Omer Bartov's new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, offers an erudite account of the foundation of the state and its subsequent moral and political decline. The author, born on a kibbutz and a former IDF officer, now a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, writes more in sorrow than in anger. His goal is not to condemn Zionism but to explain its evolution from a dream to a nightmare.
Bartov traces the degeneration from Israel's early days as a perceived liberal, progressive, and egalitarian society to its current status as an international pariah. The Israeli response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was a major milestone in this slide, with the country accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The International Court of Justice found that Palestinians in Gaza were at risk of genocide, and the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The book highlights the failure of Israel's founding fathers to resolve the tension between being both Jewish and democratic. Bartov argues that a written constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence might have tempered the creeping racism and indifference to atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. However, critics note that Bartov does not go back far enough to explore the roots of Israeli racism, which lie in Zionism as a settler-colonial movement. The 1948 Nakba, which saw 750,000 Palestinians become refugees, is seen by victims as an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing.
