The Road to Nowhere or the Path to Peace?
The Road to Nowhere or the Path to Peace?
An essay by Omer Bartov, on moving forward through the conflict in Gaza, for The Shanghai Literary Review
Editor’s Note: Omer Bartov's essay will appear in the next issue of TSLR, scheduled for publication in Spring, 2024. This next issue features two new elements: first, it will be the journal’s first themed issue, with the theme being the concept of Flux; and, second, it will include a new section on Criticism, featuring non-fictional essays on timely topics. Omer Bartov’s essay is one of four pieces that will appear in the next issue’s Criticism section, but given the unusual timeliness of its subject matter, we are pre-publishing the essay here. - Carlos Rojas (Duke)
The Road to Nowhere or the Path to Peace?
By Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University
We are currently living through a period of unprecedented chaos and confusion in the Middle East. As some have predicted, there are signs that the turmoil is spreading ever wider. Yet no formulas have as yet been proposed as to how to put the genie back in the bottle. Violence, strife, and war have a logic of their own. Without conceptualizing concrete political goals, they will keep expanding, feeding on the rage, sacrifice, and vengeance they produce, until at least one of the parties is either exhausted or wiped out.
The situation of flux in which we find ourselves at the moment in the Middle East is just one component of a general sense of confusion and uncertainty in the world, rooted in various factors ranging from economic uncertainly, distrust of political leadership, massive displacement of populations, the long-term effects of the Covid-19 epidemic, and the ongoing climate crisis.
In the face of such an array of threats and fears, one is tempted to simply withdraw into the private sphere, shut out the news, and engage as best one can with the pleasures, or at least the more manageable affairs of daily life. The problem with this choice is that—just as in the case of avoiding political speech on, say, university campuses, for fear of being immediately labeled as supporting one camp or another—it creates a vacuum, which tends to be swiftly filled by the extreme voices. In other words, silence, unclarity, confusion, and passivity themselves generate polarization, whose outcome is ever more strife and violence…
Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. His early research concerned the crimes of the German Wehrmacht, the links between total war and genocide, and representation of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. More recently he has focused on interethnic relations and violence in Eastern Europe, population displacement in Europe and Palestine, and the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel. His books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). Bartov is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine.” His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in 2023 in the United States and Israel.
Follow Omer Bartov on Twitter @bartov_omer .
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