Omar Bartov’s recent book Israel: What Went Wrong?, an Orwell Prize for Political Writing Finalist 2026, was described as “remarkable” by the Guardian, and received fulsome praise from LRB regular Pankaj Mishra: ‘Anyone disturbed and frightened by our current moral and intellectual morass should read it’.
Benny Morris takes it apart at Quillette. Some extracts:
Bartov’s book actually focuses on the here and now or at least one segment of it, the IDF-Hamas war around and in the Gaza Strip during 2023–2025 and the attendant charge that Israel committed “genocide.” (Let me quickly add that Bartov completely fails to engage with the very real, hard fact that the war, which unfortunately is far from over, is an Islamist-initiated war geared to Israel’s destruction. This was what Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who orchestrated 7 October, intended and this is what his fellow Islamists, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, Iraqi Shi’ite militiamen and, above all, the Islamic Republic of Iran, who joined the assault, were and are engaged in. Bartov’s blindness regarding the nature and ambit of the war is one of the book’s major flaws. Of course, this narrowness of focus serves Bartov’s purpose, which is to pillory Israel, but it makes for poor historiography).
Bartov’s restricted focus, on Palestine, is not merely geographic. It also relates to the protagonists. His beef is with the Zionists and Israel; he fails to acknowledge or describe the agency of the other side in all that has transpired in the region since 1882, when the Zionists began to settle in Palestine. For Bartov, absurdly, the Arabs play no role in Zionism’s bad turn. In fact, in Israel: What Went Wrong? the Arabs are not really present. There is no Palestinian Arab terrorism bedevilling the Zionist enterprise almost since birth; there are no Palestinian pogroms (1920, 1921, 1929, 1936–1939); no Palestinian or other Arab-initiated wars (1948, 1967, 1973); no constant Palestinian rejection of the successive compromises tabled by international actors and/or the Zionists/Israel (the two-state proposals of the Peel Commission (1937) and of the UN General Assembly (1947); the peace settlements proposed by Israeli Premier Ehud Barak and US President Bill Clinton (2000), and by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (2007–2008)); and the Palestinians’ rejection of Jewish sovereignty in any inch of Palestine starting with Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al Husseini and ending with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Nowhere does Bartov explain that this rejectionism, repeatedly exploding in massive bloodshed, gradually drove Zionists and Israelis to despair, eroded the Israelis’ willingness to compromise, and, ultimately, generated the current Jewish extremism.
It’s the old line then that the Israelis, the Jews, are the moral agents here – the bad moral agents – while the Palestinians have no moral agency, and merely react to the oppression imposed on them.
The same authorial mindset is apparent in his treatment of the anti-Israel student protests on the American campuses. He writes: “It must be stressed that the vast majority … have not condoned the crimes of Hamas but rather condemned the ongoing massive destruction of Gaza by the IDF.” (Of course, he is technically right—they didn’t condone Hamas’s “crimes” because they never viewed their actions as “crimes”).
At another point, belittling the antisemitism and violence towards Jewish students displayed on the campuses, Bartov simply dismisses the culprits as “boisterous.” (He sure has a way with words). But does “boisterous” really cover what was on show in the demonstrations, sit-ins and campus take-overs of 2023–2024? Does “boisterousness” cover the barely veiled calls for Israel’s destruction (“Palestine from the river to the sea”), placards juxtaposing swastikas and Stars of David, and intimidation of Jewish students and lecturers?
And, of course, Bartov defends America’s and Europe’s Muslims. He flatly denies that “the current rise in antisemitism is coming primarily from immigrants, especially from Arab and Muslim countries.” Rather, he says, antisemitism comes traditionally from the Right. But is this the whole truth? How about 19th and 20th century Marxist and Soviet antisemitism?
Anyway, Bartov implicitly denies the existence of Muslim antisemitism. But a passing look at the Quran would open his eyes. In fact, the Quran has been the wellspring of Muslim antisemitism since the religion’s emergence in Hijaz in the 7th century. In that sacred text the Jews are referred to as “apes and pigs (Quran 5:60)” and “murderers of prophets (Quran 3:21 or 3:112).” And unlike the Catholic Church’s 20th century rethinking of its attitude to “the Jews,” no such reformation has taken place in Islam. Rather the contrary, the Muslim Arab world has seen a doubling down in antisemitic professions.
Bartov pretends to be completely unaware of the rampancy of antisemitism in that world. And I’m not referring only to Hamas’s foundational charter of 1988—still the organisation’s constitution—where “the Jews” are charged with instigating the French and Russian revolutions and the First and Second World Wars (and establishing the United Nations!). The charter is a truly genocidal document, one passage even calling upon “trees and stones” behind which Jews are hiding to summon pursuing Muslims (in the person of “Abdullah,” the servant of Allah) to come and kill them….
Bartov has devoted much of his activity as a public intellectual these past months—and much of Israel: What Went Wrong?—to charging Israel with “genocide” in Gaza, describing Israel’s war-making, its leaders and Israelis in general as “genocidal.” Those words dot almost every page of this book, a constant reminder of Bartov’s message.
In fact, Palestinian spokesmen have been charging Israel with “genocide” for decades, usually after Israeli reprisals following Palestinian terrorist attacks. In the past no one in the West took them seriously. Now, however, after the 2023–2025 IDF counter-offensive in Gaza, in which some 70,000 Gazans died, many do—and to no small degree because Bartov and others like him appear to provide a stamp of authority.
Bartov evolved as an historian of Nazi Germany, and that, grotesquely, is the prism through which he views Zionism and Israel. Today he leads the (small) pack of Holocaust historians who describe Israel and its Jews as genocidaires.
In What Went Wrong? Bartov stresses that Israel has a Holocaust “syndrome.” And this is true. Israelis from a young age grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust. But this is not merely a product of Zionist manipulation, as Bartov would have it. Palestine’s and Israel’s Jews since 1945 have genuinely feared that the surrounding Muslims would do to them, if given half the chance, what was done to Europe’s Jews. Real Arab (and Iranian) threats and war-making have continuously reinforced this fear, as did 7 October.
Bartov dismisses this fear—he calls it the “again and again syndrome”—as an “internalised, irrational, and misleading terror … always lurking behind the corner.” In my view this dismissal itself is foolish, irrational and counter-historical. Bartov may believe that repeatedly stating a wish to destroy the Jewish state is meaningless (“they don’t really mean it”) or deny that such destruction would necessarily entail mass murder. And, of course, it is easier to give voice to such thinking sitting in a Cambridge café, surrounded by Gentile (and Jewish) academics who are detached from Middle Eastern realities (which have recently included the Iranian regime’s slaughter of 30,000–40,000 fellow Muslims and citizens in order to hold onto power).
And so it goes. The apologists for anti-Jewish violence, and those who revel in the opportunity to throw the genocide charge back at the Jews, always get to be lauded in “progressive” circles.
But one thing is already clear: Bartov’s book, and his journalistic “Israelis are genocidaires” campaign that preceded it, have, objectively speaking, assisted the Islamist terrorists in their effort to destroy the Jewish state. This is something he will have to live with.
Leave a Reply