​Israel’s Destruction of Gaza and the Moral Decline of Zionism

            Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, has long been a leading historian of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.  He has written pathbreaking books on interethnic relations in Eastern Europe prior to and during the Holocaust and on the German army’s role in perpetrating it. In recent years, however, he is best known for publicly declaring that Israel’s war in Gaza, launched in response to the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, had become a genocide. He was not the first scholar of genocide to make this damning accusation against Israel, but he had the biggest platform—the opinion page of the New York Times—and his scholarly stature and personal background as an Israeli who had served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gave his accusation added weight. So too did the fact that Bartov initially rejected the genocide charge in an opinion piece in the New York Times in November 2023, while warning that “we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide, as has happened more than once in the past.”

            By June 2024, Bartov had become convinced that Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza had indeed escalated into genocide. In a second opinion piece in the New York Times, published in July 2025, he wrote that “Israel’s actions [in Gaza] could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was—and remains today—to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.” He also admitted that, “[h]aving grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could.” By deploying both his scholarly expertise and personal background to buttress his accusation that Israel was committing the crime of genocide in Gaza, Bartov became perhaps the most prominent and influential scholar making this accusation, at least in the United States. Because of this, he has been vilified by Israel’s supporters, protested by Israeli university students, and lost longtime friends.

            Undeterred, Bartov has now published a book that is likely to antagonize many more people. The book’s title alone—”Israel: What Went Wrong?”—will no doubt be a provocation to many. After all, for some people, Israel has done no wrong, not in the now-decimated Gaza Strip or in the occupied West Bank. For them, the genocide accusation is not only baseless but a malicious antisemitic lie—a blood libel against the Jewish state and the Jewish people (which they tend to conflate). These people, many of them Jews of Bartov’s generation who came of age when Israel was widely perceived as the innocent victim of Arab aggression and rejectionism, are unlikely to read Bartov’s book or, if they do read it, to be persuaded by its arguments. For others, on the opposite end of the political spectrum concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel itself is wrong and always has been, as in their eyes it is an inherently illegitimate settler-colonial entity created and maintained by Western imperialism. They are also unlikely to read Bartov’s book or be convinced by its central claim that Zionism began as a legitimate national liberation movement for the Jewish people and then gradually degenerated into ethnocentrism, racism, and “Jewish supremacism” after it became a state ideology following Israel’s establishment in 1948. For these people, who are anti-Zionists, Zionism was always a racist, colonial enterprise aimed at violently dispossessing the indigenous Arab-Palestinian population.

            However, if you do not belong to either of these polarized political camps, and if you are shocked and appalled by Israel’s actions in Gaza and want to understand why, in Bartov’s words, “a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust stands today credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes, forcible displacement of civilian populations, and crimes against humanity,” then you should read this timely and powerful book. Not only does it help explain why, in retaliation for the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, Israel mercilessly waged a war of destruction in Gaza that killed at least 71,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, but it also explains, more broadly, why Zionism has gone from being an emancipatory ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to an oppressive ideology today. Bartov argues that neither of these developments was inevitable. Thus, he rejects the position of those who contend that Zionism was always intent on eliminating the indigenous Palestinian population because the essential ‘logic’ of settler-colonialism is the elimination of the natives in order to take their land and resources—and hence that ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza were the inevitable outcome of Israel’s essential settler-colonial character. Bartov argues against this kind of essentialism and historical determinism. Instead, as a historian, he emphasizes the long-term historical processes, major turning points, and key decisions that cumulatively led to “the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression and persecution, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism increasingly focused on the exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians under Israeli rule.”

            This is not a new argument. Many books and articles have decried how Zionism has changed over time and gradually turned into a violent, oppressive ideology, and many scholars have documented the decline of democracy and liberalism in Israel. Even before Israel’s establishment in 1948, Jewish intellectuals such as Hans Kohn and Hannah Arendt warned about the negative direction that Zionism was taking and lamented its ethical decline. Indeed, arguably no nationalist movement has been subjected to as much critical scrutiny as Zionism has (which is not to say that all of this criticism is unwarranted or motivated by antisemitism, as many of Israel’s supporters insist). Unlike those who believe Zionism was wrong from the outset, those who think that it went wrong must decide when, why, and how this happened. The most common answer—one that is particularly popular with disillusioned Zionists—is that it went wrong after Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. According to this view, Israel’s military occupation and colonization of these Palestinian-populated territories has steadily eroded its democracy, weakened its liberal forces, and emboldened and empowered its extremists, especially messianic religious Zionist settlers.

            Bartov shares the view that Israel’s post-1967 occupation and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza has morally degraded Israel’s political culture and its Jewish majority. Quoting the Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire, who wrote that “[c]olonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism,” Bartov argues that nearly six decades of brutal occupation have resulted in the dehumanization of Palestinians and that this helps explain why Israeli Jews were indifferent to the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. He also argues that Israel’s repeated military assaults on Gaza since it unilaterally withdrew from the territory in 2005 also desensitized Israeli Jews to the suffering and killing of Palestinian civilians. However, unlike so-called liberal Zionists who tend to idealize or romanticize what Israel was like before 1967, Bartov pointedly notes that while Israel has undemocratically ruled the West Bank and the lives of its disenfranchised Palestinian residents for nearly 60 years, before then its own Palestinian citizens lived under military rule from 1949 to 1966. Hence, he writes, “One can say that Israel was a full democracy for only six months,” from December 1966, when military rule ended inside Israel, to June 1967, when it began in the West Bank and Gaza.

            In a chapter entitled “The ‘Never Again’ Syndrome,” Bartov offers a second explanation for why Zionism and Israel “went wrong”: “the centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli education and political and public life,” which he calls “Holocaustism.” This started in the early 1960s with the public trial of the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, but it became particularly pronounced from the late 1970s onward after the Likud party first came to power. It was not just that the collective memory of the Holocaust and its public commemoration became increasingly central, but “[o]ver time, as the genocide of the Jews came to play a growing role in Israeli public life and rhetoric, it was no longer perceived merely as a past event but also as a future, indeed potentially imminent, threat.” The popular slogan “Never Again” came to mean “never again to Jews,” and the growing fear that another holocaust was not only possible, but “potentially imminent,” meant that Israel had to prevent it at any cost, which effectively gave it license to do anything, particularly against Palestinians and other Arabs, whose hostility to Israel was increasingly perceived as an existential threat to the survival of the Jewish people, despite the fact that Israel had militarily become the strongest state in the region. The irrational fear of a second holocaust and the misperception of Israel’s enemies as no different from Nazis were instrumental, Bartov argues, in shaping how Israeli Jews reacted to the Oct. 7 massacre, which Bartov correctly calls a war crime and crime against humanity, because the massacre evoked Israeli Jews’ collective memory of the Holocaust and of antisemitic pogroms (particularly, the Kishinev pogrom in 1903). “Since the Hamas massacre was constantly portrayed as genocidal, and Hamas was described in the Israeli media as a Nazi organization,” Bartov writes, “the obvious conclusion was that the war in Gaza must be guided by the lessons learned from the Holocaust and thus be implemented as an unavoidably ruthless measure to prevent the repetition of another Auschwitz.” Consequently, according to Bartov, “The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.” Bartov also blames “the utter silence in Israel over the killing of thousands of Palestinian children” in Gaza on the Israeli mainstream media’s refusal (with the notable exception of the liberal newspaper Haaretz) to cover the suffering and mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The “Israeli imagination remained squarely focused on the massacre of October 7 and its imaginary connection to the Holocaust,” he writes, “whereas the horrors inflicted on Gaza were literally censored by the media and deliberately blocked from the public imagination.” This was why Israelis overwhelmingly supported the IDF’s conduct in Gaza, he argues.

            This is a compelling argument, although it risks minimizing the massive shock and psychological trauma that Israeli Jews experienced as a direct result of the atrocities on Oct. 7—the brutal murder, torture, rape, and abduction of defenseless civilians, including infants and children—and the fear and rage that it generated, which fueled a desire to exact revenge and restore their suddenly shattered sense of security, whatever the cost. In this respect, at least, the reaction of Israeli Jews to what happened on Oct. 7 was not so different from the reaction of many Americans to the attack on Sept. 11, and in both cases, this reaction resulted in ferocious military campaigns that killed staggering numbers of innocent civilians, often remotely (by aerial bombing and drones). In Israel’s case, however, the IDF’s actions in Gaza were also facilitated by mass surveillance and artificial intelligence, influenced by the genocidal rhetoric of some of its political and military leaders, particularly the claim that there are no innocent people in Gaza, and driven by the determination of its right-wing government, especially its far-right ministers, to “encourage” as many Palestinians as possible by any means necessary to permanently leave the war-torn enclave. This is why the IDF has systematically razed entire neighborhoods and deliberately demolished homes, hospitals, schools, universities, water treatment plants, electricity grids, and other civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, destroying or damaging approximately 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings, according to the United Nations. This was, Bartov argues, “part of a strategy to destroy Gaza as a livable space for Palestinians,” and although “there was no formal order for genocide … when leading politicians and military officials openly talk about Palestinians as ‘human animals’ and about the complete destruction of Gaza—and then that is exactly what happens—it is no longer a coincidence. It is a deliberately pursued policy.”

            What might have prevented genocide in Gaza and apartheid in the West Bank, Bartov suggests implausibly, is if Israel had adopted a written constitution when the state was founded. In a chapter titled “The Missing Constitution,” he argues that “the failure to write and adopt a constitution has had deeply detrimental consequences for the nature of the state, its society, its legal order, and its policies to this very day.” If Israel had a constitution in the liberal and universalist spirit of its Declaration of Independence, Bartov believes that Palestinian citizens of Israel might have been treated as truly equal citizens, Palestinian refugees and displaced persons might not have had their land and property expropriated, and Palestinians in the occupied territories might have been mistreated less and had their human rights better protected. However, rather than being guided and constrained by a liberal constitution, the Israeli state has been guided by an ideology—Zionism—that has become progressively “more bloody-minded, more paranoid, more violent, and eventually ever more racist.” Furthermore, he speculates wishfully that, “[h]ad generations of Israelis been raised on respect for a constitution and pride in a bill of rights for all human beings, the creeping racism of Israeli society might have been tempered, and the astonishing indifference to the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza and the daily crimes and pogroms on the West Bank might have elicited a greater sense of scandal.”

            This is an alluring idea, but Bartov’s faith in the power of a written constitution to protect people’s rights and prevent or at least limit official discrimination and state violence is misplaced. No constitution can prevent a regime from routinely violating people’s rights, even when those rights are explicitly enumerated and legally codified, as many Americans have learned. Even if Israel had a liberal constitution, the rights of Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and of those in the occupied territories who are not would still most likely have been violated simply because of the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since prolonged violent conflicts tend to erode liberal norms and degrade democratic values. This has certainly been the case in Israel. A century of bloody conflict with the Palestinians (albeit an asymmetric conflict since 1948), marked by multiple wars and frequent terrorism, has been deeply damaging to Israel’s democratic character and weakened its society’s universalist and humanistic values (which were not particularly strong to begin with). To be sure, this does not excuse Israel’s persistent and serial violations of civil and human rights or its many war crimes, but it points to the fact that political extremism, religious-nationalist fanaticism, and anti-Palestinian racism in Israel today are primarily toxic by-products of an intractable conflict, which, in turn, continue to fuel that conflict. Thus, the moral decline of Zionism, which Bartov decries, was arguably an inevitable consequence of a conflict with the Palestinians that was unavoidable once Zionists sought to create and maintain a Jewish state in the Land of Israel/Palestine, which was already inhabited by a population—Palestinian Arabs—that (understandably) refused to concede their land and wanted their own state.

            This century-long conflict, however, barely features in Bartov’s book. He largely ignores the Palestinians as political actors and attributes sole responsibility for the perpetuation of the conflict to Israel because Israel is much more powerful than the Palestinians. But this power imbalance does not erase Palestinian agency. Palestinians are not entirely passive and blameless. Zionism has evolved in interaction with Palestinian nationalism, and what Palestinians do influences Israeli politics and Israeli-Jewish public opinion. The fact that Israeli-Jewish society has become more right-wing, more militant, and more ethnocentric since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second Intifada testifies to this, as does the fact that the deadliest attack that Palestinians have ever carried out against Israel—the Oct. 7 massacre—resulted in the deadliest retaliation that Israel has ever conducted against them. This does not, of course, absolve Israel of responsibility for its crimes in Gaza, but it means that we cannot truly comprehend why these crimes occurred, and more broadly why Israel has become what it is today, if we pay attention to only one side of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, unequal though it is.