The war in Gaza unleashed by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel is ongoing, but it has already spawned a large number of books, covering the conflict from many different angles. One book that has deservedly received considerable critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic is Omer Bartov’s Israel: What Went Wrong?
Bartov, who is from a liberal Zionist family and is now a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, seeks to explain how Israel, once a beacon of hope for a persecuted minority, became a genocidal state and an international pariah. In his account, things began to go wrong from the start: Israel’s founding fathers never settled how a state which is home to multiple ethnic groups could remain at once Jewish and democratic – they left unresolved the tension between ethno-nationalism and pluralism.
A written constitution, with a bill of rights that enshrined the rights and freedoms of all individuals, could have set the new country on a different course, he argues: “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”. In short, the Israeli state’s moral and political degeneration could have been averted.
We can never know, of course. But there is good reason to doubt it.