Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times:
Bartov doesn’t go in for rhetorical extravagance; his writing style is clear, sober and deliberate. “Israel” is his attempt to chart what has happened to the country where he was born, and where many of his friends and family — including his eldest son and two young grandchildren — still live. He is critical of how Zionism now functions in Israel, but he also believes that anti-Zionists can often miss a crucial point.
What makes the current catastrophe so tragic, he says, is that it was far from inevitable. Bartov discusses the Nakba, the violent displacement of Palestinians in 1948. From the beginning, he emphasizes, Zionism had two faces: one that was liberatory and pluralist, the other ethnonationalist. Over the decades, the emancipatory element receded while the ethnonationalist element was elevated to a “state ideology.”
More here.
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