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.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020)

This is a quietly impassioned, but simultaneously extremely cogently argued, account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Though I can't claim deep knowledge about this issue, I found the book quite plausible and compelling. Though Khalidi's main critiques are reserved for the Zionist project and its great-power enablers (first Britain, and then the US), he hardly shies from criticism of Palestinian leadership and the autocratic rulers of Arab states. Khalidi's most basic contention is that Zionism was a settler colonial project from the start. Given that in 1895, when Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat launched Zionism, hundreds of thousands of people already lived in Palestine/Zion, nearly 100% of whom were not Jewish, it's hard for me to imagine a credible counter-argument. Perhaps Adam Kirsch's description in his chapter on Herzl in The People and the Books (see earlier review) offers the most charitable case: Herzl wrote in his book that the current residents of Palestine would benefit from an influx of enlightened, motivated Jewish settlers. In short, the indigenous would be uplifted - a Jewish "civilizing mission." On this view, then, early Zionists like Herzl were at most ingenuous. Khalidi challenges this charitable view, using an entry in Herzl's diary to show that he was quite conscious that hundreds of thousands of indigenous inhabitants would have to be displaced. Revisionist Zionists like Yabotinsky, of course, were unabashed in calling for what later would come to be known as ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. I would be interested in reading more about how early Zionists spoke - both publicly and privately - about this issue. For me what was most eye-opening about this book was Khalidi's commentary on the Mandate system (1921-1948) and the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. I hadn't realized that the British Mandate for Palestine had stacked the deck so decisively in favor of the Zionists and against the Palestinians. Basically, it accepted the British commitment in the Balfour declaration and failed even to mention the Palestinians as a people deserving of self-determination. Khalidi himself was involved in talks in Washington that preceded Oslo. (He's from a politically and academically prominent Palestinian family, with members serving in various political offices in Ottoman times and later in Mandate Palestine; his father was a respected historian in the US, as is the author himself, now at Columbia. Khalidi integrates his family history and autobiography here and there, but it's not a main strand in the book, as I had hoped it might be - as Ari Shavit had done so brilliantly in My Promised Land) Though Khalidi participated in some of the negotiations, he became increasingly skeptical of the US's role as an ostensibly honest broker and also of the PLO's woeful ineptitude in negotiation and desperation to reach a deal, any deal. In Khalidi's view, Oslo only appeared to recognize Palestinian wishes and to dangle the prospect of Palestinian statehood, which however, was never on the cards. Though he's arguing a brief, Khalidi's tone remains sober, measured, and humane throughout, adding to his persuasiveness.