Israel
What Went Wrong?
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- Vorbestellbar
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- Erwartet am 21. Apr. 2026
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A leading Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust explores and explains his native country's intensifying turn toward violence and exclusion.
The distinguished historian Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv, and served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become a leading scholar of the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.
In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov sketches the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism. How is it possible, he asks, that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, an event that gave legitimacy to a national home for the Jews, stands credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes? How do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction is being conducted with the support, laced with denial and indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens?
Tracing the roots of the violent events currently unfolding in Israel and the occupied territories, Bartov tracks his country's moral tribulations and considers the origins of Zionism, the intertwining of Israel’s independence with Palestinian displacement, the politics of the Holocaust, controversies over the term "genocide," and the uncertain future. The result is a searing and urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism and the future of Israel with rigor 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.
