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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.”
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AIPAC attacked a Democrat for funding ICE. Now it’s backing one who voted the same way.
AIPAC’s super PAC is spending big to boost Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — over a record that includes the same ICE funding vote the group used to attack a different Democrat earlier this year.
Stevens is one of three leading candidates in the primary, running against progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed, who called the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. A new 30-second ad from AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, praises Stevens for confronting Trump’s immigration policies — citing legislation she introduced to create an independent prosecutor for ICE misconduct, and her calls for then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.
The ad is part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to boost Stevens, a longtime AIPAC ally, whom the group helped elect in 2018 and reelect in 2022.
But the message is hard to square with AIPAC’s own record elsewhere. Earlier this year, the group spent more than $2 million attacking former Rep. Tom Malinowski in a New Jersey special election for voting to fund ICE as part of a bipartisan border bill. “We can’t trust Tom Malinowski to stand up to President Donald Trump,” that ad said. Stevens voted for the same funding bill. Last June, she also voted for a House resolution thanking ICE agents “for protecting the homeland.”
An AIPAC spokesperson and a UDP representative did not immediately respond to explain why the vote to fund ICE was presented as a liability in Malinowski’s race but not in Stevens’ case.
AIPAC has spent years cultivating ties to Trump-aligned Republicans, many of whom strongly support aggressive immigration enforcement.
The Israel-boosting organization’s brand has become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats in recent years. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC. Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the word “monsters” to describe AIPAC at a rally for progressive candidates he backed, all of whom won their primaries.
In the Michigan race, shaping up as one of the starkest tests of the Democratic coalition and how the party navigates policy towards Israel in Congress, United Democracy Project has already spent $10.7 million backing Stevens, making the Michigan contest one of its largest Senate investments this election cycle. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign, effectively erasing its fingerprints in public data.
McMorrow has the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy group that supports a two-state solution. The Jewish Democratic Council of America issued a rare dual endorsement of Stevens and McMorrow.
El-Sayed, the progressive frontrunner, is increasingly trying to transform AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, El-Sayed has released videos accusing AIPAC of attempting to buy Democratic elections and police debate over Israel. In recent months, he has also reached out to Jewish voters while seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement, which protested the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza. The state is home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Arno Rosenfeld and Hannah Feuer contributed to this article
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Adam Sandler officiates Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce wedding, fueling theories about singer’s Israel stance
(JTA) — A Jewish comedian who played one of cinema’s most notable Israeli characters took center stage — literally — at Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden on Friday.
Adam Sandler officiated the ceremony between Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, a spokesperson for Swift confirmed to media after the wedding.
The event included a wide range of Jewish attendees, including the Haim sisters, who recently attended a Knicks game with Swift; the writer and actor Lena Dunham; Joshua Kushner, the businessman whose brother Jared is a top Middle East advisor to President Donald Trump; and Kelce’s former teammate Mitchell Schwartz.
Sandler’s presence in particular fueled criticism from anti-Israel voices, who argued it was significant that someone who has described himself as “very pro-Israel” officiated the wedding. Sandler has discussed his friendship with Swift and Kelce publicly, saying that it developed through his daughters, who are Swift fans.
Swift has largely avoided wading into polarizing political issues, and her outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a source of confusion for many fans, who have struggled to interpret her silence on the topic at a time when many celebrities have publicly voiced support for Gaza. Her decision not to publicly criticize Israel is seen as having bolstered her popularity among Israelis. At the same time, some pro-Palestinian fans have decried her silence and protested at her concerts, while others have speculated that she is privately pro-Palestinian but has avoided speaking out for fear of alienating fans.
“For all the Swifties defending Taylor Swift regarding her silence on Palestine she had Adam Sandler … a well-known Zionist, officiate her wedding so I think we know where she stands now,” tweeted an account called Land Palestine that had nearly 2 million followers on Instagram before being suspended last year.
“They’re all Zionists, clearly, and no doubt about it,” tweeted the Oxford University student Kate Crawford, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice on X who identifies as partly Jewish.
Some pro-Israel voices joined in the speculation. “I wonder if she is publicly aligning herself with certain people for a soft launch of her views. If she were to say some pro-Israel or pro-Jewish things, I think it could go a long way amongst the younger generation,” wrote one user on Reddit’s “Jewish” forum, in a post that was deleted but yielded nearly 200 comments parsing Swift’s possible Israel attitudes. (Among the evidence offered for possible pro-Israel leanings: She and Kelce recently dined at a buzzy Israeli restaurant. But other commenters noted that Gigi Hadid, a Palestinian-American celebrity who has spread anti-Israel rhetoric, was also at the wedding.)
The chatter about the wedding and Israel swelled so much that the parody account Buzz Crave riffed off of it with a viral post proclaiming: “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have left the U.S. for Israel to start their honeymoon.”
Like Swift, Sandler is not among the celebrities to engage in activism on Israel or Gaza. In fact, Sandler — whose early hits included “The Hanukkah Song” — is not known to have visited Israel, after disclosing in a 2022 interview that he had never traveled to the country of one of his signature characters. He played Zohan Dvir, an Israeli soldier who prefers partying to war, in the 2008 comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
Sandler made the “very pro-Israel” comment in 2015 while criticizing artists who boycott Israel during an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show. He has said little publicly about Israel since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack that began the war in Gaza, when he said his “heart is shattered” and signed onto an entertainment industry letter calling on then-President Joe Biden to help return the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.
For some, the reaction to Sandler’s officiation added to a growing sense that no Jewish figure can escape being targeted by anti-Zionist activism. “You can stay silent. You can avoid politics. You can try not to get involved,” the pro-Israel influencer Ran Alkalay posted on Instagram. “For antisemites, none of that matters.”
For other Jewish voices commenting on the wedding, the guest list was immaterial. On Facebook, Rabbi David Glickman of Kansas City noted that Swift and Kelce had doled out $26 million in charitable gifts ahead of their nuptials.
“Jewish tradition says that a bride and groom have the ear of God on their wedding day — so the couple will say silent prayers for folks in need. I’m grateful your prayers weren’t only silent,” Glickman wrote. “You gave an example for all of us that personal celebration is made greater through tzedakah and generosity. Your charitable gifts are more impressive than a wedding at MSG — I hope it will get the same publicity.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In the pickles and babka of Williamsburg and the Lower East Side, a glimpse of a lost New York
It was an early Sunday morning when my grandmother and I arrived at Sander’s Bakery in South Williamsburg for a “Pickles and Babka” food and culture walk through Williamsburg and the Lower East Side.
Since 2024, Sammy, our leader, has been showing off his favorite kosher food spots on @kosher.hopping, an Instagram account, which now boasts more than 17,000 followers and features a variety of mouthwatering dishes — including kosher sushi, kosher smashburgers and historic businesses like the ones we would be visiting.
It was Sammy’s last stop in Williamsburg of the season: Business owners were already closing up shop for the summer and heading upstate.
As our group gathered — city natives along with visitors from Westchester and Long Island — Sammy described South Williamsburg as a glimpse of what the Lower East Side used to be. Unlike the Lower East Side, which has experienced gentrification in recent decades, this neighborhood has retained its distinctly Jewish identity since immigrants first crossed over the Williamsburg Bridge.
When my grandmother and I entered Sander’s, opened by a Holocaust survivor in 1959, the smell of yeast and chocolate was so tantalizing that we couldn’t help but purchase a Danish and cherry turnover before the tour even began. We then tried slices of chocolate and cinnamon babkas, which were rich and nutty.
As our group walked towards Flaum’s, an appetizing store reminiscent of Russ & Daughters, but kosher — buses lined the streets, each bound for a different yeshiva. There was a grocery store at each corner, shops with beautiful silverware and strings hung up to designate the eruv. At the shop, we sampled small cheese danishes and sugar cookies with custard. The cookies were my favorite “bite” of the tour; they were sweet with great texture, and the custard provided a necessary moistness.
When we walked to the subway to head to the Lower East Side, the neighborhood took a decidedly different turn. All at once, the local businesses and Yiddish signs were gone and replaced with fast food chains. As we climbed up the steps and the train pulled into the station, we returned to the city’s usual chaos, leaving Williamsburg behind.
Upon exiting the subway, we made a pit stop at Essex Street Market. Its origins stem from Jewish open air markets that were once crowded with pushcarts. Under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, these sellers were forced to move inside. The original indoor market, located across the street from its present-day location, retained its Jewish character, but the market doesn’t currently house any kosher vendors.
As we continued on to our remaining stops, I felt aware of what was lost. Entering The Pickle Guys, located on the corner of Grand Street and Essex Street, a deliciously briny smell filled the air from the dozens of barrels at the center of the shop. We tried pickled corn and carrots and — my favorite — mango, which had a delightfully spicy aftertaste.
We could feel the presence of what was formerly “Pickle Alley”: the neighboring road that featured more than 80 vendors. Now, The Pickle Guys is the last pickle shop left in the Lower East Side. Even the pickles, made with plastic barrels, are not what they once were; Sammy told us that the New York Department of Health banned wooden barrels in the 1970s, and even now vendors swear that they don’t taste the same.
We ended our walk at Moishe’s Bakery, the last kosher bakery on the Lower East Side. Many Jews still live near the bakery; the community mikveh is in the building across the street. Until it closed this year, East Side Glatt, the neighborhood’s last kosher butcher, was located right next door to Moishe’s.
Though The Pickle Guys had been packed, Moishe’s felt intimate and at the center of a community, like the shops we visited in Williamsburg. We tried chocolate and poppy seed versions of Kokosh cake, loaves similar to babka that stem from Hungarian origins. We also picked up some of my dad’s favorite rainbow cookies to bring home with us.
After the tour, I made my way to Eldridge Street Synagogue’s “Egg Rolls, Egg Creams, and Empanadas” festival. On the way, I walked past the old Forward Building, which once bustled with whirring printing presses and Yiddish-speaking reporters. A large graffiti “JET” had been painted on the side of the building.
When I first came back to the city this year, my best friend texted me to ask whether I thought New York was changing. She felt that it had been modernizing; sometimes, she said, she looked around and couldn’t find the “old New York.” As I toured South Williamsburg and the Lower East Side, I felt as though I was looking into a bygone era, seeing remnants of what had mostly been lost. I would have given anything to return to the Lower East Side crowded with pushcarts and Yiddish music to be heard.
Still, as I listened to the singing trio of the Mamales crooning “Yidel Mitn Fiedel,” while the smell of empanadas filled the air and festivalgoers played Mah Jongg, the culture of the Lower East Side felt bustling and alive. The Lower East Side isn’t the neighborhood it had once been, but its legacy remains — in the people making babka and those who choose to share their story.
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