Israel: What Went Wrong?

A leading Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust explores and explains his native country’s intensifying turn toward violence and exclusion.

Omer Bartov was born in a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv, and served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become a leading scholar of the Holocaust before turning his attention to his native country. In a series of widely read essays, he has argued rigorously and passionately against Israel’s war in Gaza and the steady erosion of its democratic norms. His early warning that Israel might be at risk of conducting genocide in Gaza and his later judgment that a genocide was under way became topics of international debate.

In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov sketches the transformation of Zionism from a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism. How is it possible, he asks, that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, which brought a Jewish national home widespread approval, stands credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes? How do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction in Gaza was conducted with the support, laced with denial and indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens?

Drawing from several decades of thinking and writing, Bartov explores the present crisis and the urgent questions it has raised. He tracks the origins of Zionism, the intertwining of Israel’s independence with Palestinian displacement, the politics of the Holocaust and antisemitism, and a number of new ideas for how Jews and Arabs alike can achieve peace and security. Then, in an essay titled “The Missing Constitution,” he discusses Israel’s failure to draft a binding national compact, and the escalating consequences of this lost opportunity. The result is a searing critique that assesses the meaning of Zionism and the future of Israel with lucidity and depth.