What’s Wrong with Omer Bartov’s “What Went Wrong?”

by Peter C. Herman

Omer Bartov, Israel: What Went Wrong? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026. Pp. 243.

Omer Bartov, distinguished historian and now public intellectual, does not like what Israel has become. In his view, Israel has become its own Greek tragedy. Originating as a response to the Holocaust, Israel committed, and continues to commit, its own genocide against the Palestinian people. Zionism, “a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression and persecution” (3), has morphed into an ideology defined by the “oppression and persecution” of the Palestinians. Even worse, Israel responded to the Hamas invasion of 10/7 with a genocidal war against Gaza’s inhabitants that was “conducted with the wide support, laced with denial and indifference, of most its own Jewish citizens” (3). How Israel became such a monster is the question Bartov explores in this short, maddening book.

Before I get to the many problems, errors, and omissions in Bartov’s argument, let me give credit where credit is due: unlike other examples of what Matti Friedman terms “Gazology”—a new literary genre that blames everything on Israel and grants the Palestinians total immunity—Bartov does not let Hamas or the Palestinians off the hook. The Hamas attack on 10/7 “is a war crime and a crime against humanity” (20–21), “akin,” Bartov says later in the book, “to the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001” (120). Bartov even admits (in a qualified way) that maybe “the Arab and Palestinian rejection of the partition was a mistake” (137).

Continue reading at Telos Insights

Telos Insights on Substack

Signing up for a Substack account is easy. You can do so here. If you enjoy reading on your tablet or phone, you can also download the Substack app, which works well and looks great. Once you sign up for Substack and subscribe to Telos Insights, you can adjust your settings to receive alerts about new posts, as well as opt in to notifications from the many other publications sharing content on the platform.

A Substack account is free, and some Telos Insights content is free too, but paid subscribers also have access to our regular premium content. To read the premium content, you will need to either become a member of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute or subscribe to Telos Insights directly through Substack.

A TPPI membership is $40/year, or $15/year for students, and is tax-deductible in the United States. Membership runs through the end of the calendar year in which payment is received. Your Telos Insights subscription will automatically become active a few days after your membership is processed. You can also subscribe to Telos Insights on a monthly basis through Substack at $5/month, or an annual basis at $40/year. We dedicate all revenue directly to the production of further content.

We hope that you will follow our efforts and join the conversations!

Contact Information
Telos-Paul Piccone Institute
431 East 12th St.
New York, NY 10009

Tel: (212) 228-6479
Email: info@telosinstitute.net
www.telosinstitute.net