How Israel Got This Way - A new book by a genocide scholar traces the roots of the nation's descent.

[Celerity]

Implied in the question posed by the title of Omer Bartov’s new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, is the equally unsettling question of whether the state of Israel can be fixed. (If you are convinced it never should have existed in the first place, you might want to stop reading now.)

https://prospect.org/2026/05/22/how-israel-got-this-way-bartov-review/


An Israeli soldier stands guard during the inauguration ceremony for the newly legalized Jewish settlement of Yatziv, near the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour, in the West Bank, January 19, 2026. Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP Photo

For many, the death and destruction wrought by Israel in the Gaza Strip since 2023 have been so horrific—even as a response to the mass slaughter with which Hamas initiated the war—that they have lost any sympathy they may once have had for the Jewish state. What Bartov’s book makes clear, however, is that there is also a war going on within Israel, one that pits democracy, equality, pluralism, and the rule of law against a growing and increasingly violent camp—which includes the government—that is working to dismantle the country’s legal institutions, its press freedoms, its pretense to being a liberal democracy, and any conviction that it can and needs to seek an equitable resolution to its conflict with the Palestinians.




Understanding the nature and background of that war—the internal one—is essential to comprehending how and why Israel has fought its war in Gaza (and elsewhere) in the relentless and unrealistic way that it has. Such understanding also sharpens just what a critical moment this is in Israel’s history. By law, the country must hold an election before November, and if the coalition of parties led by Benjamin Netanyahu is not defeated, it could well seal the state’s one-way descent into autocratic theocracy. Sending Netanyahu home in no way guarantees a restart for the country, but it is certainly a necessary condition for it.

Bartov is an Israeli-born professor of genocide and Holocaust studies at Brown University. He has deliberately made his life outside his birthplace since the 1990s, but like a latter-day wandering Jew, he carries with him an identification with and concern for the state. He fought in its army, his grandchildren are being raised there, and if he hasn’t visited in two years, it’s because the last time he came, he felt alienated from even his closest friends.

It should not be surprising, then, that Bartov has been preoccupied with whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. In two prominent New York Times opinion pieces, in November 2023 and July 2025, respectively, he progressed from identifying “genocidal intent” on the part of Israel, to determining that its actions now amounted to genocide. That line was crossed, he tells us, when, by the summer of 2024, when Israel attacked and plowed under the city of Rafah (population 275,000), it “demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards … [and] indicated that the ultimate goal of this whole undertaking from the very beginning was to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable.”

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