Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine
First-Person History in Times of Crisis
Auteur: Omer Bartov
A 2024
Choice Outstanding Academic Title
This book
discusses some of the most urgent current debates over the study,
commemoration, and politicization of the Holocaust through key critical
perspectives. Omer Bartov adeptly assesses the tensions between Holocaust and
genocide studies, which have repeatedly both enriched and clashed with each
other, whilst convincingly arguing for the importance of local history and
individual testimony in grasping the nature of mass murder. He goes on to
critically examine how legal discourse has served to both uncover and deny
individual and national complicity. Genocide, the Holocaust and
Israel-Palestine outlines how first-person histories provide a better
understanding of events otherwise perceived as inexplicable and, lastly, draws
on the author’s own personal trajectory to consider links between the fate of
Jews in World War II and the plight of Palestinians during and in the aftermath
of the establishment of the state of Israel.
Bartov
demonstrates that these five perspectives, rarely if ever previously discussed
in a single book, are inextricably linked, and shed much light on each other.
Thus the Holocaust and other genocides must be seen as related catastrophes in
the modern era; understanding such vast human tragedies necessitates
scrutinizing them on the local and personal scale; this in turn calls for
historical empathy, accomplished via personal-biographical introspection; and
true, open-minded, and rigorous introspection, without which historical
understanding tends toward obfuscation, brings to light uncomfortable yet
clarifying connections, such as that between the Holocaust and the Nakba, the
mass flight and expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.
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