Our Wednesday News Analysis | Zionism Didn't Go Wrong, It Was Always Built This Way

Omer Bartov at the launch of his new book, "Israel: What Went Wrong?" on April 21 near Boston. Credit: Arthur Mansavage

Bartov's approach is different than the anti-Zionist trends now flourishing around the world.
He is convinced that something went wrong in the pure and innocent country that used to be his, and that something got twisted in its pure Zionist ideology.

There was an ideology that led to the establishment of a highly moral state, and suddenly, something went wrong.
This statement may ease the agony of Bartov's painful farewell to Zionism, but it's doubtful it's true.

It's not easy being Israeli and anti-Zionist. It's almost impossible. That combination is perceived in Israel as treason, heresy, and lacking any legitimacy. This has been the case since the good, old Mapai-era Israel, long before the dark days of Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Not since the Soviet Union has there been another state with such an exclusionary and rapacious ideology, an ideology that prohibited any doubts or denial, like the Zionist State of Israel. Even being an anti-Zionist exile is not easy, especially for a prince of the Zionist aristocracy.

Omer Bartov is a renowned Israeli American historian, a genocide researcher, and an expert on the Holocaust who teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After deliberating for two years, Bartov reached the conclusion that Israel did, in fact, perpetrate a genocide in the Gaza Strip.

He published two op-eds that reflected the process he went through regarding the label of genocide in The New York Times, evoking reactions across the globe. One of the books written by his author and journalist father, Hanoch Bartov, is called "Ligdol Ulikhtov Be'Eretz Yisrael" ("To grow up in and to write in the Land of Israel"). Omer Bartov's most recent book is "Israel: What Went Wrong?" – the entire journey, in a nutshell.

On the occasion of the book's release, Bartov gave an interview to Haaretz in which he hastened to declare that he is not anti-Zionist, so painful and difficult is such an admission. "I grew up in a Zionist home. It was self-evident to me that Israel was my place," he said, by way of explaining why he is not "anti." But he left this home decades ago, and his statements make one wonder about his concerns, or perhaps his shame, over admitting that he is anti-Zionist, which ostensibly still lacks legitimacy...

Read more: Zionism Didn't Go Wrong, It Was Always Built This Way

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THE VANISHING CHRISTIANS OF PALESTINE

Source: Savage Minds
https://substack.com/home/post/p-197739713

By Ramzy Baroud
Published May 14, 2026

The Assault on a French Nun and the Forgotten Story of Palestinian Christians

Gaza City’s Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, damaged in Israeli bombardment on 19 October 2023. Photo credit: Dawood Nemer

In that massacre, 18 Palestinian Christians were killed,
their blood mixing with the dust of a sanctuary that had stood for 1,600 years.
It was a devastating reminder that the Israeli missile does not distinguish between a mosque and a church,
nor between the blood of a Muslim and a Christian.

The story of the French nun is worth every bit of the attention it received, as is the targeting of pilgrims.

The video is horrifying, though it is the kind of horror now synonymous with the behavior of Israel, its military, its armed settlers, and society that has been conditioned to see the ”other” as subhuman.

Yet, this was not the typical viral video that emerges almost daily from occupied Palestine. The victim, this time, was not a Palestinian. She was an elderly French nun.

On 1 May, footage surfaced from Jerusalem showing a 36-year-old Israeli man running behind a French nun—a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research—and shoving her violently to the ground.

In a chilling display of cruelty, the assailant did not simply hit and run. He walked away a few paces, then returned to the fallen woman to kick her repeatedly and mercilessly as she lay helpless.

What was most astonishing was the sense of normalcy that followed. The assailant remained on the scene, conversing with another man who appeared entirely unperturbed by what should have been a devastating event in any other context.

The video briefly imposed itself on the mainstream media scene, garnering perfunctory condemnations. Many explained the event as part of the larger landscape of Israeli violence, highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza as the most obvious example of this unchecked aggression.

But even the context of general violence does not fully explain why a French nun was targeted. She is not dark-skinned, she is European, she is Christian, and she holds no historical or territorial claims that would typically trigger the ”security” paranoia of the Zionist state.

Still, the incident was anything but ”isolated,” despite the rush by Israeli officials to label it a ”shameful” exception. To the contrary, the nun was attacked specifically because she is Christian.

This raises the question: why?...

Read more: The Vanishing Christians of Palestine

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THE FUEL TO MY REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISM

Source: CODEPINK
https://codepink.substack.com/p/the-fuel-to-my-revolutionary-optimism

By CODEPINK staff
Published May 14, 2026

Graffiti on a wall in Jordan, captured in July 2023. “The homeland is the heart, the pulse, the artery, and the eyes. We are its sacrifice. Palestine.”

Israel believes it can continue what it has always done.
It can embark on an outright genocide with the intent of wiping Palestinians off the map, then agree to multiple ceasefires only to break every single one of them.
After all, you cannot cease a genocide while the genocidal entity still operates with impunity.
The difference this time around is that people around the world actually know what’s going on. Israel, along with its benefactor, the U.S., has backed itself into a corner I doubt it will ever escape from.

As a Palestinian born in the 21st century, I am the generational product of Nakba survivors and the trauma that came with it.

As distant as it may seem, I am only two generations removed from the 1948 Catastrophe of Palestine, where over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their land,

and thousands were massacred. Zionist militias backed by the British Empire razed Palestinian villages, killing, raping, displacing, and imprisoning anyone they could find,

all to establish the brand new settler colonial project of Israel. This single day in Palestinian history would stain the soil with blood spilled and trauma gained for decades to come.

Both sets of my grandparents are older than the state of Israel, each born a few years before the Nakba. May 14th, 1948, was probably a rather normal day in my grandparents’ childhood. They would have been inside their homes with their families, or playing outside like any other day. The next day, everything changed. On May 15th, Zionist militias stormed their hometowns, slaughtered their neighbors, and destroyed entire villages. My grandparents’ childhoods were stripped away, and their entire lives uprooted.

After the Nakba, everything changed. The people of Palestine now live under the occupation of racists who despise and dehumanize them. These foreigners decided what rights they could and couldn’t have in their own homelands, and the threat of violence was always present. My great-grandfather was shot in the head by a settler. The Palestinian education system was dramatically defunded, leading my mother’s parents to leave for Europe for university. When they tried to come back home after the 1967 Naksa, foreign soldiers somehow had the authority to bar them from ever entering again. They had to move to Jordan and start a new life. They were only 2 hours away from their families, but they didn’t know if they’d ever be allowed to make the short trip back. My grandmother has only been to Palestine once since then, and my grandfather twice.

My other set of grandparents remained on the land, but now had to live a life of heavy restriction and limited movement. It’s hard for me to imagine what it was like to witness the plundering of our homeland by foreign invaders, but I can never truly understand the magnitude of seeing the gradual colonization that seemed to only get worse throughout the decades. I will never forget when my grandfather, who was a bus driver back in the day, told me that he was once able to drive to Beirut or Baghdad, and then return home on the same day. Now, such an idea is unfathomable...

Read more: The Fuel to My Revolutionary Optimism