How Israel Got This Way

Implied in the question posed by the title of Omer Bartov’s new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, is the equally unsettling question of whether the state of Israel can be fixed. (If you are convinced it never should have existed in the first place, you might want to stop reading now.)

Israel: What Went Wrong?
By Omer Bartov
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

For many, the death and destruction wrought by Israel in the Gaza Strip since 2023 have been so horrific—even as a response to the mass slaughter with which Hamas initiated the war—that they have lost any sympathy they may once have had for the Jewish state. What Bartov’s book makes clear, however, is that there is also a war going on within Israel, one that pits democracy, equality, pluralism, and the rule of law against a growing and increasingly violent camp—which includes the government—that is working to dismantle the country’s legal institutions, its press freedoms, its pretense to being a liberal democracy, and any conviction that it can and needs to seek an equitable resolution to its conflict with the Palestinians.

Understanding the nature and background of that war—the internal one—is essential to comprehending how and why Israel has fought its war in Gaza (and elsewhere) in the relentless and unrealistic way that it has.

Such understanding also sharpens just what a critical moment this is in Israel’s history. By law, the country must hold an election before November, and if the coalition of parties led by Benjamin Netanyahu is not defeated, it could well seal the state’s one-way descent into autocratic theocracy. Sending Netanyahu home in no way guarantees a restart for the country, but it is certainly a necessary condition for it.

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Bartov is an Israeli-born professor of genocide and Holocaust studies at Brown University. He has deliberately made his life outside his birthplace since the 1990s, but like a latter-day wandering Jew, he carries with him an identification with and concern for the state. He fought in its army, his grandchildren are being raised there, and if he hasn’t visited in two years, it’s because the last time he came, he felt alienated from even his closest friends.

It should not be surprising, then, that Bartov has been preoccupied with whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. In two prominent New York Times opinion pieces, in November 2023 and July 2025, respectively, he progressed from identifying “genocidal intent” on the part of Israel, to determining that its actions now amounted to genocide. That line was crossed, he tells us, when, by the summer of 2024, when Israel attacked and plowed under the city of Rafah (population 275,000), it “demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards … [and] indicated that the ultimate goal of this whole undertaking from the very beginning was to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable.”

While the value of having scholars like Bartov, and institutions like the International Court of Justice, rule on the question of genocide should be self-apparent (though the ICJ could take another year or two to render a final verdict), my experience has been that among ordinary Israelis, the term is so charged that constructive conversation becomes impossible, and the human dimension of the events recedes to the background. Israelis are so outraged at being accused of genocide that they won’t allow themselves to consider why the “most moral army in the world” needed to kill more than 70,000 Gazan Palestinians, and damage or destroy 75 percent of the Strip’s buildings. And a large percentage of the public, as Bartov discerned midway through the war, displayed an “utter inability … to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza.” I don’t see much change in that today.

Only a small portion of the book, however, is concerned with surveying the effects of the Gaza war. Most of it, rather, is an interrogation of how Israel, a state founded, in the author’s words, to advance “Jewish self-emancipation, individual transformation, self-determination, and freedom from persecution and antisemitism,” became caught up in “an unstoppable rush … toward the destruction of others as well as self-annihilation as a society and state.”

In asking “what went wrong,” Bartov also contends with a question that has been dogging me, and no doubt others: Was it inevitable that Israel, despite its promising, idealistic beginnings, would devolve into an intolerant and inegalitarian society, a wannabe theocracy, and the master of a mini-empire that rules over millions of noncitizens whose chances for self-determination only shrink by the year?

According to Bartov, what happened “can be seen as inevitable only in retrospect.” By that, I think he means that there were critical forks in the road when decisions were made, or opportunities forgone, that taken together can now be understood as having set the country on its current path.

Briefly, those wrong turns include the following:

No constitution: Israel’s founding, on May 14, 1948, was accompanied by a Declaration of Independence that offered “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” and promised to enshrine those principles in a written constitution within six months. Seventy-eight years later, Israel still lacks a constitution, and there is no longer a consensus about those basic values.

Zionism: The Zionist movement should have been retired in 1948, after it succeeded in establishing and gaining international recognition for a national home for the Jewish people. Instead, “Zionism” remains the guiding mission of the state, though there is no agreement on just what it means. And with no universal concept of a citizenship that is shared by all Israelis, different population groups have different sets of privileges and obligations.

Arab citizens: Some 150,000 Palestinian Arabs remained in Israel following the War of Independence, or Nakba (“catastrophe”), the word used by Palestinians to describe the impact of Israel’s founding on them—about one-fifth the number that were present prior to the war. Israel, to its credit, granted citizenship to those who held on, but, uncertain of their loyalty, it subjected them to martial law for the state’s first 19 years. To the credit of these Palestinians, whose descendants today constitute about 20 percent of Israel’s ten million citizens, their struggle for equal rights and opportunities has overwhelmingly been waged peacefully and within the law. Yet the Jewish majority has never ceased to suspect them, and remains unable to comprehend that they could be loyal citizens of Israel without being Zionists, not to mention possessing a national identity as Palestinians.

Holocaust lessons: Israel was established in the shadow of the Holocaust, and though reminders of the Nazi genocide are present in most every realm of life here, the main lesson Israelis are expected to take away from them is the need for eternal vigilance, since the danger of a repeat is always present. “Eventually the catastrophe of the Holocaust,” writes Bartov, “became, for most Israelis, a vast fig leaf, its lamentable effect to combine self-victimization and self-pity with self-righteousness, hubris, and the euphoria of power.”

The Occupation: In June of 1967, in the wake of the Six-Day War, Israel occupied what are commonly called “the territories,” including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Initially hoping that its Arab adversaries would sue for peace, Israel held off on unilateral moves that would change the legal status of the territories, or even to establish Jewish settlements there. Over time, however, as attempts to resolve the conflict came and went, with only partial success, the occupation became comfortable, entrenched, and deeply corrupting. Today, there are more than a half-million Jewish settlers in the West Bank alone. They are subject to Israeli law. The nearly 3.5 million Palestinians living there lack the citizenship that their Arab brethren within Israel possess, and are ruled by an increasingly harsh military regime that won’t lift a hand to protect them from the increasing settler violence. Bartov notes that since only six months passed between the end of military rule for Arabs within Israel (in December 1966) and the start of military rule for Arabs in the territories (June 1967), “One can say that Israel was a full democracy for only six months.”

Israel’s Supreme Court: Bartov calls out former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, a Holocaust survivor whom liberal Israelis still revere, two decades after his retirement, as a champion of human rights, just as many on the right actively regard him as an enemy of the people for his judicial activism. Barak was largely responsible, in the absence of a written constitution, for pioneering the use of the Court as a constitutional tribunal with the power to overturn legislation passed by the Knesset. Ironically, Barak himself acknowledged that he and his Israeli compatriots were unable to “[work] out properly the interrelationship between the Jewishness of the state and the fact that it is a state of all its citizens.” Worse, when it came to Israeli rule in the territories, writes Bartov, paraphrasing human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, under Barak’s leadership, Israel’s Supreme Court “played a crucial role in establishing an apartheid system in the West Bank, even as its most brilliant justice was laboring to anchor human rights in its evolving constitutional edifice.”

Bartov is not optimistic about the likelihood of Israel returning to the path of democracy and equality. Though Israelis rallied on behalf of democracy and the rule of law when the Netanyahu coalition launched its judicial “coup” in early 2023, to date only a small minority seem to see the connection between democracy at home and the occupation a few kilometers away.

For Israel and the Palestinians to begin to address their problem, they will need, Bartov believes, the help of an outside power, most likely the United States, to embrace “a political solution for the fourteen million Jews and Palestinians living between the river and the sea. Such a solution would enable them to share the land within whichever political framework they choose—a binational state, two states, or a confederation, ensuring equality, justice, and dignity for all.”

Bartov refers at some length to a plan written up for the Century Foundation in 2025 by Israeli political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin, who suggests that the “only one realistic and pragmatic solution” is “a confederation of two sovereign nations living peacefully in partnership on the same land.”

Scheindlin’s blueprint is smart and well thought-out. But conceptually, it doesn’t require a paradigm shift. It’s the two-state solution, with a twist. What it requires is the will.

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