There’s an image worth holding right at the outset. A young man, born in a kibbutz, raised in Tel Aviv, carries a rifle through the Yom Kippur War. He survives. He studies. He becomes, over the following decades, one of the world’s foremost scholars of genocide — the kind of scholar who spends years in the archives of a small town in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, reconstructing the life and death of a community whose destruction also killed most of his own family. He learns, with the rigour and the grief that only proximity to such material can produce, exactly what it looks like when a state decides that a category of human beings has forfeited its right to exist.
And then, in the eighth decade of his life, he looks at the state he was born into and once fought for, and concludes that he is watching it happen all over again.
This is Omer Bartov. “Israel: What Went Wrong?” is his reckoning — with the state, with the movement that built it, with the tradition he carries in his body, and with himself. The personal courage required to arrive at this conclusion, and to publish it, from inside the Jewish intellectual community, in this political moment, should not be underestimated. Neither should the scholarly precision with which he makes the case. This is not polemic. It is the careful, sorrowful work of someone who has spent a lifetime learning to see clearly and who has now turned that capacity on something he would, given any other outcome, have preferred not to see.
His book certainly earns its place in the literature. But its title is wrong.
Not factually wrong. Not dishonest. Wrong in the deeper sense that a question can be wrong: it already contains, within its own framing, the answer it will find and the answer it will be unable to find. “What went wrong” assumes that something once went right — that there was a path on which this ended differently, a turn off that was missed, a betrayal of origins that a more moral leadership, a written constitution, a more honest accounting with the Nakba might have prevented. Bartov believes this. He says explicitly that the outcome was not inevitable. Israel, he argues, could have evolved in a more humane direction after 1948.
He may be correct. But the civilisational frame — the one that asks not what went wrong with Zionism but what goes wrong, systematically and predictably, with any emancipatory movement embedded in the civilisational order of industrial economism — suggests something much more uncomfortable: that what happened to Zionism was not a deviation from a viable path. It was a convergence toward the destination that industrial economism prepares for every project of collective self-determination that it absorbs and does not transform.
The pattern has a structure. A movement is born out of genuine suffering, animated by genuine ideals — liberation, dignity, the refusal of victimhood, the demand for a place in the world. In its early stages it carries the energy that suffering distilled into purpose always carries: moral clarity, solidarity, a sense of what it is fighting against that’s clear enough to hold a diverse coalition together. This is Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is also, mutatis mutandis, a dozen other liberation movements of the modern period.
Then the movement achieves partial success. It gains statehood, a territory, an institution, a recognised place within the existing order. And here the civilisational logic begins its quiet work. Because the existing order — the order of industrial economism, of growth as the measure of all things, of security defined as the elimination of threat rather than the cultivation of conditions in which threat does not arise — doesn’t transform the movement. It absorbs it. It offers the movement its tools: the bureaucracy, the military, the economy, the legal architecture, the diplomatic protocols. And the movement, exhausted by its long struggle and intoxicated by its partial victory, accepts.
What follows is not sudden. It takes decades. But its direction is consistent. The founding ideals — the humanitarianism, the commitment to the rule of law, the promise of equal rights, the claim to represent a better kind of politics — do not disappear immediately. They persist in the language, in the founding documents, in the speeches, in the self-image of the educated liberal class that continues to believe it’s living in the country its founders intended to build. Meanwhile the actual architecture of power moves in a different direction entirely.
Bartov documents this movement with great precision in the Israeli case: the unwritten constitution, the promise of equal citizenship never attempted, the occupation deepening year by year, the settler movement growing from a fringe to a governing coalition, the Holocaust converted from a wound into a weapon. He reads it as a series of choices — bad choices, missed opportunities, the steady erosion of democratic norms under pressure from ethno-nationalist forces. All of this is accurate. But choices made consistently in one direction across seven decades, by governments of left and right alike, begin to look less like a series of bad choices and more like the expression of a structural logic. The question is not why Israeli leaders kept making these choices. The question is what kind of system made these the choices most available to them.
The theological dimension is where the analysis must go, and where Bartov — despite his courage and his scholarship — reaches a limit that his own formation may make difficult to cross.
He identifies correctly that the Holocaust was converted into a state ideology, that “never again” became a lens that transformed every threat into an existential one, and that this conversion produced a kind of moral blank cheque: whatever was done in the name of Jewish survival was by definition justified, because the alternative was the gas chambers. This is an important observation, and it explains much of the impunity with which Israeli leaders have operated for decades.
But underneath this there’s a more specific theological mechanism, one that’s not about the Holocaust at all. It is older, more precise, and considerably more dangerous — because it’s not, at its core, a response to trauma. It’s a framework for sacred violence that predates the twentieth century by three thousand years and that has been deliberately reactivated by the religious nationalist movement now occupying the centre of Israeli political power.
The invocation of Amalek — deployed by Netanyahu in the immediate aftermath of October 7, framing the people of Gaza in the role of the people God commanded to be annihilated utterly — is not rhetoric. It’s the activation of a specific theological tradition: the herem, the sacred ban, the divine command of total destruction. In its biblical form, the herem is not the violence of warfare, in which the enemy is defeated and the victor claims the spoils. It is the violence of consecration — the dedication of the enemy and everything associated with the enemy to God, leaving nothing for human use. No prisoners. No tribute. No mercy. The failure to complete the herem is itself the sin. Saul loses God’s favour not for his cruelty but for his restraint: he spared the Amalekite king when God had commanded total annihilation.
When this framework is active — not as metaphor but as operative theology — it doesn’t merely justify violence. It sanctifies it. And it sanctifies restraint’s absence. The soldier who hesitates, the minister who counsels proportionality, the general who draws a distinction between combatant and civilian — in this context, they are committing the sin of Saul. Mercy toward the consecrated enemy is desecration of the divine will.
I traced this argument in an earlier essay, “The Same God, The Same Logic,” and the claim bears repeating here in this context: the theological mechanism operating inside the Israeli governing coalition is not uniquely Jewish and it’s not a response to the Holocaust. It is structurally identical to the mechanism that animated the September 11 hijackers — a tradition of sacred violence in which the enemy is not merely opposed but consecrated to destruction, in which the act of killing is not just permitted but divinely mandated, in which any hesitation is transgression. The traditions are different. The God invoked is nominally different. The theological architecture is precisely the same.
This is not an argument for equivalence between the victims of October 7 and the victims of Gaza. It’s an argument about mechanism — about the specific structure of sacred violence that makes certain kinds of killing not simply possible but obligatory within a given theological framework. Bartov sees the result. The herem analysis names the engine.
The deeper question the civilisational frame raises is this: why did this particular theological mechanism, dormant for much of Israel’s early decades, become available and then dominant? Why did the secular socialist Zionism of the kibbutz generation — Bartov’s Zionism, born in the same milieu that produced him — fail to hold the political centre against the religious nationalist movement that now controls it?
The answer, in part, is that secular socialist Zionism carried within it the same structural vulnerability as every other progressive project absorbed by industrial economism without transforming it. It built a state without the three foundational obligations that any durable civilisational architecture requires: the commitment to being genuinely beneficial to every person within and beyond its borders; the commitment to operating syntrophically within the living world rather than extractively against it; and the commitment to honouring the claims of those who are not yet born. Without these obligations written into its foundations — and Bartov himself notes that Israel never wrote its constitution — the state had no architecture capable of holding its founding values against the pressure of fear, military power, increasing paranoia of its geography, and the ethno-nationalist logic that industrial economism always makes available to states that feel threatened.
A constitution is not merely a legal document. It’s a civilisational covenant — the place where a political community writes down what it will not do to the other, the future, or the world, regardless of what it’s permitted to do by the distribution of power in any given moment. Israel’s failure to write one was not an oversight. It was, as Bartov rightly identifies, a structural choice with structural consequences. But the choice was made possible — was made almost inevitable — by the civilisational order within which the state was built, an order that has never been genuinely hospitable to the kind of self-limitation that a true covenant requires — and that has produced the same constitutional failure in every polity that has accepted its terms without questioning its design.
None of this diminishes what Bartov has written. A scholar of his stature, writing from inside the experience he describes, performing the act of witness he performs, arriving at the conclusions he arrives at — is an event in the intellectual life of the question, and it matters.
But the question it asks — “what went wrong?” — is a question about a deviation. The civilisational frame asks a different question: what is the pattern, and where does it lead, and what would it take to build something capable of interrupting it before the next movement born of genuine suffering arrives at the same destination by the same route?
That question doesn’t have a national answer. It doesn’t have a diplomatic answer. It has a civilisational one — which is to say, it has an answer that requires us to examine not just what Israel chose to do with the tools of the existing order, but what the existing order does with every project that accepts its tools without questioning their design.
Bartov ends with prescriptions: remove the government, negotiate a regional settlement, open a reconciliation process, build the institutions that should have been built in 1948. These are not wrong. They are probably necessary. But they are only necessary in the way that treating a patient’s immediate crisis is necessary — without addressing the conditions that produced the crisis, and that will produce the next one.
The question is not what went wrong with Zionism. The question is what kind of world keeps producing this. And the answer to that question requires a different kind of reckoning than even the bravest historian, writing from inside the tradition he is examining, is positioned to provide.