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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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The Netherlands will return to Eurovision after boycott over Israel
(JTA) — The Netherlands will return to the Eurovision Song Contest, overriding a broadcaster that withdrew over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The Dutch organization that oversees public broadcasting, the Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, said on Wednesday that it will take over the country’s entry to Eurovision after Avrotros, the broadcaster that usually takes part in Eurovision for the Netherlands, pulled out of the 2027 event in Burgas, Bulgaria.
Avrotros said last month that it withdrew because the event “can no longer be considered neutral,” citing Israel’s inclusion amid “the severe humanitarian suffering in Gaza and the ongoing restrictions on press freedom.”
Avrotros dropped out of the most recent contest in May 2026, and the Netherlands did not participate after the NPO ruled out identifying another broadcaster. Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Slovenia also boycotted this year’s Eurovision. Israel’s participation in the world’s largest music contest has become a source of intense controversy, sparking mass protests. The contest drew 35 million fewer viewers this year.
For the next Eurovision, NPO is assigning the broadcaster NOS to provide coverage of the event and an “independent team of experts” to select the Dutch act.
“We understand that participation in the Eurovision Song Contest evokes mixed feelings in the Netherlands,” said Jet de Ranitz, the chairman of the NPO’s executive board. “We have explicitly asked the [European Broadcasting Union] to once again make the unifying character of the festival an important part of the event, in recognition of a time of geopolitical unrest, war, and polarization.”
The NPO added that the EBU, which owns the contest, has “taken significant steps regarding the rules of the Eurovision Song Contest.” The EBU introduced changes in August that included barring countries involved in armed conflict from hosting the competition. It also made adjustments to the voting process after accusations of politically motivated voting.
Avrotros said the new rules were not sufficient to ensure that Eurovision remains “independent and neutral.”
Martin Green, the director of Eurovision, said in a statement that the contest was “delighted to welcome the Netherlands back” in 2027.
Ireland is set to boycott Eurovision again in 2027 after RTÉ, the national broadcaster, said last week that its position “remains unchanged.”
RTÉ cited “the appalling and ongoing loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there which continues to put the lives of so many civilians at risk,” adding that it was “deeply concerned by the continued denial of independent access to international journalists to the territory.”
Spain could also stay out of Eurovision next year. José Pablo López, the president of Spanish broadcaster RTVE, announced at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that he supported a continued boycott, saying it was “painful that Israel continues to participate.”
Meanwhile, Belgium confirmed its participation despite calls for a boycott by its public media unions.
“Participation is in no way an endorsement or normalization of what is happening in Gaza and the rest of the world,” said Frederik Delaplace, the CEO of the Flemish broadcaster VRT. “We do note, however, that the EBU is no longer shying away from these difficult societal and geopolitical issues.”
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Police label shooting in Belleville, Ontario, a hate-motivated attack against the Jewish community
(JTA) — TORONTO – The shooter who opened fire on a Belleville, Ontario, synagogue Sunday evening committed an anti-Jewish hate-motivated offense, according to the city’s police chief.
“This was a deliberate attack directed at members of the Jewish community during one of the holiest observances of the year,” Belleville police chief Murray Rodd said at a press conference on Thursday, adding that the shooter had combustible materials, including gasoline, in his truck.
He said the threat posed to Jewish communities required increased alertness on the part of Canadian law enforcement. Police stationed outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue had engaged in a shootout with the assailant, Sean Ward, that prevented him from entering the building as members of the congregation were about to begin Yom Kippur services.
Rodd noted that the force had a long-time relationship with the Jewish community that involved “our proactive pre-positioning of on-duty staff” to ensure the safety of Jewish worshippers. “One of the messages to my colleagues around the province and the country is: It is clearly time that we all be proactive.”
Rodd said the efforts of Constables Jeff Smith and Michael McCurdy prevented the attacker from using the explosive materials he had with him, as well as a “significant” amount of ammunition.
Smith, who was stationed outside of Sons of Jacob to provide security, remains in critical condition but is making progress, according to Rodd. Ward later died of his wounds from the exchange with police.
“[The shooter] had the means, the mechanism, and the motive to perpetrate a greater act. The only thing that stopped entry into the synagogue to execute the intent were the two officers,” said Rodd. “He was equipped with other weapons and the means to carry on a gun battle for a long period of time.”
The CBC reported that police obtained a video of the attack in Belleville, a town over 100 miles east of Toronto on the north shore of Lake Ontario. On the video, Ward is heard shouting. Police report he is saying, “You are going to die for the Jews.”
Rodd confirmed that before Ward targeted the Sons of Jacob, he scoped out the synagogue grounds. “We know that there was a reconnaissance in the presence of our officer, but nothing that would have alarmed him or would have triggered him to be on the defensive,” Rodd said.
Ward was a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces. Rodd noted.
“He was shot multiple times in multiple places,” Rodd said. “He has everything extending from fractures to wounds, and is still bearing shrapnel.”
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US Senate Democrats seek sanctions on those facilitating controversial West Bank settlement project
(JTA) — A slate of U.S. Senate Democrats, led by staunch Israel supporter Chris Coons, is seeking to sanction individuals and businesses linked to a controversial settlement expansion in the West Bank.
The massive E1 project, which would add 3,401 housing units east of Jerusalem, would effectively bisect the West Bank, inhibiting the prospects for a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank. It would also further separate the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which Palestinians seek as the capital of a future state. Israel recently issued new construction tenders for the project, following the government’s approval of the plans last summer.
Coons, of Delaware, introduced legislation this week that would target “any foreign person” deemed “responsible for or complicit in” the construction or financing of, or investment in, the planned E1 settlement, as well as the leaders of any entity that has engaged in such activities.
“As Palestinian civilians face a campaign of devastation and fear from violent extremist settlers, the United States must send a strong message that this behavior is unacceptable,” Coons said in a statement.
Israel, he added, must demonstrate “that it remains committed to freedom, security, prosperity, and self-determination for all Israelis and Palestinians.”
Global leaders have slammed the prospective development, as have many U.S. lawmakers. Yet even amid the increased criticism of the Israeli government, the bill is unlikely to advance in a Congress with Republican majorities in both chambers.
Coons thus far has garnered support from 18 of the Senate’s 44 other Democrats, including three co-authors: Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Ruben Gallego of Arizona. Wyden is Jewish and a longtime Israel supporter.
“For decades, American presidents from both parties have warned successive Israeli governments that construction in E1 threatened the viability of a Palestinian state and was unacceptable to the United States,” Coons said.
As unlikely as it is that the bill will pass, its introduction is symbolic of the chasm that has grown in recent years between Israel and the Democratic Party. The legislation is led by Coons, who has a solid pro-Israel record. Previous sanctions backed by Democrats, including by former President Joe Biden, have generally targeted settler violence and offensive weapons, while this bill centers on what Israel’s government would regard as a conventional building project.
Warren, Wyden and Gallego all voted in favor of a failed resolution authored by independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, which sought to stop the sale of military bulldozers to Israel. Coons, who voted against the measure, was one of just seven Democrats to do so.
While Warren’s position on Israel has fluctuated in recent years, she has consistently maintained that Israel has a right to defend itself and has voted against measures to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. But she has been a sharp critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and suggested conditioning military aid to Israel on compliance with U.S. and international humanitarian law.
Regarding the E1 settlement sanctions bill, Warren said the U.S. “must use all diplomatic and economic tools available to counter rapid settlement expansion and extremist settler violence.” These “spiraling trends” risk undermining “the prospect of lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians,” she added.
The bill would sanction “foreign persons that have facilitated Israeli settlement construction in the E1 area,” including those who have submitted tender bids, offered guarantees to such bids, signed development or lease agreements, provided construction-related services or financed related infrastructure.
The sanctions would “block and prohibit all transactions in property and interests in property” of such a person in the U.S., with exceptions made for those providing humanitarian assistance or conducting intelligence activities in the area.
“The E1 settlement project is a move towards de facto annexation of the West Bank,” Warren stated. “Those who choose to facilitate settlement construction should understand that they risk losing access to the U.S. financial system.”
Wyden, who has a similar record of backing Israel while criticizing Netanyahu, slammed the prime minister’s “disgraceful policy of expanding West Bank settlements,” noting that such activity “crosses a clear red line and makes Palestinian statehood and lasting peace even more difficult.”
He, too, urged the U.S. to “stand up against Netanyahu’s campaign of violence and aggression against Palestinian civilians” by sanctioning those who “are complicit in this unlawful action.”
The fourth co-author, Gallego, in recent months has shifted his stance from pro-Israel centrist to a fierce and outspoken opponent of the country’s current military operations.
“Proposed Israeli construction of new settlement homes in the E1 area would cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank and threaten a viable Palestinian state,” he said.
Describing the project as “a step in the wrong direction,” he noted that “for decades, Democrats and Republicans alike have pushed for a two-state solution.”
Coons, Warren, Wyden and Gallego are not alone in hammering the advancement of the E1 project. Their bill followed collective action taken by the United Kingdom, France and Canada earlier this month, when the countries decided to ban goods from West Bank settlements and Jewish areas of East Jerusalem.
At the same time, the U.K. and 11 other nations released a joint statement announcing “their intention to introduce national and/or support European restrictions on trade in goods with settlements which are illegal under international law.”
At the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham warned that the E1 settlement’s construction would “threaten to put a viable Palestinian state beyond reach.”
“We want to see the suffering and death finally come to an end,” Burnham added. “We want to see Israeli and Palestinian people living side by side in peace and security.”
Back in Washington, joining the four co-authors of the bill were 15 other senators who signed on as cosponsors, most of whom are likewise long-time allies of Israel but sharp critics of the Netanyahu government.
The co-sponsors include Michael Bennet of Colorado, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Mark Kelly of Arizona, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Patty Murray of Washington, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Adam Schiff of California, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Peter Welch of Vermont.
The liberal pro-Israel group J Street welcomed the legislation, with its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, declaring “the end of the era in which right-wing Israeli governments could ignore U.S. demands to halt settlement expansion.”
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