A Genocide Scholar Asks “What Went Wrong” in Israel
4/17/202639 min
Omer Bartov is an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. He grew up in a Zionist home and served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, but he has long been concerned about Israel’s use of military power. In a new book called “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” Bartov argues that Zionism has morphed into an ideology of extremism that led to genocide in Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7th. “There is growing criticism of American support for these kinds of Israeli policies, both on the American left and on the American right,” Bartov tells David Remnick. Bartov believes that Israel requires “shock therapy” because “it has not still come to identify the limits of its own power, because those limits are in Washington, DC and it's there that those limits have to be set.” “For Israel, that would be good, because I think Israel needs to be liberated from that kind of dependence on American power. I think, for American society and for American Jewry, that’s a very bad thing because there is a rise of . . . antisemitism from the Tucker Carlsons of the world, who are a rising force right now.”
Further reading:
- “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” by Omer Bartov
- “A Holocaust Scholar Meets with Israeli Reservists,” by Isaac Chotiner
- “How to Define Genocide,” by Isaac Chotiner
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:01
[theme music] This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
David Remnick· Host0:07
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In recent years, and especially since October 7th and the war on Gaza that followed, I've tried to hear out a range of voices on the question of Israel and Palestine on this show. We've heard from Palestinians like the poet Mosab Abu Toha, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his essays in The New Yorker. I've spoken with the writers Raja Shehadeh and Yossi Klein Halevi, the broadcaster Yonit Levy, the philosopher Avishai Margalit, the historian Rashid Khalidi. I asked peace negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley about how this conflict could possibly end. Now today, I'm in conversation with Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born historian of the Second World War and the Holocaust and a professor at Brown University. Bartov describes the terrible events of October 7th as a war crime. But as Israel's war ground on with a death toll that by now exceeds seventy thousand Palestinians, he wrote an essay in The New York Times that described the war as a genocide, which for an Israeli and a scholar of genocide was a startling thing and had an enormous impact on its audience. Omer Bartov has now published a book reappraising his homeland called Israel: What Went Wrong.