Israel: What Went Wrong?
Orwell Prize for Political Writing Finalist 2026
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- 14,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2026
'Remarkable' GUARDIAN
'Anyone disturbed and frightened by our current moral and intellectual morass should read it' PANKAJ MISHRA
A leading genocide scholar explores the history of Zionism, Israel’s lurch towards extreme oppression and violence, and why it stands accused of crimes against humanity
Professor Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv and served in the Israel Defence Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become an expert on the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.
In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov explores the transformation of Zionism from a movement of Jewish emancipation and liberation into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians. He traces the process whereby Israel – whose establishment in 1948 received international support in the aftermath of the Holocaust – now faces accusations of war crimes and genocide.
What are the implications of Israel’s near total impunity for the post-1945 regime of international law? And how do we understand the widespread support for these policies by Israel’s Jewish citizens?
The result is a searing and urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism, genocide, and the future of Israel with rigour and depth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
