settler-colonial project, I am not an outsider lobbing accusations from a position of ignorance or hostility. I am one of them, saying the hardest possible thing about my own house, and I am prepared to be hated for it by people whose good opinion I once had. I am being a ‘good Jew.’ That is precisely Mann’s structure: insider authority, spent at cost, in service of a judgment my own society doesn’t want to hear. The parallel is not decorative. It is the entire source of the position’s moral weight. The attraction of the analogy becomes even greater once one remembers that Mann himself did not begin his intellectual life as a dissident. Quite the opposite. During the First World War and the early years of the Weimar Republic he was a cultural conservative, deeply attached to German national traditions and openly skeptical of liberal cosmopolitanism. His eventual break with German nationalism was therefore not the posture of a lifelong outsider but the painful evolution of someone who believed he had watched his own civilization descend into barbarism. Forced into exile after Hitler’s rise to power, stripped of his German citizenship, and denounced as a traitor by the regime, Mann paid a very real personal price for that transformation. If I were looking for a historical model of an Israeli historian who gradually came to see his own country’s conduct as morally indefensible, I could hardly find a more compelling one. The trajectory itself seems uncannily familiar.

The character hides in the shadow

This is a genuinely strong self-story. It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend it isn’t. The question is whether the conditions that made it true for Mann would also be true if I were Bartov, or whether I would merely be borrowing the form of his courage while standing in circumstances that do not support it.

I do not know if Bartov or Shlaim think about Mann when trying to recreate this sweet feeling of self-righteousness while portraying the Zionist project as morally compromised from its very inception, but I think it would be the most expedient thing for them to do. Indeed, what could be more satisfying than associating yourself with great thinkers and dissidents fighting an evil grown in their own land? If this is not the story that allows one to look in the mirror each morning, then what is left? Careerism? Public adulation? The intoxicating pleasure of moral celebrity? I prefer the Mann explanation. It is at least intellectually respectable.

So back to Mann’s framework. The character reappears from the shadow.

Yes, it would be expedient, it would be self-satisfying, but would it be intellectually honest? Intellectual honesty is expected of academics, so having fortified my rejection of Israel’s legitimacy with Mann’s great example, I must try to see if it survives critical analysis. And I am terrified to discover that it doesn’t.

To appropriate Mann’s story as my own, I would first need to believe that, as in Hitler’s Germany, meaningful internal dissent inside Israel is no longer possible — that whatever formal democratic machinery exists has stopped functioning on this particular question. I would point to the near-total collapse, after October 7th, of two-state discourse across the Israeli political spectrum; to a public that has moved sharply rightward under trauma; to a disoriented — and sometimes physically annihilated by Hamas — peace camp with no realistic path to power. If I tell myself the internal channel of dissent is closed, then all that’s left is to speak externally, in English, to European and American audiences. That choice would be exactly as forced by Israel’s political situation as Mann’s was by Germany’s — it is forced by the same structural absence of an internal remedy.

However, this would be yet another example among a great number of false-analogy fallacies. Here is where the justification breaks. Any open dissent in Nazi Germany was impossible in principle, and those suspected of it were promptly sent to a concentration camp or murdered. Nothing remotely equivalent describes Israel. It has a Supreme Court that has ruled against sitting governments on matters of real consequence. It has an unruly, adversarial press that publishes material about settler violence and IDF conduct far more damning than anything I would say abroad. It has a reservist and refusal movement that operates inside the system, not as a substitute for it. What I would actually be describing, if I were honest, is not a political system disallowing dissent but a system that has produced a result I don’t like: the Israeli public, having weighed the argument, currently rejects the two-state framework in numbers it once didn’t.

Losing an argument in a democracy is not the same condition as having no forum in which to make it. Mann was licensed to go around the system because the system had ceased to exist as a mechanism for change. If I claim the same license while the mechanism is intact, and simply unfavorable to my view, I am not continuing Mann’s act. I am asking to be exempted from the normal condition of being outvoted.

The second thing I would need to believe is that the genocide framing is simply an act of naming — the same kind of act Mann performed when he described what Germany was doing to the Jews. If I use the comparative-genocide vocabulary my own discipline gave me, I am doing what any honest historian does: applying the analytical categories at my disposal to the facts in front of me, regardless of how uncomfortable the application is. However, doing so I would have to ignore some pretty inconvenient facts, which Mann didn’t have to contend with. I would have to ignore that Israel was attacked first, and that the failure to respond forcefully to the attack would undoubtedly invite more attacks — that in Israel’s neighborhood, even perceived weakness is mortally dangerous. That doesn’t settle any question of proportionality, of the legality of specific operations, or of whether particular conduct crosses lines that should never be crossed — those remain real, contestable questions, and dodging them would be its own dishonesty. But it does mean that applying a category built for one-sided extermination to a reciprocal-threat conflict is not naming a fact the way Mann named a fact. If I present a contestable analytical judgment with the rhetorical certainty of a settled description, I am doing something Mann never had to do, because Mann’s crime and paradigm case were identical, and mine is not.

The third thing I would need to believe is that historical judgment doesn’t have to wait for the historical record to close — that comparative genocide studies exists precisely to let trained observers see patterns before they’re retrospectively obvious, and that waiting for certainty is itself a moral failure: the failure of the German who, in 1935, could already see where things were going and said nothing because the camps didn’t yet exist. This is a serious argument and needs to be taken seriously, but it also reveals exactly why I cannot honestly invoke Mann’s behavior to defend my own. Mann’s clearest, most forceful condemnations came after the mechanism of extermination was underway and increasingly confirmed by escaped witnesses and Allied intelligence. His moral certainty was purchased with mounting evidentiary certainty, not with postmodern epistemological exercises.

I am not narrating a settled atrocity with Mann’s 1945 certainty. I am applying a comparative method to a live, contested, unfinished situation, and the appropriate register for that is hedged and falsifiable, not prophetic. The rhetorical cost of using Holocaust-adjacent vocabulary is that it imports a certainty the situation cannot yet support, and if I don’t flag that gap myself, I am letting the vocabulary do work my actual epistemic position hasn’t earned.

The fourth thing I would need to believe is that using the term ‘genocide’ for Israeli conduct is a straightforward application of an existing, stable category — that I am the messenger, not the author, of what the word means. But this is not the case, as scholars within my own discipline have pointed out — and how could I justify not taking their objections seriously? If I tell myself I am merely naming, I am avoiding the harder and more honest admission: that I am taking a position on the taxonomy itself, and that position has a cost — an erosion of the term’s discriminating power that Mann never had to pay, because he didn’t expand the category. He was the category’s origin point.

The fifth thing I would need to believe is that my audience is the same as Mann’s — that when I write in English for the Guardian, or testify to international bodies, I am doing what Mann did on the BBC: appealing to the conscience of people who could, in principle, act on what they hear, at real risk to my own standing among them.

This is one of the justifications I would find hardest to sustain under scrutiny, because it requires ignoring who is actually listening and what they actually want. Mann’s primary audience was Germans themselves, and the explicit purpose was to change German behavior,  to hasten resistance or accelerate the end of the war among the very people who could turn on him for saying it. My actual audience, most of the time, is Western institutions and publics shaped by currents, some post-colonial, some frankly antisemitic,  that will only applaud me as long as what I say can be used against Israel. My testimony is consumed by an international discourse, not a domestic one. Some in this audience are sincere in their concern for Palestinian welfare. But a real and well-documented portion of it uses Palestinian suffering to advance a separate political project aimed at Israel’s existence rather than its conduct. If I don’t ask which of these audiences is actually metabolizing my testimony, I am claiming Mann’s insider risk while collecting a different, much cheaper form of standing: credibility that costs me nothing with the people actually listening, because they were never positioned to punish me for it. I cannot fall back on the sincerity of my motive. As a serious ethical actor, I have an obligation to notice what my testimony is actually doing once the pattern of its use becomes visible, not just what I believe it does.

The sixth, and last, thing I would need to believe is that ‘Zionism’ and ‘Israel’ are separable in the way ‘Nazism’ and ‘Germany’ were. That I can call for the disappearance of one while insisting on the survival of the other, and mean something coherent by it. I might be able, with a straight face, to claim that Zionism must disappear, with Israel remaining in place.

While this even sounds like Mann’s own distinction between the criminal regime and the nation it seized, it does not survive the comparison. Germany existed for a thousand years before Hitler and remained, undiminished in its Germanness, the moment he was gone.  Nazism was a twelve-year regime bolted onto a nation whose identity had never depended on it. Israel has no equivalent pre-Zionist ‘Israeli’ identity to fall back on. Zionism is not a government that came to power inside an already-existing Israel; it is the movement that called Israel into being, and its central commitment — a homeland for the Jewish people — is not incidental to the state’s character but is its essence. Without Zionism, the remaining state, whatever you might call it, becomes just another state with a Jewish minority, oppressed and relegated to the status of dhimmi. I could point to Buber’s binationalism, or to Magnes and Ahad Ha’am, as proof that Zionism and Jewish statehood were always separable,  but that was the losing strand of the movement for a reason, and it is not the state I have spent this whole argument describing as having gone wrong. The distinction sounds elegant in an interview headline, but it is as empty of real content as Crabapple’s hopes to resurrect Bundism in the 21st century.

Every point of resemblance to Mann is real enough to be tempting while thin enough to fail on inspection. The honest version of the position I’ve been constructing is not that ‘I am this generation’s Thomas Mann.’ It is something much smaller: just a historian applying a comparative method to a live situation, who could be wrong, who is taking a real position on where a difficult concept’s boundary should sit, and who owes it to the seriousness of the claim to say so in that register  rather than in the borrowed certainty of a man who spoke only after the worst had already happened. But would such a position satisfy my ambitions, and generate interviews, invitations to speak, and the sense of real importance? Probably not.

The character hides back in the shadow.

I do not know if what I have described is, indeed, the actual mechanism of self-permission employed by people like Bartov, but I would insist that this is the most favorable reading of their actions available. They are just trying to be the ‘good Jews’, allowing the moral prestige of that role to eclipse the intellectual discipline, professional integrity, and any real regard for the consequences their actions might have for the rest of us.