Can Israel Be Saved From Itself?

On May 11, 2026, the New York Times carried a report by Nicholas Kristof titled 'The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians'. Based mainly on survivor testimony, Kristof describes in chilling detail how sexual violence has become part of Israeli officers’ ‘standard operating procedure’ when it comes to handling Palestinians, particularly Palestinian prisoners, male, female or child. Patently, the idea behind brutalising Palestinians in this manner is to ‘soften them down’, and prison guards and IDF soldiers, both men and women, as Kristof’s investigations showed him, seem to have been using this SOP with impunity – and with pleasure – since at least October 7, 2023. 

Now, for those who have been closely following Israel-Palestine for some time, this was really no revelation. There have been any number of reports in the public domain over the past almost three years of the utter savagery underpinning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians: reports have come from human rights organisations including those based in Israel, from medics who have had occasion to treat Palestinian victims of sexual violence, from the Red Cross in Gaza and the occupied territories, and from the United Nations that put out a report on March 13, 2025 with the compelling title: ''More than a human can bear': Israel’s systematic use of of sexual, reproductive and other gender-based violence since 7 October, 2023'. But the NYT article on this is in an altogether different class, for the newspaper had zealously ring-fenced the Israeli state from all criticism even as the genocide in Gaza was playing out for all the world to see, going so far as to forbid its journalists from using terms such as ‘occupied territory’ and ‘refugee camp’ – not to speak of ‘ethnic cleansing’ – while reporting on Gaza. So the Kristof article has produced consternation, not least because it has also mentioned the use of ‘trained’ dogs for raping Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli foreign ministry has described it as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” and called Kristof a ‘propagandist’. The Israeli government has now vowed to sue the NYT. The American Jewish Congress has suggested Kristof amplified “inflamatory narratives that have real-world consequences in a time of surging hatred towards Israelis and Jews worldwide”. And the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has dubbed the article “a poorly sourced, fantastical tale of torture”, never mind that Israel’s Chaneel 14 TV network has not infrequently – but approvingly – presented prison guards and soldiers gloating over their violent sexual abuse of Palestinians including by deploying canines.

This episode, considered in the wider context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, shows that everything that could conceivably go wrong has indeed gone wrong with the state of Israel today. By consistently presenting a sanitised picture of the genocide and meticulously balancing its narrative at all times by keeping the October 7 Hamas attack front and centre while reporting on Israeli atrocities, the NYT has provided signal service to the Israeli cause. And yet Israel has chosen to turn on the same friendly newspaper at the precise time when its (and the US’) unprovoked war on Iran has managed to alienate a significant part of its own traditional support base worldwide. Where does this arrogant stupidity come from? What explains the reality-defying bubble of hubris and (apparent) death wish that Israel seems to have now made its permanent home?

Omer Bartov’s new book Israel – What Went Wrong? helps us locate these (and other related) questions around Israel’s steady descent into barbarity within a broader understanding of the country’s colossal failure as a modern nation-state. 

What went wrong?

The book’s point of departure, as Bartov frames it in his Introduction, is an exploration of

"...the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate Europen Jewry  from repression and persecution, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism increasingly focussed on the exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians under Israeli rule."

That exploration leads to the other shattering question: how could a state born out of the ashes of one of history’s worst genocides – the Nazi Holocaust – itself go on to perpetrate another of history’s worst genocides within a mere seventy-five years of its coming into being? And do so in full view of the same worldwide liberal institutions that helped shape and sustain worldwide revulsion at the sight of genocide, indeed the very idea of genocide? – Omer Bartov examines these questions and their context with the expert’s thoroughness and intellectual rigor. 

'Israel: What Went Wrong?', Omer Bartov, Fern Press, 2026.

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And few scholars are better qualified for such an exposition than Omer Bartov, Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University who has researched and written extensively about genocide and its cultural and social appurtenances and is considered one of the world’s leading Holocaust scholars. His personal history says a lot. He is a Jewish Israeli-American born into a family of prominent Zionists that lived on a kibbutz and had lost many of its members to Nazi death camps in occupied Poland. He grew up in Tel Aviv, served in the Israel Defence Forces, and was a company commander during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 before he went to Oxford for a doctoral degree. He dedicates his new book, his 13th to date, to the loving memory of his father, “The last Zionist Hanoch Bartov...".  In Israel…, he doesn’t tell us if he still considers himself a Zionist, but he doesn’t disavow Zionism either. More about that later.

The overarching theme of the book is the sustained tension between what Bartov posits as the emancipatory impulse of Zionism at its origin and Israel’s genocidal project in Gaza. The moral abomination that has been Israel’s ostensible ‘response’ to October 7 informs the book’s every argument against what Bartov believes is a debased and profoundly corrupted version of Zionism, the Israeli state’s official ideology. Four of the book’s five main chapters – 'Israel’s Forever Wars', 'Antisemitism and Zionism', 'The 'Never Again' Syndrome', 'On the Slaughter of Children' – examine, in seriatim: 

• The origins of and recent background to the ongoing genocide, how it picked up momentum over
  2023-24, and how it veritably transformed Israeli society, its culture and even its psyche.
• Israel’s cynical instrumentalisation of antisemitism, aided and abetted in that project by the
  sweepingly broad provisions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism and by the USA (broadly, the West) doubling down on those tendentious and deleterious provisions (for example, that calling Israel a racist state is antisemitic).
• Israel’s (and its Western patrons’) purposefully opportunistic abuse of the memory of the Nazi Holocaust so that Israel, born out of that catastrophe, can claim a unique, permanent kind of victimhood which entitles it to wildly deviant behaviour including committing genocide, so that another holocaust of Jews is possible ‘never again’.
• The complete, and apparently irreversible, inversion of all moral standards in the Israeli society, including among its cultural elites, so that even a mass slaughter of young children, even infants – of the kind that has been ongoing in Gaza since Octobe 7 – not only becomes par for the course but is even considered essential for Israel’s continued survival.

Killers and the killed are dehumanised together 

Repeatedly in these pages, Bartov agonises over two other phenomena. One, how many of his closest friends and colleagues were increasingly frustrated with him as he raised the pitch of his critique of the Gaza  genocide and the Israeli government, shunning him, often renouncing his friendship publicly. And two, how Western governments and elites continued to have Israel’s back through even the most ghastly phases of the  genocide even as ordinary citizens across Western countries mobilised against that savagery and their governments’ complicity in the crime.

Bartov traces the latter phenomenon to the by now familiar matrix of Western guilt over the Holocaust and the West’s own deeply flawed project of exorcising mid-twentieth-century fascism/Nazism. He does not, however, link Western powers’ affinity with Israel to the essentially colonial character of those powers’ own political and cultural traditions, though he recognises the state of Israel as a settler-colonial project. But he writes movingly about how the genocide has not only inured vast swathes of Israeli society (including even many left-liberals) to Palestinian suffering but has actually served to normalise celebrating that suffering. His insider’s perspective on the dehumanisation of Israeli society even as the Israeli state was engaged in perpetrating the genocide is as dispiriting as it is scary.

Chapter 5, 'The Missing Constitution,' argues that the Israeli state morphed into its current ungodly incarnation principally because of its inability, fuelled  by the unwillingness of its leaders, to frame and adopt a full, written constitution and a bill of rights. The country’s Declaration of Independence (1948) loftily promised to uphold “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex”. But those noble sentiments were in effect a nod to the UN which, while approving the Partition Plan that cleared the pathway to  Israeli statehood, had mandated the new state to guarantee “to all persons equal and non-discriminatory rights in civil, political, economic and religious matters and the enjoyment of...freedom of religion, language, speech…”,  as also to draft a democratic constitution to guide Israel’s statecraft. Israel’s inaugural Declaration had committed to a written constitution as well, but, as Bartov documents in meticulous detail, it was never the leadership’s intention to make good on that commitment.

Absent a constitution and a full bill of rights, the new state was free to legislate on vital matters according to the political elite’s own lights, unconstrained by any overriding constitutional priorities or principles. Over the years, as the political leadership grew progressively more sectarian and xenophobic, it could steer the country towards  increasingly more majoritarian objectives until 2018 when, in enacting a new Basic Law, Israel formally declared itself as ‘the nation-state of the Jewish People’ where others, such as its Arab citizens, enjoyed only such rights as the Jewish state deigned to offer them.

Barking up the wrong tree?

Plausible as this line of argument may appear at first glance, it may be somewhat simplistic to assign so much heft to a written constitution on a stand-alone basis. India’s founding fathers gave us a very progressive, but also an eminently poised and wonderfully well-structured, constitution. But is that stopping India’s steady and accelerating slide into majoritarian xenophobia over the last decade and more? One can hardly make such a claim. So, even with an eloquently written, liberal constitutions, a wicked regime could have devised a thousand convenient workarounds to effectively eviscerate the constitution until the time came to jettison that printed book altogether.

So where and when did Israel go wrong? Bartov documents the pathologies warping Israeli society with great authority, but his diagnosis of the canker seems Panglossian at best. He refers often enough to the Nakba, the forced expulsion of a million Palestinians from their homeland with which Israel began its nation-building project in May 1948; he speaks at length of Zionist settlers usurping Palestinian homes and Palestinian property even before Israel became a reality. And, in his analysis, he even links up those early atrocities with the ongoing settler savagery on the West Bank. And yet, sadly, he fails to acknowledge that the Zionist project of building a Jewish state (which soon metamorphosed into a Jewish-only state) on land on which Arabs had lived for many centuries was immoral and wrong ab initio. That Israel did not go wrong at a certain juncture, but was iniquitous all along. In fact that  it was pre-destined by the very manner it had been conceived to end up where it finds itself today.

That brings us to the question: does Omer Bartov still think of himself as a Zionist?

The answer, it seems to me, is yes.

The fact that, intellectually, he hasn’t given up on what he considers Zionism’s pristine original mission tells us that this very compassionate, erudite, profoundly moral man is still wedded to Zionism’s first, stirring message of Jewish emacipation. And that’s why the question – what went wrong with Israel – exercises his mind and his heart so powerfully. Such a person was bound to find it hard to come to terms  with the knowledge that Israel could not but have gone wrong.

Quo Vadis?

The book’s last section, titled 'The Abyss and the Promise', looks ahead with hope to a saner future for Israel-Palestine. Like many other serious commentators today, Bartov believes the only way to build a humane future for everyone living between the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) sea is by creating a federated state of two autonomous but interlinked and inter-dependent regions, housing the Jews and the Palestinians respectively, where the two communities live side by side in a symbiotic relationship.

Aware that such a scenario will likely appear fanciful at this point, and knowing that Israel will resist any such initiative very strongly, Bartov envisages the intervention of major world powers in hastening this process of reconciliation and unification. While that logic is irrefutable, his suggestion that Germany, of all countries, be roped in to lead  this complex process must come across  as somewhat naïve. For Bartov knows as well as anyone else that, next to the US, Germany has been Israel’s staunchest ally through the darkest, most violent stages of the genocide, supplying Israel with more weapons with which to slaughter Palestinians than every other country than the US. Additionally, hasn’t Germany virtually outlawed all protest against the genocide as well as all support to the besieged Palestinians? It’s incredible that Bartov could visualize Germany in the non-partisan role of an interlocutor-cum-mediator when he himself has written at length, in this very book and very perceptively, about Germany’s no-questions-asked backing of Israel through the entire duration of the genocide.

Israel – What Went Wrong? is a very important contribution to the literature on Israel-Palestine. We may not like to accept all the answers it provides, but there’s no doubt that the book asks all the right questions. It’s also a book written from the heart, and written very elegantly.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

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