Book review of Israel: What Went Wrong?

Bartov brings unusual authority to this undertaking. Born in a kibbutz, raised in Tel Aviv, and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War, he later emerged as one of the leading academic voices on Nazism, genocide, and the Holocaust.

The book opens with a stark question. “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?” Bartov seeks to understand how a movement born from persecution, statelessness, and the search for Jewish emancipation evolved, into a system increasingly marked by exclusion, domination, and permanent occupation.

One of the book’s strengths is its refusal to flatten history into ideological simplicity. Bartov does not caricature Zionism. He acknowledges its origins in European antisemitism and the desperate historical circumstances that drove the Jewish search for sovereignty. He reconstructs the climate of nineteenth-century Europe, where Jews encountered exclusion even as modern nationalism promised liberation to others. Zionism, in this account, emerged not simply as conquest, but as rescue, dignity, and historical survival.

Metamorphosis of Statehood

Yet Bartov’s central argument is that statehood transformed the movement irrevocably. Once Zionism became state ideology, he argues, its liberal and universalist strands weakened while ethno-nationalist impulses hardened. The absence of a formal constitution, the persistence of military rule

over Palestinians, and the normalisation of permanent insecurity gradually altered the moral and institutional character of the state. In Bartov’s telling, Israel evolved from a democratic aspiration into an increasingly exclusionary political order.

The sections on memory and trauma are among the book’s most compelling. Bartov contends that the Holocaust, which should have produced a universal ethic against dehumanisation, became in Israel a source of permanent existential anxiety. “Never Again,” in his formulation, evolved from a warning against genocide into a doctrine of perpetual siege. The result, he argues, is a society simultaneously militarily dominant and psychologically fragile, where historical victimhood becomes part of national infrastructure.

These arguments will provoke fierce disagreement, particularly among readers who regard comparisons between Israeli policy and colonial frameworks as morally distorted or historically inflammatory. Bartov writes directly into that controversy. Terms such as ‘apartheid’, ‘settler colonialism’, and ‘genocidal undertaking’ are used with deliberate moral force. Many readers will reject those conclusions outright. Others will see them as long overdue.

The emotional centre of the book lies less in accusation than in disillusionment. Bartov repeatedly returns to the tragedy of inheritance. His father, shaped by antisemitism in Europe and devoted throughout his life to the Zionist ideal, eventually came to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu had become “the great destroyer of Zionism”. Bartov’s dedication to his father, whom he calls “the last Zionist”, becomes one of the book’s most haunting motifs.

Lived Experience in Gaza

The chapters on occupation possess particular force because Bartov combines scholarship with lived experience. His recollections of serving in Gaza and patrolling occupied territories lend the narrative unusual

texture. He writes about the gradual normalisation of domination, the bureaucratic rituals of humiliation, and the psychological corrosion that prolonged occupation imposes not only upon the occupied, but also upon the occupier. Drawing upon Aimé Césaire, Bartov warns that colonial systems ultimately brutalise the coloniser’s moral imagination as much as they dispossess the colonised.

The timing of the book gives it unsettling immediacy. As West Asia endures another prolonged season of war, civilian suffering, displacement, hostage trauma, shattered cities, and widening regional instability have once again exposed the terrible human cost of unresolved history.

Bartov writes with unmistakable empathy for Jewish historical trauma, yet insists with equal force that collective pain cannot become a permanent moral exemption.

At the same time, the book’s sharpest arguments are also likely to provoke debate among readers who believe Bartov underestimates the scale of Israel’s security dilemmas in a region shaped by terrorism, proxy warfare, ideological militancy, and recurring armed conflict. Israel’s supporters would argue that its strategic culture cannot be separated from decades of existential threats, civilian trauma, rocket attacks, and regional hostility.

Geopolitically, however, Bartov’s larger argument is that prolonged asymmetrical conflict and permanent security exceptionalism can gradually reshape the moral and institutional character of states themselves. Beneath the historical narrative lies a wider warning about militarised nationalism, demographic anxieties, fractured regional orders, and the strategic costs of unresolved territorial conflicts. At a time when West Asia is witnessing expanding instability involving states, militias, proxy networks, and global powers, the book raises an uncomfortable question. Can overwhelming military superiority alone produce political legitimacy, strategic stability, or durable peace?

Bartov’s decades of scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust shadow every page. He is careful not to construct crude equivalences, yet

his lifelong study of how societies normalise violence unmistakably informs his interpretation of contemporary Israel.

The prose itself deserves mention. Bartov writes with grave precision and clarity despite the conceptual density of the subject. The narrative moves fluently between autobiography, political theory, military history, and moral philosophy without collapsing into academic abstraction. There is anger in these pages, but it is disciplined anger.

A particularly memorable line appears early in the book when Bartov writes that “our resurrection had come at the price of another people’s catastrophe.” Few sentences better capture the collision of historical truths that defines the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy. Another striking passage arrives when he observes that Israel now appears “trapped in its own sense of shock and trauma.” Those words resonate beyond the Middle East. They speak to the danger of nations constructing political identity entirely around historical fear.

Israel: What Went Wrong? is not a balanced book in the conventional journalistic sense, nor does it aspire to neutrality. It is an unapologetically moral and interventionist argument. Yet it is also a profoundly learned work that forces readers to confront questions many public debates evade. Can a state built in the aftermath of extermination sustain permanent occupation without moral transformation? Can nationalism rooted in liberation avoid becoming domination when fused with military power and demographic anxiety? Can democratic institutions endure indefinitely when constitutional ambiguity collides with ideological absolutism? Whether one agrees with Bartov’s conclusions or contests them fiercely, this remains an important and unsettling work.