Starlight

Bartov, a historian of the Nazi era at Brown University, principally blames Israel’s transformation on two things. The first is how Israelis interpret the Holocaust—no longer as a historical event to be remembered but as a template for an ever-present threat of genocide. Convinced that they are surrounded by enemies bent on their annihilation, Israelis justify the occupation of the West Bank and the war on Gaza as necessary to their survival. Bartov writes, “What had been for long the ‘never again’ syndrome, thus became its exact opposite, the ‘again and again’ syndrome—an internalized, irrational and misleading terror of another Holocaust, always lurking behind the corner, from which one can liberate oneself only by lashing out, pressing down, breaking in, and blowing up both one’s own doubts and unease and any real or perceived external threat.”

Bartov acknowledges that Israelis were traumatized by Oct. 7, in which Hamas fighters killed some 1,200 Israelis and took another 250 as hostages. But he wants them to put the attack into perspective—to understand the roots of Palestinian rage, appreciate the fact that international law countenances resistance to oppression and occupation (albeit not unrestrained violence), and, above all, to get over their Holocaust complex.

That is a tall order. Oct. 7 was an atrocity that was filmed live and has been repeatedly re-aired, its horrors reinforced by accounts of survivors and hostages who endured months of suffering. For Israelis, it served as a taste of things to come if they fail to remain vigilant. And, while the Hamas attack was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history, it was not an isolated event: Since 1948, Israel’s existence has been contested through war and terrorism. Bartov is right to decry Israel’s use of the Holocaust to justify unrestrained violence, but it is unfair to dismiss it as a paranoid delusion.

The second thing that went wrong with Israel, according to Bartov, is the absence of a formal constitution. He correctly asserts that Zionism’s progressive values and goal of emancipating the Jewish people have always been in tension with its nationalist ideology and the presence of Palestinians in its designated homeland. Had Israel written a liberal constitution soon after its founding in 1948, Bartov believes, Zionism’s liberal values would have been enshrined, leading Israel to treat its Arab minority more equally. Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, which has become a component of its de facto constitution, does speak of freedom and equality, and a series of quasi-constitutional Basic Laws enacted over the years has cemented rights such as freedom of movement and privacy. But Bartov is highly critical of the way that the declaration was written, with an eye to pleasing the United Nations and international public opinion rather than a deep commitment to democracy and human rights, and of the time it took for the Basic Laws to be enacted. He thus concludes that Israel’s “relationship to democracy is a troubled one.”

Bartov’s assessment fails to recognize that a constitution is only as good as the government that enforces it; history is littered with constitutions that failed to honor their promises. The proof of freedom and democracy is found less in founding documents than in everyday practice and in case law. In that regard, Israel has not fared badly. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index puts it firmly in the ranks of liberal democracies, a notch or two below the United States. The index doesn’t take into account Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its treatment of the Palestinian population, which clearly violates democratic norms and constitutes a deep stain on Israel’s record, but that hasn’t sapped democracy at home so far. Israel is a flawed democracy—and one that is becoming more flawed under its current government—but given the constant pressure of war and terrorism, it is remarkable that it is a democracy at all.

Whereas Bartov focuses on what is wrong with Israel, peace activists Abu Sarah and Inon seek to lay the foundations for a reconciliation in the century-plus conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in The Future Is Peace. They do this by way of an eight-day journey across Israel and the West Bank, meeting with friends and family and sometimes accompanied by fellow activists. Along the way, they recount their personal and family histories. In the case of Abu Sarah, that includes the death of a brother from injuries sustained in an Israeli prison; for Inon, it is the murder of his grandparents on Oct. 7.

Most readers will probably come away from The Future Is Peace feeling more empathy for Palestinians than for Israelis. Part of Israel’s problem is that, since 1948, Israel is no longer the victim in this conflict (with the notable exception of Oct. 7). For every Israeli tale of suffering, Palestinians have 10, including the Gaza war and the indignities and repression of the occupation. The other is that Inon, as a leftist activist, doesn’t really provide a full-throated Israeli narrative about the history of antisemitism and the justice of Jews having a state of their own. He arouses empathy for the deaths of his grandparents and the others who were killed, raped, and kidnapped on Oct. 7, but he doesn’t make a case for Israel’s existence.

Interestingly enough, in contrast to Bartov, Abu Sarah doesn’t demand that Jews get over the Holocaust. Indeed, he recounts visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, recalling that “as I moved through the exhibits, taking in the photographs, artifacts, and stories, I found myself identifying with their suffering. I forgot that they were Jews, forgot they were my so-called enemies.” Abu Sarah’s experience captures the book’s message, which is that each side should listen to the other’s narrative and learn to empathize. The point is to share these stories without attempting the impossible task of reconciling them into one that both sides can accept.

According to Abu Sarah and Inon, ordinary Israelis and Palestinians need to reinterpret their suffering as a reason to seek peace rather than as the basis for an endless cycle of revenge and war. Both men have done just that. Recounting the death of his brother when Abu Sarah was 10 years old, he writes, “What I didn’t understand then was that the men who tortured Tayseer didn’t just murder my brother; they had also made me their prisoner. It would take me years to learn that I didn’t have to be consumed by rage, that there was another path through my grief.”

Their call for Israelis and Palestinians to appeal to the better angels of their nature is heartfelt and inspiring. But the reality is that events are leading in the opposite direction. The 1993 Oslo Accords, which were the most serious attempt to end the conflict, failed miserably. Today, Israel is led by a government that regards Oslo as a crime and is determined to annex the West Bank (and Gaza, if it gets a chance). Even if the majority of Israelis don’t subscribe to these extreme goals, they have little interest in reaching a deal. On the Palestinian side, a corrupt and ineffective Palestine Liberation Organization leadership has largely been supplanted by Hamas, an extremist religious movement that rejects Israel’s existence and sees armed force as the only path to establishing a Palestinian state. The last time that Israeli and Palestinian leaders held direct peace talks was in 2014.

Diagnosing the obstacles to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and a lasting peace still leaves open the daunting question of what such an agreement would look like and how it could possibly erase the effects of such a bitter conflict. On that account, neither book offers anything new or original.

Bartov believes the burden is on Israel to achieve peace, since it is the more powerful party. If it fails to do so and continues to exist as an “authoritarian and apartheid state,” he writes, it will probably implode. The best alternative is two states joined by a confederation that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to live in whichever one they choose.

Abu Sarah and Inon are less explicit about the future, though Abu Sarah also proposes a confederation as a short-term solution in the hopes that it will one day lead to a binational state. In the meantime, they write, it will be important to rely not on politicians and diplomats but on the goodwill of ordinary people to push them into an agreement. The details will sort themselves out later. “We don’t need to convince everyone—we just need to convince enough people. We don’t need to convince them what the solution is, but to convince them that a solution is possible,” Inon writes.

Two principles of ordering can be suggested. First, every country should be free to grow new technologies. Britain led the first Industrial Revolution. The United States led the second. To insist that China must now develop within boundaries drawn in Washington is to confuse the privileges of incumbency with the laws of nature.

Technological revolutions reshape the global hierarchy; the country that diffuses the new technology fastest tends to move to the center. Attempting to freeze the current arrangement is not only futile but contradictory, since the incumbent itself rose by overturning the order before it.

Change cannot happen at the global level without being driven by powerful state actors. With its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China launched a revolutionary project whose final goal is to reshape the global system in ways that place it closer to its core or center. Such profound changes cannot be achieved without bringing about similarly profound changes inside China itself, and in fact, the BRI aims to transform China into a technological powerhouse, a country singularly able to deploy and control the technologies and industries of the future, including clean energy, artificial intelligence, space, and quantum computing.

The U.S. response to the Chinese challenge could take two very distinct forms. First, the United States could try to race ahead of China in these critical industries. There would, in that case, always be an element of uncertainty. The two countries might make different bets in either general technologies or the pathways to develop them. Time or history would decide the winner. There would be nothing certain or final about the Chinese challenge. After all, when in 1971 U.S. President Richard Nixon decided to delink the dollar from gold, it seemed that the reign of the dollar was coming to an end. In reality, it was beginning anew and on much stronger foundations.

The other possible response would be for Washington to try to slow down or even block its adversary. As a response to the challenge, it would be purely reactive. Its premise is that the developments we have witnessed in China for four or five decades can be brought to an end or even reverted so as to preserve the global system in its current form. It is doubtful that such a policy can work. After all, radical change in China was not brought about by the United States in the first place.

Imposing strict export restrictions or tariffs will likely only force China to look for alternative development pathways, and these pathways will become more autonomous or independent. A second reason the policy is likely to fail is that history never travels the same road twice. When deliberating on how to close off certain development possibilities for China, U.S. policymakers will tend to focus on those possibilities that were important for U.S. development.

They will lack awareness of the very different possibilities that are relevant for Chinese technological progress. A specific development pathway only looks inevitable in retrospect.

The second principle of global ordering is that every country should be free to choose. China is now the largest trading partner of more than 120 nations. Most of them do not want a bloc; they want optionality. Singapore, Switzerland, and much of Africa would rather weigh competing offers from Washington and Beijing than be conscripted into either. If one treats the world as a standing election in which the great powers must canvass continuously for support, the resulting discipline improves the candidates.

The principle would exclude all attempts to use force or threats to enlist a country against some other country. Its application is obvious in the case of the competition between China and the United States to create their own spheres of influence. That competition should be free from coercion or force. Whether a superpower is able to appeal to other peoples and countries will naturally determine its future status as a superpower, but this is a test it must pass rather than evade by preventing those peoples and countries from exercising their free choice.

The principle applies just as naturally in the case of Ukraine. The possibility that Ukraine could be forced to exclude a close association with Europe or the United States as a solution to its conflict with Russia offers no basis for a functional global order. It is so far from a solution that it lies, in fact, at the very origin of the war.

These two principles are not norms in the liberal sense. They are conditions for the operation of any norms at all. Liberal rules are too contested, even within the West, to serve as that floor. Principles of change and choice are thinner and for that reason more durable. They do not tell countries what to become. They tell incumbents that they cannot prevent others from becoming something new.

A new United Nations would be the natural vehicle for these principles, though it would look little like the institution that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sketched in 1945. The current body was designed to freeze a moment, and its architecture still reflects that ambition. A new body would enshrine the two principles above.

The first would be enforced through a right of technological development, no exceptions: No incumbent power could lawfully impose export controls, sanctions, or investment restrictions designed to prevent another country from acquiring the industries of the future. The second would be administered through a right of geopolitical alignment and realignment—a geopolitical right to vote. Spheres of influence would have to be earned in open competition rather than fenced off by treaty or by force. The task would not be to preserve any particular arrangement of power but to ensure that power arrangements can succeed one another peacefully.