Omer Bartov: What Went Wrong?

Dr. Verena Buser and Avraham Russell Shalev

Dr. Verena Buser is an academic advisor and deputy to the Commissioner for Combating Antisemitism in the Federal state of Brandenburg and Research Associate of the Holocaust Studies Program at Western Galilee College, Israel

Adv. Avraham Russell Shalev is a senior fellow at Kohelet Policy Forum and specializes in international public law. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill University in Canada, and a Bachelor of Law, and Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Bar-Ilan University.

The Scholar’s Shift: From History to Indictment

Omer Bartov is an Israeli Holocaust historian at Brown University, one of the eight Ivy League universities in the United States. In his new book, “Israel: What Went Wrong?”, he claims that Zionism transformed from a movement for Jewish liberation into a racist and exclusivist Jewish supremacism, fueling genocide in Gaza. Ironically, Bartov’s indictment of his former homeland doesn’t meet the ideological purity test for many of his colleagues¹, as Bartov entertains the possibility that Zionism may have once been legitimate.

The Rafah Pivot: Methodology or Ideology?

According to Bartov, while concerned about the human cost of Israel’s operations in Gaza, he initially rejected allegations of Israeli genocide. The turning point for Bartov was Israel’s May 2024 operation in Rafah. He argues that the subsequent razing of Rafah demonstrated Israel’s genocidal intentions and policies all along. That Bartov sees the Rafah operation as the key moment is worth noting, as it underscores his flawed methodology and shaky conclusions. For Bartov, Hamas or any other Islamist terror organization in the Strip is barely a player in Gaza. Although he acknowledges the brutality of Hamas’s 7.10.23 massacre, Hamas’s continued rule over Gaza and its large terrorist army play no role in explaining Israeli actions in Gaza.

He began warning of the dangers of “genocide in Gaza” at the beginning of the war, while simultaneously providing concrete examples of how it could be prevented. Six days after the massacres, he told the German Berliner Zeitung that the attack by Hamas must be seen as an attempt to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians, claiming that “Netanyahu sowed the wind that Israel has now had to reap as a storm”.²

This perspective remains one-sided; the blame and responsibility for October 7 and the entire Middle East conflict lie primarily with the Israeli side. Islamist massacres are contextualized in a way that risks relativizing them, and this opinion remains an ahistorical assessment of historical events. This pattern continues in his perception of the Gaza war. For him, there is no harsh, challenging war in a dense urban environment—only alleged Israeli genocide and hostility toward the people of Gaza, while combatants are characterized as innocent and traumatized victims.

According to Bartov, Rafah “demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards.” In fact, the Rafah operation shows that Bartov relies on his academic prestige rather than undertaking a comprehensive empirical assessment of Israel’s actions. His assessment is purely ideological, as evidenced by his total lack of engagement with research rejecting genocide allegations.³

Strategic Realities and Military Logic in Rafah

Rafah was the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip and a key point in controlling the border with Egypt. While Bartov calls the Rafah operation genocidal, Israel successfully evacuated almost the entire civilian population of Rafah, close to a million people, before moving in. The UN warned that an Israeli operation could kill hundreds of thousands of people – in reality, fewer than a hundred died.⁴

Losses in a war do not inherently constitute a genocidal campaign. Rafah sits on the border with Egypt and was Hamas’s economic lifeline. Smugglers brought weapons, cash, and goods through the crossing and in tunnels going to Egypt. Dr. Gilad Noam, Israel’s Deputy Attorney General for International Law, explained before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in May 2024 that close to 700 tunnels were identified in Gaza, with 50 crossing into Egypt. Hundreds of rockets had been fired into Israel from Rafah. In February 2024, Israel rescued two hostages held by Hamas in Rafah. Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7^th massacre, was eventually killed in Rafah, highlighting its strategic importance to Hamas.

For Bartov, Israel’s demolition of Rafah was part of a plan to “destroy the conditions for life” in Gaza with the intent to make it allegedly uninhabitable. The truth, however, is far more grounded and dictated by military logic. Rafah’s location, immediately abutting the Philadelphia corridor and Egypt, made it almost impossible for Israel to prevent continued smuggling. With Egypt on one side and the Mediterranean on the other, Israel could not build an underground barrier to stop the smuggling. The Philadelphia corridor is a narrow 500-meter strip along the border with Egypt, making it practically indefensible, especially against RPG attacks. Military strategists note that it is impossible to maintain a buffer zone when an enemy town is right there.

Soldiers who served in Rafah will attest that many of the homes were booby-trapped by Hamas. At this late stage in the war, the Israeli army had developed tactics to identify traps and quickly took down buildings suspected of being rigged. Hamas’ tunnel network was so intricate that it became impossible to destroy them one by one. By demolishing the buildings above the tunnels, Israel aimed to isolate the terrorists inside and force them to come out. Demolitions also protected Israeli soldiers from ambush, as combatants emerging from tunnels were completely disoriented by the changes in the urban landscape.

Rhetoric and Misinterpretation

Like many commentators promoting the genocide allegation, Bartov builds his case on the same three misquoted statements by Israeli senior leaders. On October 9^th, 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a complete siege of Gaza City and stated that Israel was fighting “human animals”.⁵ Bartov sees this as dehumanizing Palestinians, even though the full quote explicitly refers to Hamas and “the ISIS of Gaza”. Three weeks after the massacre, Prime Minister Netanyahu called on Israelis to “remember what Amalek did to you”. As a Holocaust scholar, Bartov should know that Amalek refers to the epitome of evil and hatred in traditional Jewish discourse, not a call to genocide.⁶ Bartov also finds genocidal incitement in Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement acknowledging the uncomfortable but accurate reality of mass Palestinian support for Hamas and the killing of Jews. He, of course, omits the rest of Herzog’s words in which he stresses that Israel operates according to the laws of war.⁷ To add to the usual narrative, Bartov quotes Nissim Vaturi, a Knesset backbencher with a controversial history of public statements.

The Nazification of Israel: Gaza and Holocaust Inversion

Bartov’s book is replete with Holocaust Inversion and the familiar clichés about Jews and Israel. Prominent among these cliches is the claim that Jews are so obsessed with their own suffering that they are oblivious to the suffering of others. For example, in German magazine SPIEGEL, he stated at the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025 that ‘the Holocaust serves Jewish Israelis to perceive themselves as existing outside any moral and ethical boundaries that apply to other people’.⁸

Repeated Holocaust analogies—allegedly published as a “moral warning”—frame Israel as a Nazi State. For the everyday lives of most Jewish communities and Israelis in the Diaspora, it is precisely these inversions that label them as “new Nazis”. These labels then legitimize violence against Jews, identified with absolute evil.⁹ As Bartov writes, “Israeli indifference to the killing of Palestinian children is also the product of an overwrought, self-indulgent, pornographic preoccupation with one’s own pain and suffering.

Even worse than indifference, Jewish suffering has reportedly become an excuse to inflict pain on others. In Bartov’s view, not only haven’t Jews learned the moral lessons of the Holocaust—they’ve learned the wrong moral lessons. He describes an internalized, irrational terror of another Holocaust that leads to “lashing out” at any perceived threat. Israelis defending their actions in Gaza are compared to Wehrmacht soldiers rationalizing killing Jews. Israelis carrying on their lives are said to be reminiscent of “Nazi commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss living with his family in a well-kept house just outside the camp”. Bartov goes to great lengths to emphasize the equations of today’s Jews with their past genocidaires.

Unbalanced Grief: Why Only One Side Has Agency in Bartov’s View

Bartov is disturbed that Israelis celebrated the IDF’s rescue of Noa Argamani and three other hostages from the Nusseirat camp, despite the cost in Palestinian lives. For him, this proves that Israelis have thoroughly dehumanized Palestinians. Israelis blame Hamas for the death and destruction in Gaza, yet the growing casualties never prompt Israelis to reconsider their support for the war. However, we are unaware of any case in which a country stopped a war it believed to be justified and in self-defense because of the cost to enemy civilians.

For some reason, Bartov never applies the same standard of concern for civilian suffering to Palestinians. In Gaza, news of the massacre of Israelis was met with significant celebration and the distribution of candy. The video of Hamas terrorists parading the half-naked body of Israeli-German victim Shani Louk, surrounded by Gazans who were cheering and spitting on her, is indelibly imprinted in the memories of many Israelis. In fact, many “ordinary” Gazan civilians took part in the massacre and looting in southern Israel on October 7th. Senior figures in the Palestinian Authority praised the attacks and openly supported terror against Israelis. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called it the “greatest day in Palestinian history”. Few Palestinians in the territories or abroad express any revulsion or opposition to the slaughter of Israeli civilians. Palestinian activists worldwide marched under banners reading “glory to our martyrs”.

Existential Threats and Holocaust Trauma

Bartov bemoans the “lachrymose view of Jewish history” that Zionism has instilled in Israelis. Zionists warned that Europe would soon violently expel its Jews, and Israelis continue to maintain an attitude of “the world is against us.” Bartov fails to mention that the Zionists were historically accurate in their diagnosis of the Jewish predicament and that Europe did become a vast Jewish slaughterhouse. Neither did state persecution end with the defeat of the Nazi State. Since the end of the Holocaust, Jews have suffered legal discrimination, marginalization, and expulsion in Arab countries, Iran, and the Soviet Union. The truth of the Zionist historical analysis should in fact prompt a historian like Bartov to treat it with seriousness.

Instead, for Bartov, Israel’s response to October 7th is an acting out of unresolved Jewish trauma over the Holocaust and persecution. In this narrative, Hezbollah, with its arsenal of hundreds of thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli cities and its elite Radwan force trained for a similar invasion of northern Israel, simply does not exist. Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and “ring of fire” around Israel are treated as mere PTSD over the Nazis.

Bartov claims that there is a “lack of any substantial evidence” of rising antisemitism since October 7. In any case, “Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere, a nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians are making even some of its erstwhile supporters shrink from it in discomfort, or horror and disgust.” Bartov writes that antisemitism has always come uniquely from the Right, ignoring the venerable traditions of Jew-hatred from the Left’s liberal and socialist-revolutionary branches.¹⁰ The non-existent rise in antisemitism will come as a surprise to the Jews murdered in a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur 2025, or to those recently stabbed in London’s Golders Green. Bartov’s ideological blinders ignore antisemitism in the Islamic world and the link between antisemitism in the Middle East and Nazi antisemitism.¹¹

Throughout the book, Israelis are the only actors with agency, while Palestinians are purely passive. He fails to analyze the broader context of the fight against terror and the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict. This is not surprising, given that he has never researched Palestinian issues himself, instead adopting Palestinian narratives and a narrow definition of the “Palestinian cause”.¹² His shortcomings are most evident when he talks about the Palestinians, focusing only on the Israeli perspective. Bartov may be inspired by Edward Said, who wrote about Palestinians under occupation being as powerless as Jews were in the 1940s. Unsurprisingly, he never acknowledges critical Palestinian initiatives that criticize the Israeli government without demonizing Zionism.¹³

The “Peace Trap”: Why Israeli Attitudes Hardened

Bartov laments that “Israeli reluctance to make territorial concessions has increasingly hardened” since the 1990s, without ever mentioning what might have caused that hardening. As Yuval Bloomberg compellingly demonstrates in his Hebrew book, The Oslo Trap, the Oslo “Peace Process” led to the intensification of Palestinian terror against Israelis, while Yasser Arafat refused to condemn the attacks and played footsie with Hamas.¹⁴ In 2000-2001, Yasser Arafat walked away from an offer for a demilitarised Palestinian state on 92 percent of Judea and Samaria and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip and launched the Second Intifada.¹⁵

This one-sidedness is characteristic of Bartov’s entire historical analysis. He calls for the need to study the “Nakba” as the twin catastrophe of the Holocaust. Israel’s supposed expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs during its founding is one of the country’s original sins, motivated by its racist Zionist ideology. Social scientist Ahmed Albaba commented on the term Nakba: ‘The term Nakba first appeared during the 1948 war. In Arab-Palestinian discourse, it serves as an instrument of power in the battle of narratives and the struggle for interpretive authority — that is, for the meaning and interpretation of the war and its consequences.”

Bartov attempts to show that Israel’s Jewish character is fatally at odds with democracy. He writes that “in one of its least sincere and most revealing paragraphs, the Declaration [of Independence] makes an appeal… to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions,” even while the Nakba rages on. Of course, Israel’s war of Independence, both in its 1947 Civil War and 1948 inter-state phase, was launched by five Arab States. The Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states rejected the UN’s Partition Plan, believing Jewish statehood to be a grave injustice. The first casualties following the Partition Vote were Jewish – on 30 November 1947, an Arab band attacked a Jewish bus near Kfar Syrkin, killing five; the attack was followed by another attack on a bus coming from Hadera, killing two; later that morning, Arab snipers fired from Jaffa to southern Tel Aviv, killing one. On 2 December 1947, an Arab mob emerged from Jerusalem’s Old City, attacking and setting fire to Jewish shops and passerbys at Mamilla Street. The mob was led by Arab High Committee officials.

As Benny Morris explains, “by the end of March 1948 most of the wealthy and middleclass families had ﬂed Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and most Arab rural communities had evacuated the heavily Jewish Coastal Plain; a few had also left the Upper Jordan Valley. Most were propelled by fear of being caught up, and harmed, in the ﬁghting; some may have feared life under Jewish rule. It is probable that most thought of a short, temporary displacement with a return within weeks or months, on the coattails of victorious Arab armies or international diktats.” Haifa’s Mayor Levy literally pleaded with the city’s Arabs not to leave. Within ten days of Haifa’s surrender, almost all of Haifa’s Arabs left to Acre, Beirut, Nazareth or Nablus. When the war ended, Israel’s leaders had little desire to allow Arab refugees to return as they were seen as having instigated the conflict.

Bartov has a long chapter in which he argues that had Israel adopted a constitution in the 1950s, its democratic character may have triumphed over its Jewish exclusivism. Bartov, though, never demonstrates precisely where Israel’s Jewishness violates democracy. Ironically, his main example is the 2000 Ka’adan case, in which the Supreme Court struck down discriminatory land policies.

Conclusion: Academic Malpractice Dressed-up as Moral Warning

Ultimately, critics view Bartov’s analysis as a significant academic failing, in which rigorous empirical assessment is sacrificed for ideological purity. By systematically stripping Palestinians of their agency and reducing a complex existential conflict to a one-sided morality play, he becomes a political activist whose conclusions are seen as ahistorical. His “Holocaust Inversion” and “genocide narrative” do not merely offer intellectual ammunition to those seeking Israel’s destruction; they are argued to betray the very history he claims to protect. In Bartov’s world, facts such as the 700 tunnels in Rafah or the rejection of peace offers are treated as inconvenient, easily exorcised to maintain a narrative that casts the Jewish state as a singular moral failure. This persistent focus reveals far more about the author’s own lens than about the reality of the Middle East.

Kindly note that the opinions expressed by the authors of ISGAP Flashpoint are their own and do not necessarily reflect or receive endorsement from ISGAP. ISGAP believes in providing a platform for diverse perspectives to encourage open dialogue on these important matters.

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ISGAP Flashpoint

ISGAP Flashpoint features articles designed to foster public debate about critical issues related to developments in global antisemitism, with a focus on the contemporary context.

Dr. Verena Buser and Avraham Russell Shalev