Put pressure on Israel, demands Holocaust scholar

On 27 October, Israelis will decide in parliamentary elections whether Benjamin Netanyahu, their prime minister of many years, will stay in office. They are deeply divided. On the one hand, the country has seen huge protests recurring against Netanyahu in recent years. On the other hand, he enjoys the unwavering support of religious nationalists.

In the eyes of Omer Bartov, a renowned Holocaust scholar, Netanyahu’s tenure has been destructive. Bartov spelled out his assessment in the book “Israel – What went wrong”, which was published in April 2026. According to the historian, Israel is becoming an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist state that breaches international law and is thus turning itself into a pariah of the international community. He warns that liberal Israelis will increasingly leave the country, while a growing number of Jews, who are exposed to worsening antisemitism in the diaspora, will disown it.

Bartov sees evidence of this trend in the USA. In an interview with the magazine The New Yorker in April 2026, he welcomed that 60 % of US citizens had a negative view of Israel, arguing that the figure showed people were paying attention. At the same time, he said American Jewry must worry because not only legitimate criticism of Israel was growing, but so was right-wing antisemitism of the kind propagated by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Since the book was published, opinion polls have shown that Jews under the age of 35 in the USA increasingly oppose their parents’ Zionism.

A veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, Bartov teaches history at Brown University in Rhode Island. The professor argues that Zionism has changed almost beyond recognition since Israel was founded in 1948. The movement was initially secular and demanded a democratic state with equal rights for all, regardless of faith or mother tongue. Bartov emphasises that this aspiration was expressed in the country’s declaration of independence. In the meantime, however, right-wing extremists have won the upper hand, according to Bartov. They claim as much land as possible for Israel, intend to annex additional territory and insist on an exclusive state of and for Jews only. Bartov points out that the radicals base their demands on holy scriptures rather than a constitution.

On behalf of Israel’s government, war crimes and crimes against humanity are being perpetrated according to Bartov. Even before the Gaza war, he writes, the Netanyahu government’s campaign against the Supreme Court amounted to an attack on democracy.

Dangerous ethno-nationalism

Bartov sees a historical failure at the root of Israel’s dangerous drift towards ethno-nationalism. The country never adopted a constitution, even though that was promised at the beginning. The scholar insists that the attempt to fill the gap with a series of basic laws remained incomplete, which is why there is no bill of inalienable rights for everyone living under Israeli rule. He adds that colonialist propensities to grab ever more land were always evident, but it kept getting stronger.

In the historian’s eyes, the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank since 1967 has been especially harmful as the aggressive expansion of settlements poisoned Israel’s political culture. Bartov’s assessment is that Israel, as the sovereign power, today has jurisdiction over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Its laws, however, only insufficiently protect the rights of Palestinians in Israel – and hardly do so at all in the occupied territories. Human rights, Bartov adds, are disregarded.

Bartov acknowledges that terrorism has traumatised many Israelis and that many have become numb to Palestinian suffering after the Hamas atrocities of 7   October   2023, which he condemns as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The historian nonetheless insists that human rights and democracy are indispensable principles. He warns that military dominance cannot guarantee lasting security. Violence, after all, breeds hatred.

Reputation marked by genocide

At this point in history, Bartov sees no influential forces in Israel or the occupied territories who might lead an escape from downward-spiralling violence. In his view, international pressure is indispensable. He considers the peace plan of US President Donald Trump to be only a half-hearted beginning and would like to see Germany’s federal government do more to promote a peaceful solution. Bartov told D+C that he wished the German government would join the initiative to ban imports from settlements that Britain’s Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband launched in September and which is supported by other countries, including Canada, France and Denmark.

As the author spelled out in the book, it matters that the Federal Republic not only managed to become an internationally accepted partner once again after the Nazi genocide of European Jews, but also achieved reconciliation with Israel. The author worries that Israel’s international reputation is likely to be overshadowed by the genocide in Gaza for a long time, in a similar way as Germany’s was after 1945 by Nazi atrocities. As early as November 2023, Bartov had warned in the New York Times that Israel was on the verge of committing genocide and should exercise restraint.

Whether what is happening in Gaza indeed amounts to genocide is disputed among legal experts. For example, Kai Ambos, who teaches international criminal law at Göttingen University, argues that any verdict of genocide requires proof of genocidal intent, which is hard to obtain. Bartov disagrees. He points to Israeli leaders who spoke of “human animals”, promised to flatten Gaza and pledged to deny the people there food and water. In the Holocaust expert’s eyes, the subsequent destruction and the lack of humanitarian aid are sufficient proof that genocidal action has followed genocidal rhetoric in Gaza.

Book
Bartov, O., 2026: Israel – What went wrong? New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hans Dembowski was D+C’s editor-in-chief from 2004 to 2024.
dembowski@posteo.de