Former 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.
Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.
Bartov did more than simply apply the word genocide to Israel’s actions: he shouted it from the establishment-media rooftops, making the case in a lengthy July 2025 essay in the New York Times titled: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. (He had addressed some of the arguments in a Guardian essay the year prior.) Bartov’s declaration cost him several close relationships, he told me, even though subsequent events have not only validated his analysis but further demonstrated the lack of concern for Palestinian suffering that has become prevalent in Israeli society.
His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, is an attempt to explain that indifference. The book, which was published on Tuesday, is a detailed account of how Israel was transformed from a hopeful nation that in its founding document promised “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex” into one intent on what he bluntly terms “settler colonialism and ethno-nationalism”.
Egypt cannot possibly govern the West Bank, it is too far from the Egyptian heartland and it is also physically separated from the rest of country. Egypt has already tried governing Gaza before and that went horribly wrong.
Jordan and the West Bank are physically connected and they’re the same culturally, therefore it makes sense for them to be together in that sense, but with that being said, Jordan also tried to rule the West Bank before and that went pretty poorly.
The biggest hurdle here is why would Egypt or Jordan participate? What would they get out of it. They would be getting a big headache in exchange for a lot of strategic land (Egypt giving the Sinai also means giving up one side of the Suez Canal and that’s a big no no in geopolitics). Not to mention, that the West Bank already has well over 700,000 settlers. Even if we exclude East Jerusalem, that’s still over 500k settlers. That’s a loooot of people, and they’re also some of most unhinged zealots you’ll find anywhere in the world. That’s even bigger headache than the Palestinians that they’ll have to take on. I just don’t see this as a realistic proposal.