Israel: What Went Wrong?

A leading genocide scholar explores the history of Zionism, Israel’s lurch towards extreme oppression and violence, and why it stands accused of crimes against humanity


Professor Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv and served in the Israel Defence Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become an expert on the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.

In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov explores the transformation of Zionism from a movement of Jewish emancipation and liberation into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians. He traces the process whereby Israel – whose establishment in 1948 received international support in the aftermath of the Holocaust – now faces accusations of war crimes and genocide.

What are the implications of Israel’s near total impunity for the post-1945 regime of international law? And how do we understand the widespread support for these policies by Israel’s Jewish citizens?

The result is a searing and urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism, genocide, and the future of Israel with rigour and depth.

Review

The descent of Israel, once a refuge for the Holocaust’s surviving victims, into genocidal madness has revealed how little we know about the 'slaughter-bench' of modern history. In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Omer Bartov explores the most horrifying and vexing calamity of our time with a rare combination of painful personal intimacy and impeccable scholarship. Anyone disturbed and frightened by our current moral and intellectual morass should read it -- Pankaj Mishra

More than two years on from the horrific Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, [Bartov] tries to understand how a nation founded in response to an epoch-defining genocide became a perpetrator of the same terrible crime against Palestinians in Gaza . . . For anyone seeking to understand the tragedies of the last two years, Israel: What Went Wrong? is an essential read ― Booklist, starred review

About the Author

Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and the author of many books, including Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, which won the National Jewish Book Award, Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past and Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel–Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.