A review of Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov; 243 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 2026)
Omer Bartov, a prominent historian at Brown University, was born to a solidly left-wing Zionist family in Kibbutz ‘Ein Hahoresh, south of Haifa, in 1954. (By chance, I was also born in ‘Ein Hahoresh, six years earlier; also by chance, both of us did our IDF service in the Nahal (Infantry) Corps and both at some point were wounded. And both of us did our PhDs in Oxbridge in European history).
Omer’s father, Hanoch Bartov, was born in Palestine in 1926 to Polish Jewish immigrants and joined the Haganah, the Jewish community’s militia, at the age of 13. During the Second World War Hanoch served in the British Army in Europe. In 1948 he fought with the Haganah/IDF and was wounded in Jerusalem. After the war he turned into a full-time writer and journalist, publishing nine novels and a variety of other works, including a two-volume biography of the IDF’s chief of general staff in the 1973 Yom Kippur/October War, David (“Dado”) Elazar. Hanoch won the Israel Prize for literature in 2010 and died in 2016 (he once told an interviewer that he refused to die before getting the Israel Prize, Israel’s highest award).
Omer Bartov dedicated Israel: What Went Wrong? to the memory of his father, whom he called “the Last Zionist.” Omer writes that his father had “insisted with growing vehemence that Benjamin Netanyahu was the great destroyer of Zionism.” But Hanoch, I am sure, would not have approved of this hyper-critical take on Israel’s history, as he had not approved of his son’s emigration to the US in 1988–1989. (Omer devotes a terse sentence to the matter—Hanoch was “never quite reconciled with my departure from Israel.”) Traditionally, Zionists referred to emigration from Palestine/Israel as yerida (a descent), as opposed to immigration to the Holy Land, aliya (an ascent). Yerida carried a tinge of betrayal, though today emigrating from Israel—and tens of thousands have left the country these past three years under the impact of the war—generally carries no emotional-judgmental baggage. But I have often found Israelis who long ago moved to America spouting criticism of Israel with great vehemence, perhaps in retroactive “justification” of their yerida.
Omer Bartov is a historian of the Holocaust and the travails of Eastern-Central Europe before, during and immediately after the Second World War. His path-breaking books on the German Army’s participation in the murder of Eastern Europe’s Jews (and millions of Slavs)—Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1992) and The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (2001)—radically changed accepted wisdom about the Wehrmacht’s role in the Holocaust. But he has never produced scholarship on Zionist-Israeli history.
