Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.
Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was perhaps less a change of heart than one of strategy, as his senior adviser later admitted, the lyric became a byword of Israeli politics, an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.
Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.
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