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An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
On Nov. 10, 2023, the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov published a guest essay in the New York Times. Though scarcely a month had passed since the Hamas massacre of hundreds of Israeli men, women and children, Bartov expressed fears over Israel’s military response to this horrifying act of barbarity. But, he concluded, while “it is very likely that war crimes, and crimes against humanity, are happening,” he concluded, there is “no proof that genocide is taking place in Gaza.”
By mid-2025, however, Bartov revised his stance in a second Times essay. As a scholar of genocide who has taught classes on the subject — including at Brown University, where he is currently based — for a quarter of a century, he announced, “I can recognize one when I see one.”
In his new book Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov offers a searing analysis, both personal and professional, of the tragically entwined history of Israelis and Palestinians that climaxed with the disaster of October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, followed by the even more disastrous response of Israel. Bartov’s account resembles an earlier book on an earlier war: Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, in which the veteran of two world wars examines the causes to France’s collapse in 1940. Both internationally known historians, and patriots who served their nation in arms, each man wrote their book when the debacles were still fresh.
For France, the collapse was as much moral and political as it was military. “Whatever the complexion of its government,” Bloch observed, “a country is bound to suffer, democracy becomes hopelessly weak, and the general good suffers accordingly if its higher officials are bred up to despise it.”
As Bartov’s book reminds us, this diagnosis applies not just to the decay that undermined the French Third Republic, but also to the moral rot that has been sapping the foundations of the Israeli republic. In his account, Bartov weaves the parallel histories of Israelis and Palestinians — a history composed of two catastrophes, the Shoah and the Nakba, that have ever since shaped events.
Inevitably, the very mention of these events in the same breath often sparks a violent response from many Israeli and diasporic Jews, but Bartov rightly insists upon their pairing. One of the many reasons why Bartov’s book is so important is his insistence that the two events are “inextricably linked historically, personally and as part of a politics of memory” and that they each have “become constitutive of Israeli and Palestinian national identities.”
William Faulkner’s old chestnut — the past is neither dead nor even past — is the through-line to Bartov’s sharply, at times brutally, etched history of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Crucially, Bartov argues that what has gone so terribly wrong since 1948 was inevitable only in retrospect. An alternative history, one shaped by a Zionism faithful to the ideals of the Enlightenment, was, if unlikely, certainly not impossible. At the very least the history of the past eight decades could have gone in a liberal and democratic direction.
What, then, went wrong? First, there is the simple and tragic fact that the resurrection of one people meant the destruction of another people. Bartov underscores that early Zionist pioneers like his own father and grandfather, the offspring of “mutilated families” that were decimated by the Holocaust, were taught they represented the future of this reborn people. They only slowly grasped that this rebirth required the removal of the Palestinian people. For many Israelis, he observes, this “generated contradictory responses — guilt and regret, or negation and denial; a hope for redress and reconciliation, or a conscious and, just as important, unconscious will to eradicate and erase.”
The will to eradicate has been enabled by the occupations of the West Bank and Gaza, and their management. Since 1967, the metastasizing of walls and fences have transformed these territories into mazes, leading to a different kind of erasure. Israeli civilians, who once regularly encountered the Arab occupants of the land, no longer had occasion to see their Palestinian neighbors, hidden behind these walls, while Israeli soldiers serving in occupied territories were influenced by the burgeoning of ethno-nationalistic sentiment, making them increasingly incapable of seeing Palestinians as fellow human beings.
This form of “social death” — when a group or entire people are shunned and shut into confined spaces — has led with increasing frequency to all-too-real deaths. According to a recent United Nations report, more than 1,000 Palestinians living in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli soldiers, while settler violence has displaced nearly 2,000 Palestinians from their villages since the start of 2026, often with the complicity of the IDF.
For those who have been following events since Oct. 7, 2023, much of what Bartov recounts will not be a surprise. (As Bartov notes, however, the Israeli media have, with a few exceptions including Haaretz and +972, largely shielded the reality of what the IDF has done in Gaza and the West Bank from Israel’s inhabitants.)
Yet as a native-born Israeli who served as an officer during the Yom Kippur War, Bartov brings intimacy and intensity to his account. He confesses to a sense of estrangement from Israel, which now seems to be “a different, strange, and threatening place, whose people, including some of my friends, have been transformed, perhaps irretrievably.”
No less important, as a historian who has written several books on war and genocide, Barton delves into harsher and darker corners of Israeli actions, the entwined histories of Israelis and Palestinians mostly ignored by the media. To better understand the acts and words of brutality and, at times, inhumanity committed and expressed by Israeli politicians and soldiers, Bartov compares the results of his early research on German soldiers — crucially, those serving not in the Nazi SS, but in the Wehrmacht, the broader German army which, after the war, sought to distance itself from the machinery of the Shoah.
The comparison is provocative, but it is also painfully instructive. Just as latter employed animalistic images and apocalyptic claims to justify the systematic destruction of European Jewry, Israeli political and military leaders have used similar rhetoric towards Palestinians. This was true of then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, who declared Israel was fighting against “human animals,” as well as retired Major General Giora Eiland, who promised that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” No wonder, as Bartov notes, that there have been countless social posts by IDF troops calling to “kill the Arabs” and “burn their mothers.”
Given the postwar imperative of “Never again,” how has it come to this? As Bartov observes, the phrase has always carried two meanings, one applied exclusively to a repeat of a Jewish genocide, the other to the eruption of genocide, plain and simple, against any people at any time and in any place. The first definition, Bartov suggests, has bleak consequences. If the Shoah is seen, as it is by many Israelis, as an event that made the case for a Jewish state, it also turns that state “into a unique entity that operates according to its own rules and logic,” he writes. It unshackles, in short, Israel from the “constraints imposed on all other nations, not least because ‘they,’ as the saying goes, stood by while the Jews were slaughtered.”
Israel thus finds itself overseeing what Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” called the “crime of crimes.” Bartov finds that Israel’s government checks the boxes for the 1948 genocide convention, which defines the crime, in part, as the commission of “acts with the intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.”
When it comes to “intent,” Bartov lists a partial list of vows made by Israeli political and military leaders in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas massacre. These threats of complete destruction were not empty: from the targeting of hospitals and schools and razing of entire cities to causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths, the IDF has repeatedly violated the genocide convention. From the very beginning, the war’s goal, Bartov writes, has always been “to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory.”
In leveling these charges, Bartov does not ignore Hamas’ practice of using civilians and civilian infrastructure as shields against Israeli reprisals. Obviously, these tactics constitute a war crime, as does the unspeakable massacre committed by Hamas on Oct. 7th. Nevertheless, Bartov insists, Israel’s response has been no less criminal, ranging from its consistent failure to apply the principle of proportionality to its policy of blocking all humanitarian assistance in the early 2025.
It is tempting to conclude that apologists for the IDF’s excesses reflexively — though not reflectively — blame Hamas for the deaths of the tens of thousands of innocents. But even this conclusion is problematic given the many blanket accusations made by Israeli leaders against the people of Gaza. For example, President Isaac Herzog declared, a few days after the war, that it is “an entire nation out there that is responsible.”
And yet, the most tragic passages in the book are devoted to the Israeli constitution that never was. With a nod to counterfactual history, Bartov suggests that the unfolding of events over the last seven decades was not inevitable. Though Israel’s Declaration of Independence, inspired by its American counterpart, anticipated a similar constitution, the document never saw the light of day. On the one hand, the Declaration affirms “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” As for the other hand, it is empty. The constituent assembly, though required by the UN’s 1948 partition plan, failed to write a constitution. Instead, there has been a series of basic laws, two of which address human rights — an ideal that for Arab citizens of Israel, not to mention Palestinians living in the occupied territories, is mostly a mirage.
What might Israel look like today if its founders had, in fact, endowed the nation with a constitution that resembled our own? For Bartov, it might well be a nation of laws where the Supreme Court, rather than being the frequent enabler of the ethno-nationalist goals of the current government, would instead serve as a powerful check to both the executive and legislative branches. With a constitution, it is conceivable, as Bartov suggests, the now-embattled court might oppose the nature of the occupation of the West Bank, perhaps even the actions of the IDF in Gaza. Israel would be a light onto other nations not because it resolved the inherent tension in being both a Jewish and democratic nation, but because it was committed to managing it.
Of course, this possible Israel never came to pass. The original purpose of Zionism, which Bartov poignantly describes as a “Jewish rebellion against fate and oppression, religious resignation and prejudice,” has given way, he says, to the God of the zealots.
“As Israel is led singing and praying and dancing into the abyss,” Bartov concludes, “it is finally shaking itself free of Zionism and heading down the path of theocracy and apocalypse following a pillar of fire and smoke.”
The post An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani Hedges in Response to Mob Targeting New York City Synagogue
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the New York City Office of Emergency Management, as a major winter storm spreads across a large swath of the United States, in Brooklyn, New York City, US, Jan. 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Bing Guan
Protests targeting an Israeli real estate event at a New York City synagogue have put Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s leadership under renewed scrutiny after demonstrators returned to the Upper East Side location on Tuesday night.
The demonstration prompted a significant police response and raised concerns about rising antisemitic rhetoric in the city home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan during a showcase called “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event 2026,” which included the marketing of properties in Israel proper as well as West Bank settlements. At the demonstration, activists held signs and chanted slogans that went beyond criticism of Israel, seemingly calling for the death and expulsion of Jews and, in some cases, support for US-designated terrorist groups.
“Death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” “Rapists,” and “Settlers, settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone” were among the insults screamed by the protesters, some of whom also waved flags belonging to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
The scene marked a return to the same synagogue that was the site of a contentious protest in November, which drew widespread condemnation and sparked debate over the boundaries between political expression and hate speech. At that gathering, demonstrators chanted “We don’t want no Zionists here” and “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out,” among others. One speaker claimed, “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events! We need to make them scared.”
Both protests were organized by the anti-Zionist activist organization Pal-Awda.
This time, however, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) appeared better prepared. Officers established barricades and maintained distance between demonstrators and synagogue attendees, preventing the kind of close confrontations seen in the earlier protest. While tensions remained high, authorities largely kept the situation contained, avoiding major physical clashes.
Still, video circulating on social media appeared to show hordes of protesters storming and attempting to penetrate the barricades erected by the NYPD to separate the synagogue from the demonstrations. According to multiple reports, police had to deploy pepper-spray and at least one officer was hospitalized during the chaos.
Ronen Levy, a Queens-based pro-Israel counterprotester, repudiated the demonstrations as a threat to the local Jewish community.
“You want to protest? You want to assemble on the street, you want to assemble in a park, you want to assemble in a center or Columbus Circle? You’re more than welcome,” Levy told AMNY. “But to protest in a shul or a mosque or a church, that’s unethical, that’s un-American.”
“It came to where they do it in the shul, because it’s a lot easier to get Jewish people to come down, because it’s a Jewish congregation,” Levy continued. “Most people in synagogues, they want to go live in Israel.”
The incident came amid an ongoing surge in antisemitic hate crimes in New York City. According to police data, Jews this year have been targeted in the majority of all hate crimes committed in the city, continuing a troubling trend of rising antisemitism following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Mamdani took office on Jan. 1.
Jewish community leaders have increasingly voiced concern about demonstrations occurring near religious institutions, warning that such actions blur the line between protest and intimidation.
Mamdani, who faced criticism over his response to the November protest outside the same Manhattan synagogue, on Wednesday expressed support for the police’s response but also condemned the Israeli real estate event.
“I think that I’ve made it clear time and time again that we in this city believe in the sacrosanct nature of the right to protest, and also are committed to ensuring that any New Yorker can safely enter or exit from a house of worship, and that access never be in question, while we also protect the First Amendment,” Mamdani said during a press conference. “And I do believe that the police ensured that yesterday evening.”
However, the mayor went on to defend the protesters’ cause.
“There is no tolerance for hatred of Jewish New Yorkers,” he said. “I’ve also been clear to New Yorkers, my honest opinions about the fact that when we have a real estate expo that is promoting the sale of land, which includes the sale of land in occupied West Bank in settlements that are a violation of international law, that that is something that I firmly disagree with.”
“I also believe that many New Yorkers firmly disagree with it, because it has been at the heart of an ongoing effort to displace Palestinians from their homes,” Mamdani added.
Mamdani’s office issued a similar statement on Tuesday in the hours leading up to the protest.
“He further inflamed tensions on an already volatile situation,” the Anti-Defamation League’s New York/New Jersey branch said of Mamdani’s comments. “The mayor had a responsibility to de-escalate. He did the opposite.”
Mamadani faced intense criticism from Jewish leaders and pro-Israel advocates after issuing a similar statement in November that appeared to legitimize the gathering of demonstrators who called for violence against Jews outside Park East Synagogue.
Julie Menin, the speaker of City Council, defended the protesters’ first Amendment Rights while admonishing efforts to intimidate synagogue attendees.
“The right to peaceful protest must be protected, and so must the ability of individuals to safely access a house of worship without fear or intimidation,” Menin said.
Mamdani has come under immense scrutiny over his record of anti-Israel statements, repeatedly accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza and claiming that Israel does not grant “equal rights” to all of its inhabitants. Given his track record of anti-Israel sentiment, which according to critics has fueled hostility toward Jews, Mamdani’s handling of antisemitism has come under the spotlight.
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AI-Generated ‘Rabbis’ on TikTok Push Antisemitism, Generate Over 10 Million Likes, Report Reveals
TikTok app logo is seen in this illustration taken, Aug. 22, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) released a report on Tuesday exposing 49 TikTok accounts which have amassed large followings pushing bigoted stereotypes with phony rabbi videos created using generative artificial intelligence programs.
Analysts at CAM’s Antisemitism Research Center found that the accounts — which use handles such as @rabbirothstein @rabingoldmaan @rabbistirberg, and @rabbi_silverstein — had collected 950,000 users and provoked over 10 million likes.
Across accounts, researchers found similar narratives and linguistic patterns in service of a common modus operandi: recasting conventional antisemitic stereotypes by having rabbis promote them as obvious truths.
The first “rabbi” introduced in the report is “RabbiSilverman.” One video features the rabbi figure holding a bottle of Coca-Cola with the caption “$4 at the airport and $7 on a flight.” Another shows the rabbi sitting inside of a limo while he holds a gold bar and a stack of $100 bills alongside the description “when the dollar and gold go up together.” Three more images show the rabbi sitting and studying the Torah at a table while a red sports car sits in a showroom behind him.
The rabbi in one video sports a giant nose and says, “As Jews, never sign a contract without reading every single line.”
Another fake “rabbi” presented is “Rabbi StirBerg.” Sitting in front of a bookshelf in what resembles a synagogue’s office, videos include such instructions as “never give your kids an allowance” and “Jews are wealthy because we don’t feel guilty for wanting more money.” Another taunts, “by 8 our kids know why yours stay poor.”
Examples of AI-generated rabbi videos pushing antisemitism on TikTok. Photo: Screenshot
CAM noted that the antisemitism on TikTok would especially impact youth.
“The danger is clear. By masquerading as authentic Jewish voices, these ‘rabbis’ erode trust, normalize hatred, and incite real-world violence targeting Jews,” CAM said. “By amplifying this content to young, impressionable audiences, TikTok is complicit in accelerating radicalization in an era when AI is making disinformation increasingly difficult to detect.”
CAM called on TikTok to “immediately invest in AI detection tools specifically trained to identify synthetic religious impersonation, implement guidelines to ensure traffic is not actively directed to such accounts, and launch a public awareness campaign highlighting how to spot AI-generated propaganda.”
Jewish creators on TikTok have long objected to antisemitism on the platform. In November 2023, a group of more than 40 content creators and public figures raised the alarm about the antisemitism they had experienced on the platform, calling for more robust safety features and content moderation. TikTok responded at the time saying, “We’ve taken important steps to protect our community and prevent the spread of hate, and we appreciate ongoing, honest dialogue, and feedback as we continually work to strengthen these protections.”
The research into TikTok follows similar findings from CAM in a March report that revealed a proliferation of fake AI rabbis on Meta’s Instagram platform. One “Rabbi Goldman” account identified in the report had reached 1.4 million followers. Combined with 11 other imposters, the following reached 2.1 million. CAM noted how the variety of rabbis each presented with different voices and persona, but all promoted the same money-obsessed stereotypes.
Following the Instagram report, CAM reported that Meta had removed more than 60 Instagram accounts, including those in other languages like French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The watchdog group praised the technology company founded and led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying that “Meta has been highly responsive in working with CAM to better understand this activity and identify ways to reduce its reach and minimize its exposure to users.”
CAM vowed to remain vigilant to the threat, warning that “these identities are easily recreated and quickly reappear. CAM will continue to cooperate with Meta to address this expanding network … without sustained monitoring and rapid response, these false identities will continue to shape online discourse, reinforcing hostility toward Jewish communities that translates into real-world violence.”
In March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced his decision to shut down the AI video-generating app Sora, a platform which hosted videos showing Jews chasing after coins, cheating poor people out of money, and being run over by a car. Research released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in October found that in at least 40 percent of cases, programs would still generate responses when given antisemitic, extremists, or other hateful prompts.
CAM warned of the real-world consequences from the TikTok videos.
The report stated that antisemitic tropes “have historically instigated violence — from pogroms to the Holocaust to contemporary attacks on Jews. In the digital age, this content contributes to a documented global rise in antisemitic incidents by providing ‘evidence’ that justifies hostility. The visual caricatures (large noses, ostentatious wealth) further dehumanize Jews, erasing a psychological barrier to violence.”
In February, police in the Netherlands arrested 15 people, charging them with using TikTok to promote propaganda for the Islamic State. Some videos reached as high as 100,000 views. They urged views to join the terrorist group and glorified the “martyrs” who had died in service of the group’s mission of creating a global caliphate empowered to impose strict, Salafi-interpretations of Shariah law across the entire planet.
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Artists, Cultural Workers Plan Strike for Venice Biennale in Protest of Israel’s Participation
Signage for the 61st Venice Biennale running from May 9 to November 22. Photo: IMAGO/Frank Ossenbrink via Reuters Connect
An anti-Israel collective announced a 24-hour strike for artists and cultural workers on Friday, the day before the 61st Venice Biennale opens to the public, in protest of Israel’s inclusion in the event.
The Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) is organizing the strike on the city’s Viale Garibaldi, and a number of groups, unions, and art spaces have already vowed to participate including Biennaleocene, a coalition of cultural workers in Venice that formed in 2023. The strike was announced right before ANGA hosted a massive protest at the Biennale.
The international art exhibition opened for previews on Wednesday and ANGA disrupted the opening, assembling a protest outside of Israel’s temporary pavilion in the Biennale’s Arsenal complex. ANGA said “hundreds” participated in the protest and claimed the decision to include Israel in this year’s Biennale “constitutes active institutional support for a state committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people.”
“Protestors marched through the Arsenale with large banners, Palestinian flags, placards, and distributed flyers calling for the shut down [sic] of the Genocide Pavilion,” ANGA wrote in an Instagram post that featured pictures from the protest. “ISRAEL YOU CAN’T HIDE, WE CHARGE YOU WITH GENOCIDE! The demand is clear: Boycott the Israeli pavilion and SHUT IT DOWN.”
ANGA previously published an open letter, signed by hundreds of event participants, that called for Israel to be boycotted from this year’s Venice Biennale. Last week, the jury for the 2026 Venice Biennale resigned mere days after saying it would not consider awarding the event’s top prizes to countries whose leaders are facing charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, meaning Israel and Russia.
After the jury’s resignation, organizers of the Biennale announced new “Visitor’s Lion” awards. The public will vote for the winners, and Russia and Israel are both eligible to take home those awards. The award ceremony for the 2026 Venice Biennale has also been pushed from May 9 to Nov. 22, which is the last day of the show.
Romanian artist Belu-Simion Fainaru is representing Israel in this year’s event with his installation “Rose of Nothingness,” which will highlight Jewish mysticism, memory, and poetry.
At the 2024 Venice Biennale, artist Ruth Patir closed Israel’s official pavilion to the public until a ceasefire and hostage release agreement could be agreed upon. That same year ANGA supporters protested outside of the American and Israeli pavilions during previews for the Biennale, in condemnation of US support for Israel. The group of anti-Israel activists also protested outside the French, British, and German pavilions, because of each country’s relations with Israel.