Israel: What went wrong?
Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 29 May 2026
In some senses, Omer Bartov has written a volume that can serve as a companion to the volume reviewed in one of my recent blogs, Mitri Raheb’s Decolonizing Palestine. Bartov’s most recent book, Israel: What Went Wrong? (London, Fern Press, 2026) describes the process that led from the establishment of the Zionist movement to the genocide in Gaza.
Bartov, born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv, and served in the Israeli army. He is at present the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He is the author of many books on the Holocaust.
In his introduction, Bartov writes, “This book explores the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression and persecution, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism increasingly focused on the exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians under Israeli rule. It further asks: How is it possible that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust stands today credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes, forcible displacement of civilian populations, and crimes against humanity? By what bitter cunning of history have we come to the point that not even eight decades after the Jewish state was established in 1948 – the same year in which the Genocide Convention was adopted by the United Nations in direct response to the Nazi extermination of the Jews – Israel engages for two years in a genocidal undertaking with almost total impunity from the very international legal regime set up after World War II to prevent and punish this crime? And how do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction was conducted with the wide support, laced with denial and indifference, of most of its own Jewish citizens?” (3)
He concludes his important volume:
“Only the assurance of equal rights to all inhabitants of the land can put an end to this calamity. As long as seven million Jews rule over seven million Palestinians without any prospect of equality, peace will not come. Once again, as in the past, it has been shown that states stop committing genocide only when they are forced to, or when they have accomplished their murderous goal. At this moment of profound crisis, but also of new opportunity and guarded hope, it is time for the world to step in and help the peoples of the land plan for a different future for generations to come.” (220)
View a short video on the new book of Omer Bartov
View a fascinating dialogue between Gideon Levy, renowned Israeli journalist, and Omer Bartov, facilitated by Peter Beinart, renowned Jewish US journalist. They discuss Zionism and anti-Zionist: