Omer Bartov, Israel: What Went Wrong? (2026)

This book, by an esteemed Israeli-born historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust who has lived and worked in the US for decades, is good, though its origins in separately published academic and journalistic pieces sometimes gives it a disjointed feel. The book makes a compelling case that Israel - founded and conceived by many of its citizens and supporters as redemption for the sins of the Holocaust - is now itself, tragically, engaged in a genocide. Bartov makes interesting observations of parallels between the Nazi German and now Israeli cases - for example, the perception of earlier vulnerability at the hands of an outsider helps to justify extreme measures. I learned that Israel subjected its Palestinian subjects to military rule from 1948 to 1966; only six months later, upon the Six-Day-War, the current, six-decades long military rule recommenced. I learned how Old Testament stories - of Samson and the Gates of Gaza, of Amalek and the Israelites' extirpation of its population - have come to serve modern Israel's sense of its righteousness and its enemies' perfidy. How does Bartov answer the question in his subtitle? He makes a great deal of Israel's failure to adopt a constitution. This, he suggests, might have prevented Israel's brazen disregard for Palestinian rights. However, I don't think Bartov nailed this argument, or really even pursued it very systematically. For one, he shows that the attempts to give Israel a constitution starting in the 1990s under the influential supreme court justice Aharon Barak didn't preclude the same justice and court from partially endorsing Israel's apartheid system. More broadly, Bartov treats the issue of Zionism itself somewhat gingerly. He simply doesn't have that much to say about the period before 1948. When he speculates about what a constitution might have meant for Israel, he almost daydreams that it might have led to Israel losing its official Jewish character and becoming a regular liberal democracy. If that's what he wished had happened, though, does he think Zionism itself was a mistake? He doesn't say.