Last month, Omer Bartov–currently holding the title of Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University–published the book Israel: What Went Wrong. Bartov’s prestige as a Holocaust scholar is such that the New York Times gave the book a polite review, although the reviewer, Jennifer Szalai, avoided addressing the more radical ideas in Bartov’s book, such as that Israel is a settler colonial state. Since the genocide in Gaza began after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacres and hostage taking, Bartov has published multiple opinion pieces in the NYT–including one on November 10, 2023 where he earned the ire of pro-Palestinian activists by rejecting the idea that Israel was then committing genocide while also earning a rebuke from Holocaust scholars associated with Israel’s Yad Vashem museum for stating that while Israel may not at that point have been committing genocide, it was nonetheless guilty of a host of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. In July 2025, the NYT published two pieces by Bartov where he explained that he had eventually come around to the view that Israel was meeting the legal definition of genocide by its actions in Gaza. 

It is evidence of the epically barbaric conduct of Israel’s war in Gaza that it has pushed someone like Bartov in a radical direction: he has been for most of his academic career a respectable liberal Zionist and a respectable liberal in general. When Norman Finkelstein published The Holocaust Industry in 2000, the NYT published Bartov’s highly unfair trashing of the book. 

Born and raised in Israel, Bartov served as a soldier and officer in the IDF in the 1970s, including during the Yom Kippur War. He has lived and worked as an academic in the US since the late 80’s. Up until recently, his politics have tended towards the leftmost end of the liberal Zionist spectrum–but still Zionist. In Israel, he recounts that he sent Israel’s Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin two letters after the eruption of the First Intifadah in December 1987, warning  that the increasing brutality of the IDF against Palestinians mirrored tendencies that he had noticed in his studies of the German military under Nazi rule. Refusing to be edified by Bartov’s scholarly wisdom (as Bartov apparently naively hoped), Rabin replied with only the same single sentence to both letters: “How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht.” 

In Israel, Bartov occasionally shows flashes of his traditional liberal Zionism. For example, after recounting Rabin’s curt response, he goes on to praise the latter’s “subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognize that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political and moral price of the occupation.” This is nonsense. With the Oslo agreements, Rabin had no intention of ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land–he merely handed off security responsibilities for Palestinian population centers to the Palestinian Authority while seeking to maintain Israel’s control over all of the West Bank’s natural resources and most of its land. The 90’s era rhetoric of Rabin and Shimon Peres about purifying Israel’s democratic soul by ending its domination over Palestinians was a fig leaf to appease liberals like Bartov while the occupation continued in reality. 

In spite of Bartov’s naivete regarding Rabin and the so-called peace process, what is remarkable and refreshing about Israel is how clear eyed and cogent Bartov is –especially given his Zionist background–in describing Israel’s real nature: a Jewish supremacist apartheid state  not only currently with such unvarnished fascists as Ben Gvir and Smotrich holding key cabinet posts but also dating back to Israel’s 1948 founding under the leadership of much less unpleasant, ostensibly progressive people like David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan. Bartov is also effective and full of moral clarity in critiquing the support for the Gaza genocide on the part of all too many Israeli Jewish liberals as well as describing the abuse of the memory of the Holocaust by Israeli politicians and many others in attempting to justify Israeli crimes. 

It is clear that since the Gaza genocide began, Bartov has moved into the anti-Zionist camp. In Israel, he describes Israel as a settler colonialist state and quotes the late Marxist anti-colonial theorist Aimé Césaire in support of his argument.  He argues that Israel would have been wise to discard Zionism at its founding in 1948 and instead concentrate on development of liberal democratic institutions and equality of rights for all citizens, Jewish and Arab. Instead, he writes ,Israel’s focus from its very beginning on developing its governing institutions around a philosophy of Jewish ethno-nationalism is at the very root of its current apartheid rule in the West Bank, genocide in Gaza and the second class status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Bartov also spends a considerable portion of the book arguing that Israel’s oppression of Palestinians–as well as the current efforts of Netanyahu and his fascistic religious coalition government partners to transform Israel into an illiberal autocracy–is rooted in part in Israel’s lack of a written constitution. As a substitute for a constitution listing the responsibilities of governing institutions and placing limits on their power, Israel has relied on a series of basic laws which can be easily overturned by a simple Knesset majority. 

Bartov spends a significant portion of the book’s last part hammering  Israel’s most prominent progressive legal theorist  and celebrated civil libertarian Aharon Barak for his disgraceful evasions and mendacities regarding Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Israel’s Supreme Court–on which Barak served as a Justice from 1978 to 2006–has long been portrayed as a bastion of progressive legal principles–this is the reason why Netanyahu has been trying to eliminate its power. But Bartov points out that the Court has enabled Israel’s oppression of Palestinians over the decades. It is true, Bartov notes, that Barak wrote the ruling in the 2000 Supreme Court case barring Israeli Jewish communities from excluding Arab citizens from residency–but, Bartov notes, this is easily evaded in practice. In contrast to his naivete regarding Yitzhak Rabin’s supposed desire to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinians, Bartov clearly sees Barak’s prattling over the course of his long career about the moral majesty of Israel’s devotion to human rights and civil liberties to be a fig leaf for Israel’s Jewish supremacist policies.

Bartov ends his book with a survey of constructive proposals that might bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He speaks convincingly in favor of the proposal for a binational confederation between Israelis and Palestinians advocated by the American-Israeli political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin. He even thinks that the 20 point peace proposal advanced by President Trump contains one or two constructive ideas. 


Overall, Bartov’s Israel: What Went Wrong is an impressive achievement. There are even better books on Israel’s Gaza genocide by Marxists like Gilbert Achcar and Pankaj Mishra–which dig much deeper than Bartov does into Israel’s broader role within Western imperialism, especially its service in securing American domination of the Middle East. Nonetheless, to Bartov’s credit, both Mishra’s and Achcar’s books are included in a “recommended reading” section at the end of his book.