Israel: What Went Wrong?

American-Israeli Holocaust scholar Bartov (Anatomy of a Genocide) offers a powerful meditation on his birth country’s turn toward violence. Bartov chronicles the “tragic transformation of Zionism” from a movement that “sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression” into “a state ideology of ethno-nationalism.” Lamenting the “bitter cunning of history,” Bartov confronts the awful resonances between his academic work about the Holocaust and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. He reflects impactfully on growing up in Tel Aviv neighborhoods “built... over the remnants of Palestinian villages,” and on his IDF service, when he was wounded in a training accident that was subsequently covered up, which he pegs as an early glimpse of his government’s compromised ethics. Concluding that Israel’s extremism is at least partly an “inevitable consequence of... settler colonialism,” Bartov finds some hope for reconciliation in the idea of drawing connections between the Holocaust and the 1948 Nakba, the forced displacement of Palestinians, asserting that “reflecting jointly on these two crucial events can have a transformative effect on Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian mutual understanding.” Nevertheless, he remains a realist, recognizing that equality for Palestinians would have to be essentially forced upon the Israeli political class and could “only happen under firm and determined American leadership.” It’s a clear-eyed work of moral reckoning. (Apr.)