Matti Friedman’s April 21 piece for The Free Press (FP) reviews five books accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, which he frames as part of a new literary genre – written by authors with no expertise about the region – which he calls “Gazology,” that “refashions the ruins of the Palestinian territory into a dark political parable with a familiar villain.”
Gazology, to Friedman, not only fails to grapple with the terrible human tragedy caused by Hamas’ antisemitic massacre of Oct. 7, but erases the terrorist group almost entirely from the story. He likens this to “describing the American war in the Pacific without mentioning Japan, or describing all Japanese on every Pacific island as civilians.”
Though Friedman didn’t include Omer Bartov’s book “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” which similarly accuses Israel of genocide, in his essay on books about Gaza, a recent Guardian review suggests that it would fit well into the Gazology framework.
For some background, Bartov – an Israeli-born American academic – argued, in an interview with Haaretz, that “Zionism must disappear,” and though he admitted that the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks represented “war crimes,” the massacre, he insisted, didn’t happen in a vacuum. “Resistance to occupation, to siege, to the attempt to control a people trying to express national self-determination is,” he claimed, legally “legitimate.” He likened “Palestinian resistance” to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings.
He’s also peddled the Soviet-inspired libel that Zionism is a form of “settler colonialism,” and published a Guardian opinion piece in August 2024 not only accusing Israel of genocide, but suggesting that the IDF began exhibiting Nazi-like behavior as far back as the late 1980s.
The current Guardian review (“What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines ‘what Zionism became,’” April 21) by Aaron Gell, which includes an interview with Bartov, spans over 1,800 words yet, true to form, doesn’t include the word “Hamas,“ or so much as allude to the Oct. 7 massacre, even once.
These glaring omissions allows Bartov’s post-Zionist vision articulated to readers to seem reasonable. It’s known as “A Land for All” and envisions “sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish states” existing “side by side, divided roughly along pre-1967 borders” with “citizens of both entities…allowed to live and travel freely throughout the combined territory.”
How Bartov is able to reconcile this utopian vision – where Gazans could travel freely to the Jewish state – with the reality of Hamas’ cross-border attack two and a half years ago, where Palestinian terrorists engaged in an orgy of (trigger warning) sadistic antisemitic violence, is impossible to fathom.
Further, the Guardian review included this astonishing paragraph – first in the Guardian writer’s own voice, and then quoting Bartov:
Despite some alarming strains of ethnic bias underlying the perception of wealthy and powerful Jewish interests manipulating the US government, pointing out antisemitism has lost effectiveness, in part because the influence of pro-Israel donors on US politics – and Israel’s campaign to convince the US to wage war on Iran – is undeniable. Additionally, the charge of antisemitism has grown hollow, Bartov said, due to its flagrant “weaponization” as “a tool to shut people up” as the state wreaks destruction on its neighbors. “Having claimed to be the definitive answer to antisemitism,” he writes in What Went Wrong?, “Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere …
Gell and Bartov wrote these words about the “hollowness” and “weaponisation” of charges of antisemitism to “shut people up,” and which, to the extent that it even exists, is putatively the fault of Israel, amidst a rash of firebombing and arsons targeting Jewish intuitions, and only months after two Jews were murdered by an Islamist extremist at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur.
Their shameful antisemitism denial and justification also should be seen in the context of the Community Security Trust’s (CST) recent report revealing over 3,700 antisemitic incidents in the U.K. in 2025, the second-highest total ever reported to CST in a single calendar year, and only 14 percent lower than the 4,298 antisemitic incidents reported in 2023, which was highest yearly total since the charity began compiling this data in 1984.
This tsunami of Jew hatred in Britain – and elsewhere in the West – since Oct. 7, 2023, has largely been fueled by exactly the kind of demonising rhetoric and unhinged libels about Jews and the Jewish state peddled by Bartov with the help of his Guardian enabler.
Gazology, Friedman observed in his essay at the FP, “is a literature of Jewish evil” which originates “not in journalism or academic inquiry but in the pseudosciences that have sprung up over the centuries to explain the problems of humanity with stories about the malevolence of this group of people.”
The fact that the Guardian chose an Israeli-born, Jewish academic to promote such dangerous vitriol doesn’t render it any less morally reprehensible.