Ein Brief von Daniel Bar Tal

Eine Reflexion zum Jahresende 2025

Dear Colleagues and Friends

I would like to wish you first of all, health as in our age it is extremely important to feel well and also happiness and of course change of the present era of authoritarianism that plagues the world.

For many years I made it a habit to send New Year wishes to people I met along my path. During the last two years, however, I lacked the energy to continue this tradition, feeling helpless and hopeless. This year, as I approached my 80th birthday, I felt that I must overcome myself. Perhaps this will be the last time I follow this ritual, but I feel a strong need to write.

The truth is that the world has fallen upon me. The genocide carried out by Israeli Jews in Gaza bears, for me, the mark of Cain—one that cannot be erased and will haunt us for centuries. I am part of this and bear responsibility, both as a citizen of Israel and as a Jew whose family was almost entirely annihilated in Treblinka. My grandmother, aunts, uncles, and their children were murdered. Only my mother and her sister survived—two out of nine siblings.

Growing up without a family is incomprehensible, and this absence became a central reason I devoted my academic career to studying how evil evolves within the framework of intractable conflicts. I found a moral model in my aunt, who was sixteen years old and a member of a leftist youth movement. She was on the “safe” side of Warsaw and could have survived, but on April 19, 1943, she returned to the ghetto when her comrades called her to join the uprising. My life’s mission was not only to honor her courage and values, but also to uncover her fate. Three years ago, I finally did. Sent out on April 25, 1943; to seek Polish assistance, she was killed by a German Nazi policeman.

The genocide carried out in Gaza by victims of the Holocaust is appalling and violates all my values—especially as it is largely denied by its perpetrators, who have killed approximately 70,000 Palestinians, wounded about 170,000, and flattened the Gaza Strip. These acts have not ceased; they continue in both the West Bank and Gaza.

The murderous attack on 7^th of October 2023 by Hamas in which were murdered about 850 civilians and about 350 soldiers and abducted 251 civilians with women and children cannot justify the genocide. The extreme rightist, religious, racist, and messianic government led to these acts and now denies its responsibility directing the anger solely to 7^th of October. At the same time the government under the leadership of Netanyahu turns Israel into dictatorial and anti-democratic country. 

Israel has been governed by the right since 2000, following the failure of the Camp David summit and the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada. In the aftermath of the atrocities of October 7, many Israelis shifted further to the right, opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state and increasingly delegitimizing Palestinians as a people. I moved in the opposite direction. I came to understand more deeply the brutality of 58 years of occupation and the consistent trajectory of Israeli governments since 1967: the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the refusal to withdraw fully from them, and—already during the Mandate period—the aspiration to incorporate the West Bank into the future State of Israel.

It is well documented that the majority of Israeli Jews, as well as a large portion of Jews in the diaspora, are indoctrinated from an early age by successive Israeli governments with a sense of collective victimhood, feelings of superiority, the perception of non-Jews as an existential threat, chronic insecurity and fear, heightened patriotism, the delegitimization of Palestinians, and the belief in the moral justness of retaining control over the West Bank.

My state of mind is also deeply affected by developments in the United States under the leadership of Trump, who is undermining the foundations of a democratic state. The world as a whole appears to be moving in an authoritarian direction, painfully reminiscent of the 1930s. We, the older generation, are no longer able to reverse this trajectory. It is the younger generation that must bring about profound change if the world is to be saved.

It is deeply painful. Since 2022, approximately 200,000 Israelis have left the country—mostly young, progressive, and highly professional individuals. My beloved daughter, Galiya, is planning to relocate to the United Kingdom to study social work, driven by a desire to contribute to repairing the world.

I will not leave Israel. There are many reasons, one of them being that I have invested too much of my life in this state. Instead, I am fully committed to documenting what is happening here for future generations. Fortunately, I am invited to write chapters for handbooks and edited volumes, which gives me the intellectual freedom to choose the themes I address.

Thus, with the arrival of Christmas and the New Year—moments that invite at least a pause for reflection—I hope that a light will come to this world. Yet such a light will not emerge on its own. We must help illuminate the path for the younger generation.

Very cordially, Danny

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