Israel

Omer Bartov, a historian of war and genocide, examines the transformation of Zionism, the movement for Jewish national self-determination, from a force for emancipation into a state ideology of ethnonationalism, culminating in Israel's military campaign in Gaza following the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist militant group. Drawing on scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide, as well as his experience as an Israeli-born former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Bartov asks how a state founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust came to stand credibly accused of perpetrating genocide against Palestinians.

Bartov situates himself within this history. Born in Israel to committed Zionists, he belongs to the first generation after the state's creation. His father, the novelist Hanoch Bartov, served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and remained a lifelong Zionist who came to view Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the destroyer of Zionism. Both sides of the family lost virtually all relatives who remained in Europe. Growing up in Israel meant living in "mutilated families" haunted by loss while recognizing that Jewish national resurrection came at the price of Palestinian catastrophe, the mass displacement known as the Nakba. Bartov served four years in the IDF, including during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, with postings in Gaza and the West Bank where he first understood what it meant to occupy another people.

Bartov traces Zionism's emergence in late-nineteenth-century Europe as a response to modern antisemitism, produced by the anxieties of Jewish emancipation, industrialization, and ethno-nationalism. Settlement in Palestine proceeded alongside the genocide of European Jews. The 1948 war that followed the end of British colonial rule over Palestine resulted in Jewish victory and the mass displacement of Palestinians. The Declaration of Independence promised equality for all citizens and set a deadline for a constitution, but neither promise was honored, and no constitution was ever adopted.

Bartov argues that the Holocaust and the Nakba are historically inseparable. After 1948, Zionism transformed from a liberation movement into a state ideology, and Israel tilted toward being Jewish at the expense of being democratic. Holocaust memory shifted from a universalist "never again" pledge to one meaning exclusively "never again to Jews," providing what Bartov, borrowing journalist Peter Beinart's phrase, calls "infinite license" for disproportionate violence. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 Six-Day War created a system in which seven million Jews effectively rule over seven million Palestinians with vastly unequal rights.

The first chapter traces Bartov's evolving assessment of the Gaza campaign. While acknowledging the Hamas attack as a war crime and crime against humanity, he argues that Israel's response far exceeded legitimate self-defense. In a November 2023 essay for The New York Times, he warned that Israeli operations risked sliding toward genocide and catalogs statements by Israeli leaders indicating genocidal intent. These include Netanyahu citing the biblical command to destroy Amalek, the ancient enemy the Israelites were ordered to annihilate; Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calling Palestinians "human animals"; and a retired general calling for Gaza to become "a place where no human being can exist." By June 2024, following the IDF attack on Rafah, Bartov concluded that Israel was engaged in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions aimed at making the Strip uninhabitable.

During a June 2024 visit to Israel, Bartov found rage, fear, and an inability to feel empathy for Gaza's population. At Ben-Gurion University, student protesters recently returned from reserve service insisted the IDF was "the most moral army in the world" and denied hunger in Gaza. Bartov compares their worldview to that of German soldiers on the Eastern Front in World War II, who attributed atrocities to the enemy and derived justified victimhood that licensed unlimited violence.

The second chapter analyzes how allegations of antisemitism have been weaponized to silence criticism of Israel. Bartov identifies the definition endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016 as the primary instrument, noting that its examples referring to Israel allow criticism to be labeled antisemitic. The US House of Representatives adopted the IHRA framework in May 2024, and President Trump issued a January 2025 executive order using the definition to increase scrutiny of universities. Bartov argues that alternative frameworks, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, properly distinguish between antisemitism and legitimate political criticism. He traces anti-Jewish sentiment from antiquity through the modern era and contends that Israel never solved the problems Zionism set out to address: It created a refugee crisis it refuses to acknowledge and, after 1967, became half Palestinian with none having equal rights.

The third chapter examines how the Holocaust has been instrumentalized in Israeli politics. Initially marginalized, the Holocaust became dominant in Israeli public life beginning in the 1980s. Bartov argues this transformed the "never again" pledge into an "again and again" syndrome: an internalized terror that licenses lashing out at any perceived threat. He cites post-October 7 testimony from public figures who abandoned beliefs in coexistence after concluding that Palestinians want to perpetrate another Holocaust, and warns that the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies are splitting as Holocaust scholars remain silent on Israeli actions in Gaza.

The fourth chapter focuses on the killing of children. Bartov opens with the Russian-Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik's 1903 poem "On the Slaughter," written after the Kishinev pogrom; the poem condemns calls for vengeance, but in Israeli usage the first line is dropped, making it appear to license retribution. He documents the toll on Palestinian children: more than 14,500 killed in Gaza by January 2025, rising to about 19,000 by August, making Gaza the place with the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. The February 2025 return of the bodies of child hostages Ariel and Kfir Bibas unleashed vengeful emotions across Israeli media, while polls found that 82 percent of Israeli Jews supported forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. Bartov invokes the political theorist Hannah Arendt's observation that modern genocide reflects a failure of imagination, as Israeli media censored images of Palestinian suffering while fixating on Israeli pain. He notes countervailing voices, including Ofri Bibas, sister of the bereaved father, who said at the funeral that the hostages could have been saved but the government "preferred revenge."

The fifth chapter argues that Israel's failure to adopt a constitution has had profoundly detrimental consequences. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, opposed a rigid constitution that would enable judicial review, and religious parties argued that biblical law sufficed. Bartov examines Justice Aharon Barak's "constitutional revolution" of 1992, when basic laws defined Israel as both "Jewish and democratic." But civil rights lawyer Michael Sfard counters that the Supreme Court legitimized the occupation by sanctioning settlement, collective punishment, and mass detention. The 2018 Nation-State Law, declaring the right to self-determination "exclusive to the Jewish People," reversed Barak's project, and the judicial overhaul launched by Netanyahu's government in 2023 aims to dismantle what remains. Since October 7, the court has rejected appeals regarding prisoner abuse and the starvation of Gaza's population.

In the concluding section, Bartov draws parallels between the 1904 genocide of the Herero people in German South West Africa and Israel's campaign in Gaza, arguing that both treated indigenous resistance as confirmation of savagery requiring total destruction. He documents Gaza's devastation as of mid-2025, with 75 percent of all buildings destroyed or damaged. Asserting that change cannot come from within Israel and holding the United States primarily responsible for enabling the genocide through military and political support, he presents a confederation model outlined by scholar Dahlia Scheindlin: two sovereign states along the 1967 borders, with freedom of movement, inclusive citizenship, and Jerusalem as an open capital for both. Without a political resolution, Israel will continue toward authoritarian apartheid, he warns. He calls for a constitution with a bill of rights and concludes that "only the assurance of equal rights to all inhabitants of the land can put an end to this calamity."