A Genocide Scholar Asks “What Went Wrong” in Israel

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episode: A Genocide Scholar Asks “What Went Wrong” in Israel
Date: April 17, 2026
Host: David Remnick
Guest: Omer Bartov — Professor of Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Brown University

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Episode Overview

This episode features a profound and challenging conversation between David Remnick and genocide scholar Omer Bartov, whose recent public statements and new book, Israel: What Went Wrong, have deeply unsettled Israeli and Jewish academic circles. Bartov, an Israeli-born historian specializing in the Holocaust and World War II, discusses his evolution from a Zionist upbringing and his military service to his current, critical perspective on Israel’s conduct in Gaza, which he now describes as genocide. The episode explores the definition and implications of genocide, the transformation of Israeli society and Zionism, and the necessity for outside pressure to bring about meaningful change in Israel-Palestine.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Omer Bartov’s Background and Formative Experiences

• Military Service & Awakening ([05:02]-[08:51])

  • Bartov describes being a young soldier in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, drawing parallels between the shock of the surprise attack then and on October 7, 2023.
  • He recounts his realization of the complexities and moral burdens of occupation while serving in occupied territories such as El Arish and Gaza.
  • His real political awakening came during the First Intifada (1987-88), especially when the IDF was ordered to “break their bones.” He compared this to the Wehrmacht’s descent during WWII, confronting then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin directly.

• Leaving Israel ([10:09]-[13:04])

  • Bartov shares his motivations for moving abroad: opposition to the occupation, personal alienation due to the First Intifada, dissatisfaction with Tel Aviv University, and an academic opportunity at Harvard.
  • He reflects on the significant wave of emigration from Israel after October 7, 2023, and expresses his own reluctance to visit or return due to the political climate.

“There were moments when I had that feeling, that uncanny feeling... this question that you suddenly ask yourself, what am I doing here? Why am I here? This is not my home.”
— Omer Bartov ([06:27])

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The Genocide Debate and the Gaza War

• Initial Hesitance & Red Lines ([13:04]-[18:09])

  • Bartov recounts writing an early op-ed (November 2023), warning of the potential for genocide due to Israeli rhetoric and patterns of action in Gaza. He identifies genocidal statements by Israeli officials and the mass destruction already visible.
  • He emphasizes the importance of identifying and preventing genocide before it happens—warning that the Biden administration’s inaction enabled Israel’s continuation.

• Defining Genocide ([15:58]-[18:09])

  • Bartov uses the UN definition: “acts carried out with the intent of destroying a particular group… as such.” Intent and implementation are the crucial factors.
  • He argues that the destructive pattern in Gaza, especially by May 2024, met this threshold.

“There is a rhetoric in Israel which added genocidal content... ‘They are human animals, and they will be treated as such.’ That kind of rhetoric... that scared me.”
— Omer Bartov ([14:04])

• Turning Point: The Attack on Rafah ([18:09]-[22:33])

  • The Israeli assault on Rafah in May 2024, with over a million displaced Gazans, is seen by Bartov as the shift from ethnic cleansing to genocide due to lack of escape routes and deliberate destruction.
  • He critiques the stated goals of destroying Hamas and freeing hostages as contradictory and ineffective, arguing that the method employed was ultimately genocidal.

• Ethnic Cleansing vs. Genocide ([20:39]-[22:33])

  • Bartov explains how ethnic cleansing can “flip” into genocide when a population has nowhere to flee—a common pattern in world history.

“Ethnic cleansing, which was what the Israeli government wanted to carry out, became genocide... Many genocides started like that.”
— Omer Bartov ([21:50])

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Reactions, Painful Realizations, and Public Pushback

• Personal Agony & Social Response ([22:33]-[24:02])

  • Bartov is deeply pained not only by Palestinian suffering but because the perpetrators are “children and grandchildren of my friends,” and that Israeli society is “in complete and total denial of what it had done.”
  • He notes some Israelis feel discomfort because “they know that what I’m saying is correct,” but many reject the label “genocide,” associating it exclusively with the Holocaust.

• Comparisons with Other Atrocities & Intent ([24:02]-[26:33])

  • Challenges the analogy to US firebombing in WWII or Vietnam by emphasizing the centrality of intent: the United States, after WWII, rebuilt Germany, while Israel has devastated and continues to confine Gaza.

“Israel’s goal in Gaza… is to create a kind of resource town for the rich and to have the Palestinians be the water carriers for that. Those who will clean the toilets, wash the dishes, and the rest of the time live in so-called humanitarian towns which would be akin to concentration camps.”
— Omer Bartov ([25:19])

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Zionism, Israeli Identity, and Prospects for Change

• Zionist Upbringing & Later Reflection ([30:46]-[34:37])
  • Discusses growing up in an unquestioned Zionist environment—“My existence in Israel was self-evident”—and gradually questioning this in light of two foundational denials: the negation of the Diaspora and the Nakba.
  • He reflects on how Israeli children of his generation grew up without ever questioning “what was there just before we were born? What happened to all those people?... Why were there now Jews from Morocco living in homes that had belonged to Arabs?”

“We were basically, my generation was raised in two denials: fundamental to Zionism. One was the negation of the Diaspora, and the other was the negation of the Nakba… we never asked what was there just before we were born.”
— Omer Bartov ([36:11])

• The Collapse of Liberal Zionism ([36:51]-[39:50])

  • Remnick and Bartov revisit the era of “liberal Zionists” and the Oslo hope of accommodation with Palestinians, culminating in the assassination of Rabin—which Bartov calls “the last moment of realism” before Israel’s turn towards “messianism.”
  • Bartov traces “what went wrong” back to Israel’s lack of a constitution, the transformation of Zionism into an extreme state ideology, and the slide into racism, militarism, and now genocide.

• Is Zionism Reformable? ([39:50]-[41:11])

  • Bartov argues starkly: “Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is.”
  • He calls for Israel’s reinvention as “a society of all its citizens,” rejecting ethno-nationalism as the founding principle.

“Anyone who supports [Zionism] becomes complicit in the acts of that particular political ideology.”
— Omer Bartov ([39:50])

• Outside Pressure: The Only Path? ([41:11]-[42:26])
  • Bartov asserts that change in Israel/Palestine will require “shock therapy” and significant external pressure—especially from the US—because neither society currently has the internal dynamic for meaningful transformation.

“What Israel needs right now is shock therapy... It has not still come to identify the limits of its own power, because those limits are in Washington, D.C.”
— Omer Bartov ([41:21])

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American Opinion and Antisemitism

• Decline in US Support, Rise of Real Antisemitism ([42:26]-[43:49])
  • Notes Pew research showing 60% of Americans hold a negative view of Israel, calling it “something quite good about American society” in that the public responds to reality on the ground.
  • Warns, however, about the rise of “real antisemitism” from the American far right, in contrast to the often-exaggerated accusations of antisemitism against the left.

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Notable Quotes

• “The sense of shock, the lack of preparedness, the arrogance that had been there before both events was very similar.” — Omer Bartov ([05:02])
• “I could see where this was heading...the same direction that I had researched and saw the Wehrmacht... had gone down that slippery slope of brutalizing an army.” — Omer Bartov ([08:00])
• “They shall have no water, they shall have no food, they will have no power. They are human animals...” — Omer Bartov recalling Israeli rhetoric ([14:04])
• “Intent matters. How do you discern intent?” — Omer Bartov ([25:19])
• “Genocide is not the Holocaust... What happened in Gaza is a particular genocide that happened in Gaza.” — Omer Bartov ([23:02])
• “Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is. But the state of Israel has to be reinvented.” — Omer Bartov ([39:53])
• “What Israel needs right now is shock therapy... [Its] limits are in Washington D.C...” — Omer Bartov ([41:21])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:12] — Introduction of Omer Bartov; his background, early beliefs, military service
• [06:27] — Military awakening; comparing Israel/IDF actions to historical atrocities
• [13:04] — Use of the term genocide, early warnings, Israeli rhetoric
• [15:58] — The definition of genocide, UN standards, “intent”
• [18:09] — The assault on Rafah as turning point
• [22:33] — Personal impact, societal denial, reaction to “genocide” label
• [24:02] — Comparisons to US warfare—intent and aftermath
• [30:46] — Teaching about Holocaust, Nakba, atmosphere on US campuses
• [33:24] — What Zionism meant to Bartov; growing up in Israeli denial
• [36:51] — Hopes of Oslo, Rabin’s assassination, decline of liberal Zionism
• [39:50] — “Zionism is not reformable”
• [41:21] — The role of US pressure, need for “shock therapy”
• [42:26] — American views of Israel, antisemitism in the US

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Episode Tone & Style

The conversation is somber, reflective, and unsparing, with Bartov displaying both rigorous academic detachment and raw personal grief. The tone is urgent—a call to recognize uncomfortable realities, with little illusion about the prospects for easy solutions but a clear insistence on the moral necessity of confronting them.

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For Listeners

This episode provides a rare insider’s analysis—from someone who has lived every side of the Israeli experience—on the transformation of Zionism, the ongoing war in Gaza, and the agonizing recognition of genocide by a Holocaust scholar. Bartov’s arguments are at once analytical and deeply personal, making this conversation essential listening for anyone seeking to understand the current crossroad for Israel, Palestine, and Jewish identity in the 21st century.

Transcript

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this is

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the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

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

[Interviewer]

like the poet Mossab Abu Toah, who

[David Remnick]

won a Pulitzer Prize for his essays

[Interviewer]

in the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

I've spoken with the writers Roger Shehada and Yossi Klein Halevi, the broadcaster Yonit Levi, the philosopher Avishai Marguli, the historian Rashid Khalidi. I asked peace negotiators Hussein Aga 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. Bartow 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 70,000 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. Bartowf was born in 1954 and as a kid he was unquestioning of mainstream Zionism. But in adulthood, as Israel began building settlements in the west bank in Gaza, his thinking began to evolve. By 1973, Bartov was a young soldier doing his required military service when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, the so called Yom Kippur War.

[Omer Bartov]

I was in uniform then Everybody was entirely shocked. I should tell you, the first thing that came to my mind on October 7, 2023, was October 6, 1973, because the sense of shock, the. The lack of preparedness, the arrogance that had been there before both events was very similar.

[Interviewer]

I don't think you were alone, right? I mean, I think most Israelis who are old enough to remember 73 made the parallel. And maybe Hamas was not acting by accident in its dates.

[Omer Bartov]

Yeah, he missed by one day. But, yes,

[David Remnick]

you were serving in the

[Interviewer]

IDF, which of course is legally required for citizens over 18. And you wrote about that time. You said this most vividly. I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of Arish, which was then occupied by Israel, pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people. It seems to me that your military service really did, as you said earlier, begin to shape you as a human being and as a scholar.

[Omer Bartov]

It did. You know, I was very young, and I was very well socialized. What does that mean? So I did what young men in Israel did. I did it without thinking twice. I wanted to be a combat soldier. I wanted to be an officer. I became one. I did my best. And I thought that I was generally. I thought I was doing the right thing. And then there were moments when I had that feeling, that uncanny feeling. And there were at that moment in El Arish, in northern Sinai, they were. You know, I served for about a year in Gaza. I served on the West Bank. So the sense, this question that you suddenly ask yourself, what am I doing here? Why am I here? This is not my home. It would come up, but it was not. I can't say that it was a fully developed political understanding. It was a feeling that something was not right. I'd say that my maybe moment of real awakening was only really in 1988, 87. 88 with the outbreak of the first intifada. That was a moment. I was still young. I was an officer in reserve. I had every likelihood that I would be caught up to go and break their bones, as we were told to do by the Minnesota defense at the time, Ishaq Rabin. And that was not something I wanted to do. And I was quite outraged at that point. I could see where this was heading. And that was when I had the cheek to write Rabin a little note saying that he was leading the IDF in the same direction that I had researched and saw the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, had gone down that slippery slope of brutalizing an army.

[Interviewer]

You wrote a note to Yitzhak Rabin, who was then Defense Minister, comparing the Israeli reaction to the first intifada, to the Wehrmacht, to the German army. Did you get a response?

[Omer Bartov]

I did. And I was shocked because I didn't actually write him a private letter. There was a postcard going around describing a particular atrocity of killing a Palestinian child. And I was so outraged that I took my pen and wrote in tiny letters that statement and sent it to him. And I had no expectation of ever hearing from him. And two weeks later, a formal letter from the Ministry of Defense arrived, and it had one line on it which said, how dare you compare the Wehrmachts to the idf? And I thought I must have hit the nerve. And my reading of this later on was that Rabin must have been thinking about this. It wasn't me who caused him to think about it, but that something was happening that he realized himself, despite his brutal orders at the time, that this was not a supportable condition, that this would indeed corrupt Israeli society.

[Interviewer]

You studied abroad. I believe you got your PhD in England.

[Omer Bartov]

Yeah, I was at Oxford, at St Anthony's College.

[Interviewer]

And I'm talking to you now. You're at Brown University. Why did you make your home abroad?

[Omer Bartov]

The first intifada broke out in December 1987. I was very frustrated with that event. I did not want to go and serve. I also didn't want to go to jail for not serving. I was also quite unhappy with the way the university where I was teaching then, Tel Aviv University, was operating, and I had an opportunity. I was offered a fellowship at Harvard for three years. So I never, certainly not in the early years, I didn't really think that I'd just left the country for good. But as time went by, both professionally, I found the United States to be a very good place for me. And politically, I felt increasingly alienated from how Israel was evolving.

[Interviewer]

How are you feeling about that now you're sitting in the United States where political tumult is extraordinary. Is it so much more congenial to you than life would have been in, say, Tel Aviv University?

[Omer Bartov]

Yeah, that's a good question. I think about that because Americans constantly,

[Interviewer]

when something horrible happens politically, especially in an extended way, whether it was during the Vietnam, they say, well, we're going to leave. We're going to go to Canada or wherever they're going to go, but they very rarely do, or they do it in very small numbers in Israel. One of the great fears about what's going on politically is that so many of the best and the brightest will in fact leave and have been leaving.

[Omer Bartov]

Yes, about 200,000 have left since October 7, which is a huge number for a small country. Yeah. And they're also among the best trained, the best educated elements of society. They're often not leaving for political reasons, mind you. They're leaving because the economy is in the dumps. They're leaving because the schools have become religious and they don't see a future for their children. I would not go back to Israel now. In fact, the last time I went to Israel was December 2024, and I've not been there since. And I don't intend to go there at least until the elections. And depending on the outcome of the elections, I'm not sure I would be safe there, for one thing, because I've been quite outspoken. And if anybody looks at what I wrote, and they may not.

[Interviewer]

Well, let's get into that. Just weeks after October 7th, very short period of time after you wrote an op ed in the New York Times saying there was no proof of a genocide, Israel's bombardment of Gaza, which had just really begun, and it was horrific, but it had just begun. And you wrote this. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.

[David Remnick]

So take me back to that moment.

[Interviewer]

What were you seeing then that suggested that there was, in fact, in your view, an imminent genocide that was preventable? I think you have called October 7th itself a war crime. It's not as if you're in the business of excusing what happened that day by any stretch of the imagination.

[Omer Bartov]

Look, I mean, what Hamas did, killing about 800 civilians, taking 251 hostages, was obviously a war crime and potentially a crime against humanity. There's no question about it. What troubled me by the time that article came out, I think on November 10, so just a month after these events, about 10,000 people in Gaza had already been killed by then, and the majority of them were assumed to be, and it's now we know who were civilians. And there was massive destruction of homes and other facilities in Gaza. So as I wrote there, there was already pretty good evidence that war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity, meaning killing of large numbers of civilians, were already occurring. But I also refer there to the fact that there was a rhetoric in Israel which added genocidal content. There were people in executive positions in the Israeli government in the Israeli military in the security establishment who were making genocidal statements, statements that could be also construed as incitement to troops. And Israel had conscripted over 300,000 reservists who were exposed to their civilians. And they're exposed to this kind of rhetoric. They shall have no water. They shall have no food. They will have no power. They are human animals, and they will be treated as such. That kind of rhetoric. Remember what Amalek did unto you? That scared me.

[Interviewer]

That's what Netanyahu said about Amalek being a figure in the Bible. But let me ask you, this is a crucial question. How do you define genocide?

[Omer Bartov]

The only definition that I find relevant in these cases exists. It's a definition that is in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which is a UN convention from 1948. It defines genocide as acts carried out with the intent of destroying a particular group. Could be a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, as such. So you have to show that there is an intent to destroy a group as a group, and you have to show that this intent is being implemented. And I was very worried in November that this was the way things were going. And the reason I really wrote this article was I was hoping that someone in the Biden administration would pay attention, because I was clearly aware then and now that Israel can only operate at this sort of volume of operation, this kind of intensity, with constant help from the United States in providing arms, in providing economic help, and in providing a diplomatic Iron Dome in protecting Israel, mostly in the Security Council through its veto power. The truth of the matter is that had President Biden acted in November or December of 2023 to stop Israel, had he told Netanyahu, you have two weeks to wrap this up, and if you don't, then you'll be on your own. Then we might have said that there were war crimes, there was terrible destruction, and it might have become a genocide, but it didn't. But the Biden administration did not act. And by May 2024, it became clear that this pattern of operations, a genocidal pattern of operation, which conformed to the statements that were made immediately after October 7th, was actually being implemented.

[Interviewer]

You write in your book that the May 2024 attack on Rafah.

[David Remnick]

Rafah is a city in the southern

[Interviewer]

end of the Gaza Strip.

[David Remnick]

That, to you, was the turning point.

[Interviewer]

What happened in that attack? And why did that change how you were viewing the question of genocide in

[Omer Bartov]

the city of Rafah? That before the war had a population of about a quarter of a million people. At that point in May, there were a million people. Half of the population of Gaza was concentrated in Rafah. And the reason was that they were displaced by the idf. The IDF told them to leave their homes for their own safety, because their neighborhoods, towns, villages would become areas of operations and move out, move south. Obviously, after that, the IDF actually demolished their homes, but they now were concentrated in large numbers in Rafah. So if the army were to move into the city, and that's what the Biden administration was saying, they would have killed the vast numbers of people. And so the administration said, don't do that. And the IDF said, don't worry about it. We'll take care of it. And they moved those people to Al Mawasid, which is the coastal area in southwestern Gaza, where there was no humanitarian infrastructure whatsoever. And then they moved into the city and flattened it. By August, Rafah is gone. It doesn't exist. What was the pattern of this entire operation? What was the IDF trying to accomplish? Because there was an official war goal, which was, our goal is to destroy Hamas and release the hostages. And there was, of course, a contradiction between the two, because, as we know, hostages died because of IDF operations. So trying to destroy Hamas actually, also.

[Interviewer]

But forgive me, what Netanyahu would say to you. I know if you were facing him, he would say, come on, they could have ended the whole thing by releasing the hostages. They didn't release the hostages. Hamas built a vast infrastructure underground to protect not the people of Gaza, but Hamas itself leaving. And that. They wanted this. They wanted this to encourage international outrage against the state of Israel. And you know the arguments, and you can fill them out yourself.

[Omer Bartov]

So the first argument is that if had they released the hostages, we would have stopped. But of course, Hamas was perfectly happy to release the hostages. That's what Hamas was offering. Release our prisoners, and we will release the hostages in an agreement. No, disarm was another question. But. But that's a different condition. So you have to decide what the condition is. Almost all the hostages who came back came back through agreement with Hamas. The idea that you would get them released through military operations failed miserably. The idea that you would destroy Hamas by destroying Gaza similarly failed miserably because Gaza has been destroyed. But Hamas is still there. It did not destroy Hamas. And in the process, the IDF carried out genocide of the population. The opportunity is to empty Gaza of its population. What they wanted to do was to ethnically cleanse Gaza. They didn't want genocide. They didn't want to kill them all. They wanted them to leave and go back. But of course. Exactly. There was no place for them to go. The big difference between The Nakba of 1948 and what happened in 23, 24, 25 in Gaza is that at the time the borders were open. In 48, they could flee. And they did flee to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Syria in 2023, 2024, Israel, of course, did not open its borders. Egypt did not open its borders, and they had no place to flee. And so ethnic cleansing, which was what the Israeli government wanted to carry out, became genocide. Not for the first time. This is historically quite common. Many genocides started like that.

[David Remnick]

Part of the reaction that you've got,

[Interviewer]

I imagine, to your use of the word genocide. I wonder what pain that caused you and what reaction you got, particularly from Israelis.

[Omer Bartov]

Look, Amina, I want to start by saying that we can say that our heart is broken by saying that, but first of all, our heart must be broken because of.

[Interviewer]

Of the suffering of the people who suffered in Gaza.

[Omer Bartov]

Above all of that suffering, and of the fact that that was caused by Jewish men and women, Israeli Jews, by people who are the children and grandchildren of my friends. That does break my heart. Yes. And the state is still, to this moment, in complete and total denial of what it had done. That does break my heart. Now, how do people respond to it? Some have sort of felt uncomfortable themselves because they know that what I'm saying is correct. They may not want to call it genocide because in Israel, people associate the word with the Holocaust. And they say, well, it doesn't look like the Holocaust, which it doesn't. What happened in Gaza is not the Holocaust. What happened in Gaza is a particular genocide that happened in Gaza. Very different from the Holocaust, but conforming to the definition of genocide by the un, which, as I said, is the only one that matters.

[Interviewer]

Another form of pushback that you get also is that, wait a minute, the United States in the Second World War and the firebombing of Dresden, of Tokyo, more recently in its war against isis, that it was unbelievably brutal and in the rearview mirror might not have been, quote, unquote, necessary in the military sense and certainly in the humanitarian sense. So why all this uproar around Israel?

[Omer Bartov]

So, yeah, I mean, there are many such questions. And you can also say, why do we talk about Israel or not about what Russia is doing or China is doing, or Somalia and so forth. But to this particular case, the US killed about 600,000 German civilians in open cities intentionally knowing that they were killing civilians with the idea that maybe that will make the civilians stand up against their own regime. They just tried it again in Iran, having not learned that lesson that it doesn't work that way. It never did. It never will.

[Interviewer]

Or Vietnam.

[Omer Bartov]

Or Vietnam. So why is that not genocide? The question is, what was the intent? And as I said, in genocide, intent matters. How do you discern intent? When the US occupied Germany, what did it do to the Germans? It did the Marshall Plan in Germany. It invested money in Germany to rebuild Germany. It set to work to reconstruct Germany. Israel's goal in Gaza. You can see what its goal in Gaza is right now. Gaza. Now the population of Gaza lives in less than half of the territory. It's unhoused, it's living in tents. It has no infrastructure. They're living there like dogs and nobody is doing anything about it. And the plan, the future of the genocide in Gaza seems to be to create a kind of resource town for the rich and to have the Palestinians be the water carriers for that. Those who will clean the toilets, wash the dishes and the rest of the time live in so called humanitarian towns which would be akin to concentration camps.

[Interviewer]

At the same time in the west bank, you're seeing more and more settler violence that's countenanced by the right wing government. Do you think a change in government in Israel would make any difference at all?

[Omer Bartov]

Even those who are supposed to be left of center in that opposition, which may hopefully become a coalition, have no plan whatsoever that I have seen as to what to do with the issue of Palestine and Palestinians.

[David Remnick]

You're referring to Yair Golan and Yair

[Omer Bartov]

Golan and yeah, I mean, none of Gantz or Lapid or none of them. So what difference would it make for the Palestinians in the short run? I don't think it'll make any difference.

[David Remnick]

I'm speaking with the historian Omer Bartov. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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[David Remnick]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and we've been speaking today with Omer Bartov. He's a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and he's written many books about the Second World War. His new book asks profound and troubling questions about his homeland. It's called what Went Wrong? I'll continue my conversation now with Omer Bartov.

[Interviewer]

You teach at Brown, and specifically I want to talk about another word that evokes a lot of emotions. We just discussed genocide. Here's the other one. Zionist. Zionist. When I was growing up, I'm just a few years younger than you, meant something quite different. It had a very different electrical charge to it depending on what community you were sitting in. What does it mean to the students that you teach? What does it mean to you?

[Omer Bartov]

I teach right now on the Holocaust and the Nakba and I have a large number of students. I have Muslim students, I have Jewish students, I have Palestinian students, Pakistani regular American students. And I think that they have different opinions. They're open minded, they want to know they're not worried when they come to class initially they're sort of uncomfortable with each other and they don't know what's going to happen. And as they're exposed to more readings and to more knowledge, they open up and they just want to understand. And I think that's the great thing about a university and that's what this current atmosphere that exists, that tries to control teaching, that tries to tell you what you can teach or what you can't teach, is destructive of education. Quite a part of understanding this particular event. I don't have great faith in universities right now and university administrations right now. They're cowering and faculty have never been known to be the most courageous people in the world. So I worry about it. More students want to come to this class because they feel a need to understand and there's very little on offer because so many faculty are afraid of teaching about Israel, Palestine. They're afraid of being condemned as anti Semitic. And I frankly don't give a damn what people think.

[Interviewer]

I think you've got that pretty covered though on the anti Semitic end by being an Israeli Jew. Is that a kind of shield against that kind of attack?

[Omer Bartov]

I don't know because my administration tells me that they get hundreds of emails telling them to fire me, that I'm in the pay of Hamas and Qatar and that I'm an anti Semite and self hating Jew at the same time.

[Interviewer]

I'm afraid I get the same, I'm afraid I get the same when I write from there. So let's get to the word Zionism.

[Omer Bartov]

I grew up in a Zionist home, you know, and I did everything that a good Zionist Israeli, which is very different from Zionist American does.

[Interviewer]

Tell the listeners what that meant to you.

[Omer Bartov]

My existence in Israel was self evident. I had no questions about it. I was born into it. I ran barefoot on the sand, I spoke Hebrew as my first language. It was my home, it was my place. And I did the things that you were supposed to do. I went to the army, I did Everything as a good Israeli, I didn't even think of myself truly, neither as a Jew nor as a Zionist. I was an Israeli young man.

[David Remnick]

But did you have some conception somewhere

[Interviewer]

in the back of your mind we discussed this earlier, that the discussion about this was very scant, that had your mother, for example, stayed in Poland a bit longer, she would have ended up in Auschwitz. And that Zionism at a certain point, and we'll talk about it in terms of the Palestinians in a second, was that this was the last refuge available. Because it's not as if the rest of the world was welcoming Jewish refugees, including this country.

[Omer Bartov]

By the way, look, I mean, when I was growing up, this was all very abstract. I knew all these arguments. Having received the education that I had, I could not understand why Jews were living anywhere else. It's not only about those who, you know, got out at the last time or didn't from Europe. I could not understand why Jews were living in America. I went to Germany and I was asking German Jews, why are you living here? You should live in Israel. So to me it was completely self evident. The more the deeper understanding. When I was writing about my mother's hometown, I truly realized that had my grandfather not made a decision in 1935 to take his three children and his wife and move to Palestine and he was dishonest, I would not have been born. Because I know exactly what happened to those who stayed behind. And so yes, of course, it was an argument that we, my generation, internalized. So, you know, as I write in the book, I mean, we all belong to mutilated families and we knew it vaguely, but we also took our. One has to understand that we took our existence as self evident, like all children do. And the question of why are we here and what did it take to make this our place? How much violence was involved in making us be born as a self evident consequence of that act that came later. We were basically, my generation was raised in two denials, two fundamental denials fundamental to Zionism. One was the Shlilatha galut, as it's called in Hebrew, the negation of the Diaspora. And the other was the negation of the Nakba. The word of course, didn't even exist at the time or not for us, but that we never asked what was there just before we were born? What happened to all those people? Why were they gone? Why were there now Jews from Morocco living in homes that had belonged to Arabs? What was this house, the sheikh's house called?

[David Remnick]

But there was also a period, and

[Interviewer]

I know you were in transition in your own life. There was also a period in the 80s and into the 90s when there were a lot of people that would consider themselves liberal Zionists who were becoming or were already quite aware of the Nakba of Palestinian nationalism alongside of Zionism of Israelism. And we're very hopeful about call it a deal, call it an accommodation, call it a two state solution, all of which seems incredibly naive or quaint or misbegotten in the rearview mirror. But there was this period. The title of your book is what Went Wrong. And we are a long way from the psychology and some of the political realities of 20 odd years ago, before the second intifada. Do you think it's possible for Israel to change its course profoundly enough so that you would think of it in a different way?

[Omer Bartov]

So look, I mean, first of all, I don't think he was naive. I think he was realistic at the time. And yes, I knew many of those new historians, you know, Ilan Pape, who is an old friend with whom, you know, we shared a room in Oxford,

[Interviewer]

or Benny Morris, who's gone to the other political side.

[Omer Bartov]

Benny Morris went to the dark side. Yeah. And yes, and he was in many ways the last moment of realism as opposed to messianism, which is what has taken over Israel now. So it was not naive, it was the best way to go. It culminated with the assassination of Rabin. And I remember it well because I was sitting there and holding my six month old daughter and crying and I didn't even like Rabin. It wasn't that, you know, he was the last hope and he could have accomplished something because of his own record, because of his standing in Israeli society. And I thought this is over for a generation. And I was wrong because it's more than a generation now and things are only going the wrong way. So what went wrong is. I try to answer that in the book. You can go back to 1948. One of the things that went deeply wrong is that Israel never had a constitution. And, and that Zionism became a state ideology, it became something else and it kept transforming itself into what it is today, which is an insupportable ideology of extremism, of militarism, of racism and eventually of genocide. Anyone who supports it becomes complicit in the acts of that particular political ideology.

[David Remnick]

So you think Zionism is not reformable.

[Omer Bartov]

Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is. But the state of Israel has to be reinvented and it cannot be reinvented according to this Kind of ethno nationalist principle that has taken hold of it. It was always there. Of course, Zionism is an ethno national ideology, but ethno national states have reformed themselves over time. And Israel has gone the other way. Well, I mean, you look at the states of the interwar period. Poland, for instance, was an anti Semitic racist country, went through a lot of drama. Poland today, despite the fact that it does have also strong ethno nationalists, is a very different country from what it was at the time. But Israel as a society, there has to be a society of all its citizens, as it was said at the time, in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, Eretz Calle Zocher, a country of all its citizens. That was the big hope for Palestinians too. That was when Hamas was less powerful. That was when the messianic national religious were less powerful, but they took over.

[Interviewer]

I think for what you're describing to happen, a lot more has to happen than just that. Bibi Netanyahu was not on the political scene.

[Omer Bartov]

Absolutely.

[Interviewer]

What has to happen.

[Omer Bartov]

So, I mean, it is important to be rid of Netanyahu. But as I write in the book, I don't think that Israel and the Palestinians right now have the dynamic, the internal dynamic to move forward beyond that. There are forces in Israel, there are forces among Palestinians, there are wonderful people, creative people, hopeful people. But they cannot rise to the top without pressure from the outside. What Israel needs right now is shock therapy. And despite all the horrors that it has inflicted on others and has also experienced itself since October 7, it has not still come to identify the limits of its own power, because those limits are in Washington D.C. and it's there that those limits have to be set. And it's only then that some forces in Israel will start generating a new way of thinking about Israeli society.

[Interviewer]

60% of Americans now have a negative view of Israel, according to Pew. How will that affect the kind of situation that you're describing?

[Omer Bartov]

Well, for one thing, it says something quite good about American society, that Americans have actually responded to the reality on the ground. I think there is growing criticism of American support for these kind of Israeli policies, both on the American left and on the American right. I would say, however, that some of the forces that are coming now to the fore within the American right, within the MAGA movement, are also anti Semitic. And what they're speaking about is the control that Israel has or the Jews have on American policies. And that's why they want to pull away from Israel. I think 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 real not alleged antisemitism of the left, which is mostly an invention of supporters of Israel, but actual antisemitism from the Tucker Carsons of the world, who are a rising force right now.

[David Remnick]

Professor Bartov, thank you so much.

[Omer Bartov]

Thank you.

[David Remnick]

Omer Bartov is a professor at Brown University. What Went Wrong has just been published. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thank you for listening. See you next time.

[Narrator]

The new yorker radio hour is a co production of wnyc studios and the new yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by meryl garbus of tune yards, with additional music by lucas mitchell. This episode was produced by max balton, adam howard, david krasnow, jeffrey masters, louis mitchell, jared paul and ursula sommer, with guidance from emily botin and assistance from michael may, david gable, alex barish, victor guan and alejandra deckett. The new yorker radio hour is supported in part by the cherina endowment.

[Omer Bartov]

Foreign.

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