Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov review – the long view: An erudite account of the foundation of the state and its subsequent moral and political decline (Avi Shlaim, 9 May 2026, The Guardian)
The moral and political degradation of Israel is the subject of this remarkable book. The author, Omer Bartov, has impeccable credentials for writing it: he was born on a kibbutz, he served as an officer in the IDF, and is currently professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US. It is dedicated to his father, Hanoch Bartov, “the last Zionist”, a reference to the liberal brand of Zionism to which the whole family were evidently dedicated. Yet this book is written more in sorrow than in anger. Its goal is not to condemn Zionism but to explain its evolution from a dream to a nightmare.To do so, Bartov goes back to the formation of Israel in 1948. In a chapter entitled The Missing Constitution, he bemoans the failure of the founding fathers to resolve the question of how a multi-ethnic state can remain both Jewish and democratic; in other words, their failure to square the circle of ethno-nationalism and pluralism.
Had a written constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence been adopted, he argues, and had generations of Israelis been raised with respect for the constitution and pride in a bill of rights for all human beings, “the creeping racism of Israeli society might have been tempered, and the astonishing indifference to the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza and the daily crimes and pogroms on the West Bank might have elicited a greater sense of scandal”. Maybe. History does not disclose its alternatives. Arguably, however, Bartov does not go back far enough in history to explore the roots of Israeli racism. Zionism is a self-avowed settler-colonial movement and its principal political progeny – the state of Israel – is a settler-colonial state. The logic of settler-colonialism is the elimination of the natives in order to take over the land and its resources. Ethnic cleansing is the means by which this goal is achieved. In 1948, the newly born state of Israel carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine: 750,000 Palestinians became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. This is what Palestinians call the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe”. From the point of view of the victims, the viciousness of Zionism is nothing new; they have known it all along.
Moreover, the Nakba was not a one-off event; it is an ongoing process.