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.

Illustrative photo of a university classroom. Photo: Public domain.

Walk into almost any college classroom today and try a simple exercise: ask students to explain when, why, and by whom the modern state of Israel was founded.

I tried this recently with a group that was clearly comfortable using the term “settler colonialism” to describe the country. The room went quiet. One student mentioned World War II. Another suggested the British. A third admitted she wasn’t sure but felt strongly about it.

These were intelligent, motivated students. They were not refusing to engage. They were engaging earnestly with a vocabulary they had inherited but never been asked to examine. The problem was not their conviction. It was the absence of anything beneath it.

My anecdote is not the only evidence. The 2025 FIRE College Free Speech Rankings, drawing on more than 58,000 student responses across 250 institutions, found that 55 percent of students said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was difficult to discuss on their campus –  the highest figure ever recorded on any issue in six years of the survey. The students chanting most loudly are not the students reporting that difficulty. The students reporting that difficulty are the recruitable middle: the ones who sense they are missing something but do not know where to begin. The data tells us they are out there in large numbers. The anecdote tells us what they are missing. They are the students a real curriculum could reach.

This is the campus crisis in miniature. The encampments, the shouted-down speakers, the slogans about rivers and seas whose geography their chanters cannot place: these are not the words and work of deeply read ideologues. They are the work of students absorbing claims from professors, administrators, fellow students, activist organizations, and social media without any baseline against which to test them. The committed ideologues – inside the institution and outside it – are not going away easily or quickly. The question is whether the students they are recruiting encounter, somewhere in their four years, the foundation that lets them notice when something is off.

Right now, they rarely do. American higher education has spent four decades dismantling the shared intellectual foundation that once made such noticing possible –  the true core curriculum that ensures every student encounters the basic texts, histories, and ideas needed to make sense of the world they are trying to debate.

Our Jewish tradition has always understood that productive disagreement requires a shared foundation. Pirkei Avot distinguishes between machloket l’shem shamayim – argument for the sake of Heaven –  and the rebellion of Korach. The disputes of Hillel and Shammai endure because both sides argued from a shared foundation of text and truth. Korach’s challenge is remembered not as productive disagreement but as faction. The difference is not intensity. It is the foundation beneath it. Korach’s mode works on people without grounding; Hillel and Shammai’s is unintelligible without it.

This is what we are watching on campus. The slogans are loud, but they are not arguments in the sense our tradition recognizes. They are assertions made in the absence of foundation – faction, not machloket. And the students absorbing them are not refusing the conditions of real disagreement; they have never been taught that those conditions exist. Without shared knowledge, there is no common language. Without a common language, there is no argument, only assertion. The encampments and the chants are what assertion looks like at scale.

The objection comes immediately: Columbia still has a core. Lit Hum requires Genesis and the Gospels. Contemporary Civilization assigns the Bible alongside Plato, Augustine, Ibn Khaldun, Locke, and Arendt. The texts are there. Students are required to read them. And Columbia was nonetheless an epicenter of the post–October 7 campus collapse.

The lesson is not that core curricula fail. It is that content alone is insufficient. A core taught ironically – treated with contempt or as a relic to be subverted rather than a tradition to wrestle with -will not produce the formation it once did. A required text taught grudgingly by faculty who view it as an artifact of oppression does not do the work the syllabus promises. Rebuilding the core means rebuilding the faculty culture that delivers it. Content is necessary; institutional seriousness is what makes it sufficient. The new programs at Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona State understood this. They built dedicated hiring lines in dedicated units, recruiting faculty whose intellectual commitments matched the project rather than reassigning faculty whose training pointed elsewhere. A real core requires the same.

The case for a core curriculum is more modest than the one usually made. It will not convert the committed activist or persuade the tenured ideologue. It will not stop outside organizations from producing falsified history about Israel, Zionism, or Jewish life. What it does is raise the cost of that propaganda by producing students who know enough to notice when something is wrong. A student who has read the Hebrew Bible, studied the history of the Middle East, and encountered Jewish thought as a living tradition rather than a footnote is not immune to bad arguments, but she is far better equipped to test them.

This is also why the post–October 7 wave of mandatory antisemitism trainings, IHRA workshops, and one-off DEI modules will not solve the problem. Inserting a two-hour training into an unformed mind does not produce the noticing capacity. It produces students who can recite definitions during the workshop and forget them by Friday, because the definitions are not anchored in anything. The same logic applies to the broader menu universities and donors are funding right now – and this is the harder truth for our community to hear: expanded Jewish studies offerings reach the already-interested, and several flagship programs have themselves been absorbed into the framework the core would interrupt. Targeted interventions assume a foundation that no longer exists. Build the foundation, and targeted interventions become unnecessary; skip the foundation, and they become theater.

A real core curriculum is about exposure: to foundational texts, enduring debates, and the accumulated knowledge of civilization. It means basic historical literacy – ancient civilizations, the rise of monotheism, the events shaping the modern world. It means treating Jewish history as world history – from biblical origins through diaspora, emancipation, the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel – as a continuous thread, not a parenthesis. The Hebrew Bible’s influence on the American Founding, Maimonides on Aquinas, Jewish thinkers in the development of modern human rights law: these are not parochial concerns but central threads of the civilization students think they already understand. And it also means religious diverse literacy – serious familiarity with the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Quran, and other major traditions, taught alongside Jewish thought rather than instead of it.

In practice, this is a two to six-course required sequence taken across the first two years; roughly fifteen percent of an undergraduate program. The sequence sits before the major and replaces a portion of current distribution requirements. It is not an addition to the curriculum but a reorganization of what students already take, with the elective buffet narrowed and the shared foundation restored.

None of this is radical. Until recently, it was the baseline of an educated person.

Some institutions still take this seriously. Chicago has run its Common Core since the 1930s. Ursinus requires every undergraduate to take its Common Intellectual Experience. Yale’s Directed Studies is being expanded to meet rising student demand. More telling is the rise of new programs built from scratch. The Hamilton School at the University of Florida now houses the Robert M. Beren Program on Jewish Classical Education, which makes Jewish classical texts and Hebraic ideas a core pillar rather than an elective sidecar. North Carolina has launched a School of Civic Life and Leadership; Arizona State has run its School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership for nearly a decade. These programs are imperfect, but they demonstrate that meaningful academic offerings can be built in eighteen months when an institution decides to act.

This is the question our community has to confront honestly. Jewish philanthropy has spent enormous sums in the past two years on antisemitism response: Hillel programming, Israel education, campus security, dedicated Jewish studies chairs, Title VI litigation, monitoring projects. Some of it has worked. Much of it has not. And the highest-leverage move available to Jewish philanthropy right now may not be the obvious Jewish-specific one. The Beren Program at Florida launched with $15 million in philanthropic support; it is now training students who arrive on campus knowing more about Jewish history than most of their professors do. The new schools at North Carolina and Arizona State were built with state appropriations and trustee will. None of these are Jewish-specific projects. All of them do Jewish-specific work because forming students capable of serious thought about anything also forms them capable of serious thought about us.

The reflex is to fund Jewish-specific responses to antisemitism. The harder argument is that the highest-leverage Jewish philanthropic move right now is funding the rebuilding of the general core curriculum at major universities. Chairs in foundational texts. Programs in classical education. Centers that anchor serious engagement with the Western and Jewish traditions together. Not because these projects are Jewish, but because they form the soil in which serious thought about Jewish history, Israel, and Zionism can take root and in which the lies our students are being fed become harder to plant. We have the resources. The question is whether we have the institutional patience.

In theory, this work should begin earlier. In practice, K–12 education is too politicized to sustain a shared curriculum. California’s ethnic studies experience is the cautionary tale: the initial mandate was widely condemned for antisemitic content, and even after revisions the so-called “Liberated Ethnic Studies” movement produced classroom materials that have generated lawsuits and settlements. New York has required Holocaust instruction since 1994, yet a 2022 law was needed simply to verify whether districts were complying. K–12 reform is necessary, but it will not be swift or clean. Higher education is different. Trustees, presidents, and faculty senates retain genuine curricular autonomy. The barrier is not law. It is institutional will; a hard problem, but a solvable one.

Defenders of the current system frame open-ended choice as empowering. In practice, an education composed entirely of choices is not an education at all. It is a collection of experiences. The core curriculum was never about limiting freedom. It was about ensuring that freedom rested on a foundation. And contrary to the assumption that students would resist a more demanding model, the evidence points the other way. Yale’s Directed Studies is oversubscribed. Hamilton at Florida drew hundreds of applicants for its inaugural class. The demand is there. What is missing is the institutional will to meet it.

Knowledge does not guarantee agreement. But it makes serious disagreement possible again—the difference, again, between Hillel and Korach. Trustees, presidents, and faculty can act now. Foundations, particularly within our community, can accelerate the work. The K–12 fight should continue, but no one should wait on it.

Rebuild the core, and you don’t just improve education. You make the lies harder to tell and harder to believe. You give the next generation of students the foundation our tradition has always known is the precondition for argument worth having. We have spent two years asking how to fight antisemitism on campus. The deepest answer is also the oldest: rebuild the conditions in which machloket l’shem shamayim is possible again, and the rest follows.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

Tidbits is a Forverts feature of easy news briefs in Yiddish that you can listen to or read, or both! If you read the article and don’t know a word, just click on it and the translation appears. Listen to the report here:

נאָך דעם ווי דעבאָראַ בראָדי, אַ לערערין אין מערילאַנד, איז געשטאָרבן אין פֿעברואַר, האָט איר טאָכטער, ריי אַן קיילי, נישט געוווּסט וואָס צו טאָן מיט די כּלערליי ייִדישע חפֿצים, וואָס די מאַמע האָט איבערגעלאָזט.

אויף די פּאָליצעס אין דער מאַמעס גאַסטצימער געפֿינען זיך מער ווי 50 חנוכּה־לאָמפּן. אויף דער וואַנט הענגען אַ טוץ קערות לעבן קונסטווערק אויף ייִדישע טעמעס. און אָן אַ שיעור דריידלעך, קידוש־בעכערס און שופֿרות געפֿינען זיך אין יעדן ווינקל פֿונעם הויז אין ראָקוויל, מערילאַנד.

במשך פֿון 35 יאָר האָט בראָדי אָנגעקליבן מער ווי 200 תּשמישי־קדושה, וואָס זי האָט געניצט מיט אירע „היברו סקול“ (תּלמוד־תּורה)־תּלמידים — קינדער מיט ספּעציעלע באַדערפֿענישן.

„זי האָט זיי קיין מאָל נישט געזאָגט: ׳ריר עס נישט אָן, ס׳קען זיך צעברעכן׳,“ האָט קיילי דערקלערט. „פֿאַרקערט. זי האָט געזאָגט: ׳טאַפּ עס אָן, נעם נאָך עפּעס.“

בראָדי, וואָס די משפּחה האָט זי גערופֿן „באָבע קוקי“, האָט נישט אַליין געזאַמלט די זאַכן. איר לעבנס־באַגלייטער, דזשיי בריל, האָט עס מיטגעטאָן מיט איר.

אָבער נאָך דעם ווי בראָדי, 76 יאָר אַלט, און בריל, 74 יאָר אַלט, זענען ביידע געשטאָרבן אין פֿעברואַר האָבן אירע יורשים גענומען פֿרעגן: וואָס וועט מען איצט טאָן מיט דער קאָלעקציע?

„יעדער פֿון אונדז האָט גענומען עפּעס וואָס געפֿעלט אונדז אָבער מיר האָבן נישט געוואָלט פֿאַרקויפֿן די איבעריקע זאַכן. מיר האָבן נישט געוואָלט פֿאַרדינען דערפֿון,“ האָט קיילי געזאָגט.

האָט זי געשריבן אַ בריוול וועגן דער זאַמלונג צו ניק פֿאַקס, וואָס פֿירט אַ סעריע אויף אינסטאַגראַם, „מילעניאַל ירושות“.

ווען פֿאַקס, וואָס איז אַ קאַטויל, האָט דערזען די בילדער פֿון אַלע ייִדישע חפֿצים, האָט עס אים דערמאָנט אין די בר־מיצווה שׂימחות פֿון זײַנע מיט־תּלמידים מיט יאָרן צוריק. האָט ער אַרויסגעלאָזט אַ קורצן ווידעאָ וועגן דער קאָלעקציע פֿאַר זײַנע 200,000 נאָכגייער, פֿרעגנדיק צי עמעצער קען העלפֿן דער משפּחה געפֿינען אַ היים פֿאַר דער זאַמלונג.

דעם צווייטן טאָג האָט יונתן איידלמאַן, דער קוראַטאָר פֿונעם „קאַפּיטאַל ייִדישן מוזיי אויפֿן נאָמען פֿון ליליאַן און אַלבערט סמאָל“ אין וואַשינגטאָן באַקומען צענדליקער בריוו פֿון מענטשן, פֿרעגנדיק צי דער מוזיי קען געפֿינען אַ היים פֿאַר די תּשמישי־קדושה.

איידלמאַן איז געפֿאָרן זען די זאַמלונג און געבליבן געפּלעפֿט. „ס׳איז געווען אויסערגעוויינטלעך. יודאַיִקאַ פֿון ד׳רערד ביז דער סטעליע, וואָס איך האָב נאָך קיין מאָל נישט געזען אין אַ פּריוואַטער היים. ס׳איז געווען זייער גוט דורכגעטראַכט, כּמעט ווי אַן אויסשטעלונג אין אַ מוזיי.“

איצט פּלאַנירט דער „קאַפּיטאַל ייִדישער מוזיי“ אַרײַנצושטעלן די גאַנצע קאָלעקציע אויפֿן צווייטן שטאָק פֿון מוזיי. און פּונקט ווי בראָדי האָט געמוטיקט אירע תּלמידים אָנצורירן די תּשמישי־קדושה, וועט מען די באַזוכער פֿון מוזיי דערלויבן דאָס זעלבע.

צו זען דעם אַרטיקל אויף ענגליש, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.

To see the article in English, click here

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