Eighty Years of Hurt
A new book examines the corrosive roots of the Israel–Palestine conflict.
Israel: What Went Wrong?
By Omer Bartov
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
244 pages, $28.00
An Israeli defense minister received a stunning letter from a history professor at Tel Aviv University. The academic, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War in his early 30s, warned the country’s top civilian defense official that Israeli soldiers were at risk of being indoctrinated to abuse Palestinian civilians in ways similar to how German soldiers had been conditioned to brutalize “subhuman” Slavs and Jews on the Eastern Front.
The defense minister was Yitzhak Rabin. It was the late 1980s. The first intifada was underway. Rabin had allegedly instructed the IDF to break the bones of Palestinian children caught throwing stones at the Israeli occupiers. The professor was Omer Bartov, whose research delved into why young German men internalized Nazi ideology—dehumanization of the other—even before they donned a Wehrmacht uniform.
Rabin responded to Bartov in the form of a single written sentence: “How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht.”
This story appears early in Bartov’s concise, unsparing portrait of a country’s descent into barbarism. Israel: What Went Wrong? is both an indictment and a plea—an indictment of radical Zionism and a plea for mercy, reconciliation, and peace in a land bathed in blood for the better part of the past 80 years. Given what’s transpiring now, nearly 40 years after Rabin dismissed Bartov’s history lesson (and before Rabin himself changed course), the university professor’s letter proved prescient.
In the 31 months since the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, Israeli leaders have repeatedly called for unleashing immense violence and deprivation to render Gaza unlivable. Bartov fills pages with quotes like this one from IDF Major General Ghassan Alian: “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction.” Such attitudes permeate society. Based on his recent visits there, Bartov reports that most ordinary Israelis now see Palestinians as less worthy of life.
“Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterized the country for almost six decades. But the scale of what was being perpetrated in Gaza by the IDF was as unprecedented as the complete indifference most Israelis showed to what was being done in their name,” he writes.
Omer Bartov was born in a different Israel in 1954, although he argues the seeds of today’s catastrophe had been planted even then. A presence at Brown University since 2000, Bartov is an eminent scholar of war and genocide. He has also written extensively on the conflict consuming his native country, and was among the first major historians to publicly condemn Israel’s destruction of Gaza as potentially genocidal. He brings a great deal of credibility to the debate over whether the state founded as a refuge for Holocaust survivors is perpetrating “the crime of crimes.”
But when did Israel start going wrong, to use Bartov’s phrase? To find the answer, Bartov takes us back to the Jewish state’s founding in May 1948. He does not argue that Zionism was inherently genocidal, but that the movement’s prevailing leaders chose to make it fundamentally incompatible with a large Palestinian population. Citing the work of the Israeli legal scholar Yoram Schachar, Bartov points to the frantic drafting of Israel’s Declaration of Independence “and why the commitment it made to adopt a formal written constitution was never kept.” Moreover, its founders refused to define Israel’s borders, unwilling to relinquish hopes for the entirety of the Land of Israel.
Although the declaration plainly stated that the Jewish people had an irrevocable legal and moral right to establish a state, the document avoided the term “democratic.” And while it pledged to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens,” these rights have never been “enshrined in any of the country’s overarching basic laws, let alone in a Constitution,” Bartov notes. The enlightened phrasing seems to have been lifted from the UN Charter to satisfy the demands of the 1947 Partition Plan.
David Ben-Gurion opposed adopting a constitution, and the consequences were evident immediately. The approximately 150,000 Palestinian Arabs remaining within the new state lived under martial law until 1966, and hundreds of new Jewish towns were built on land confiscated from Arabs. So despite its eloquent commitment to equal rights, Ben-Gurion seems to have intended for the Declaration of Independence “largely to serve foreign policy and propaganda needs.” In theory and in practice, Zionism—whether in its secular or religious form—rendered impossible true equality and democracy by “privileging one ethnicity over another,” Bartov says.
Since 1967, Israel has ruled over millions of Palestinians (thousands of whom had been turned into refugees in 1948) who have few or no rights at all. Decades of occupation bred violence and dehumanization on all sides, birthing Islamist resistance movements every bit as uncompromising as the right-wing fanatics in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition today.
At the same time, the cancer of occupation has metastasized and deeply eroded the liberal structures and values within pre-1967 Israel itself. So, this argument continues, wars of annihilation in Gaza and southern Lebanon, coinciding with ceaseless settler terrorism in the West Bank, were logical outcomes. This is why Bartov concludes Zionism is now irreparably broken and needs to be discarded in favor of a universalist value system.
Was this descent inevitable, though? The answer matters because it may tell us whether Zionism can be reformed away from the racist, expansionist, irrational ideology it has become. The answer is not entirely clear: “One can only wish Zionism had been transcended — historicized, liberalized, and universalized — when the time was right, eight decades ago,” Bartov concludes.
Israel: What Went Wrong? has unsurprisingly not been published in Israel, as the vast majority of Jewish Israelis appear unready to reckon with the consequences of a war shot through with revenge. Americans would do well to read it, but most hardly need convincing that today’s Israel is an unworthy international partner and ultimately a strategic liability. Sixty percent of U.S. adults view Israel unfavorably, a big jump from the pre-war 41 percent of 2022, according to thePew Research Center. Disapproval runs even higher among the younger generations.
One needn’t be a polling expert to understand why. Gaza’s pitiless destruction was live-streamed on our smartphones and social media feeds. Those who protested Israel’s conduct, especially those who believed it to be genocidal, were often smeared as antisemites. To Bartov, obsessively conflating legitimate criticism of a foreign government that receives billions in U.S. aid with Jew-hatred is another reason why Israel is on the road to outcast pariah status and possibly self-destruction.
“Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere, a nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians are making even some of its erstwhile supporters shrink from it in discomfort, or horror and disgust,” he writes.
Of all the tragic outcomes, this stings the most. Israel stands as isolated as ever, as decades of war and occupation failed to solve the fundamental problem created by its existence, the dispossession of millions of Palestinians.
In 1947, the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi published his memoir If This Is a Man. It recognized the humanity of an emaciated, starving creature, male or female, brutally forced to work in the freezing cold and caking mud. While still in the death camp, Levi had already transcended his particular identity to feel anguish and compassion for all suffering, oppressed, persecuted humankind, and anger at those outside the Shoah’s horrors who had sealed themselves in denial and complacency.
We might contrast Levi’s humanity to the tone of a motivational speech delivered by 95-year-old Israeli military veteran Ezra Yachin to IDF troops before they invaded Gaza. Yachin told the soldiers to “wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children.” As Bartov notes, President Isaac Herzog rewarded Yachin with a certificate of honor.
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