{"id":16,"date":"2026-05-22T16:45:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T16:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=16"},"modified":"2026-05-22T16:45:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T16:45:47","slug":"how-israel-got-this-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=16","title":{"rendered":"How Israel Got This Way"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Implied in the question posed by the title of Omer Bartov\u2019s new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?<\/em>, is the equally unsettling question of whether the state of Israel can be fixed. (If you are convinced it never should have existed in the first place, you might want to stop reading now.)<\/p>\n

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For many, the death and destruction wrought by Israel in the Gaza Strip since 2023 have been so horrific\u2014even as a response to the mass slaughter with which Hamas initiated the war\u2014that they have lost any sympathy they may once have had for the Jewish state. What Bartov\u2019s book makes clear, however, is that there is also a war going on within<\/em> Israel, one that pits democracy, equality, pluralism, and the rule of law against a growing and increasingly violent camp\u2014which includes the government\u2014that is working to dismantle the country\u2019s legal institutions, its press freedoms, its pretense to being a liberal democracy, and any conviction that it can and needs to seek an equitable resolution to its conflict with the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Understanding the nature and background of that war\u2014the internal one\u2014is essential to comprehending how and why Israel has fought its war in Gaza (and elsewhere) in the relentless and unrealistic way that it has.<\/p>\n

Such understanding also sharpens just what a critical moment this is in Israel\u2019s history. By law, the country must hold an election before November, and if the coalition of parties led by Benjamin Netanyahu is not defeated, it could well seal the state\u2019s one-way descent into autocratic theocracy. Sending Netanyahu home in no way guarantees a restart for the country, but it is certainly a necessary condition for it.<\/p>\n

More from David B. Green<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bartov is an Israeli-born professor of genocide and Holocaust studies at Brown University. He has deliberately made his life outside his birthplace since the 1990s, but like a latter-day wandering Jew, he carries with him an identification with and concern for the state. He fought in its army, his grandchildren are being raised there, and if he hasn\u2019t visited in two years, it\u2019s because the last time he came, he felt alienated from even his closest friends.<\/p>\n

It should not be surprising, then, that Bartov has been preoccupied with whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. In two prominent New York Times<\/em> opinion pieces, in November 2023 and July 2025, respectively, he progressed from identifying \u201cgenocidal intent\u201d on the part of Israel, to determining that its actions now amounted to genocide. That line was crossed, he tells us, when, by the summer of 2024, when Israel attacked and plowed under the city of Rafah (population 275,000), it \u201cdemonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards \u2026 [and] indicated that the ultimate goal of this whole undertaking from the very beginning was to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the value of having scholars like Bartov, and institutions like the International Court of Justice, rule on the question of genocide should be self-apparent (though the ICJ could take another year or two to render a final verdict), my experience has been that among ordinary Israelis, the term is so charged that constructive conversation becomes impossible, and the human dimension of the events recedes to the background. Israelis are so outraged at being accused of genocide that they won\u2019t allow themselves to consider why the \u201cmost moral army in the world\u201d needed to kill more than 70,000 Gazan Palestinians, and damage or destroy 75 percent of the Strip\u2019s buildings. And a large percentage of the public, as Bartov discerned midway through the war, displayed an \u201cutter inability \u2026 to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza.\u201d I don\u2019t see much change in that today.<\/p>\n

Only a small portion of the book, however, is concerned with surveying the effects of the Gaza war. Most of it, rather, is an interrogation of how Israel, a state founded, in the author\u2019s words, to advance \u201cJewish self-emancipation, individual transformation, self-determination, and freedom from persecution and antisemitism,\u201d became caught up in \u201can unstoppable rush \u2026 toward the destruction of others as well as self-annihilation as a society and state.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In asking \u201cwhat went wrong,\u201d Bartov also contends with a question that has been dogging me, and no doubt others: Was it inevitable that Israel, despite its promising, idealistic beginnings, would devolve into an intolerant and inegalitarian society, a wannabe theocracy, and the master of a mini-empire that rules over millions of noncitizens whose chances for self-determination only shrink by the year?<\/p>\n

According to Bartov, what happened \u201ccan be seen as inevitable only in retrospect.\u201d By that, I think he means that there were critical forks in the road when decisions were made, or opportunities forgone, that taken together can now be understood as having set the country on its current path.<\/p>\n

Briefly, those wrong turns include the following:<\/p>\n