No one would deny that Israel has changed in recent years. Since Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the country has become more warlike, less liberal, and more nationalist and religious—and nowhere is that more evident than in its assault on the Gaza Strip that continues to this day.
The vast majority of Israelis remain, at best, indifferent to the death and destruction that their military has wreaked on Gaza. A significant minority, including some in Israel’s cabinet, actively encouraged the carnage, reveling in it as an act of revenge and/or a chance to reverse what they see as the historic error of 2005, when Israel uprooted Gaza’s Jewish settlements and handed the enclave to Palestinian control. Today, Omer Bartov, an Israeli who has spent his academic career in the United States, feels like a stranger in his homeland. “It seems to be a different, strange and threatening place, whose people, including some of my friends, have been transformed perhaps irretrievably,” he writes in his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?
No one would deny that Israel has changed in recent years. Since Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, the country has become more warlike, less liberal, and more nationalist and religious—and nowhere is that more evident than in its assault on the Gaza Strip that continues to this day.
The vast majority of Israelis remain, at best, indifferent to the death and destruction that their military has wreaked on Gaza. A significant minority, including some in Israel’s cabinet, actively encouraged the carnage, reveling in it as an act of revenge and/or a chance to reverse what they see as the historic error of 2005, when Israel uprooted Gaza’s Jewish settlements and handed the enclave to Palestinian control. Today, Omer Bartov, an Israeli who has spent his academic career in the United States, feels like a stranger in his homeland. “It seems to be a different, strange and threatening place, whose people, including some of my friends, have been transformed perhaps irretrievably,” he writes in his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?
Bartov’s book arrives at a time when Israel has come under unprecedented criticism for its war in Gaza and growing settler violence in the West Bank. It was published the same month as another new, and more forward-looking, book on Israel-Palestine, The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land, in which Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon make an impassioned appeal to revive the long-neglected peace process. Together, the books serve as a reminder that the only solution to the conflict will be a compromise reached by negotiation.
Bartov, a historian of the Nazi era at Brown University, principally blames Israel’s transformation on two things. The first is how Israelis interpret the Holocaust—no longer as a historical event to be remembered but as a template for an ever-present threat of genocide. Convinced that they are surrounded by enemies bent on their annihilation, Israelis justify the occupation of the West Bank and the war on Gaza as necessary to their survival. Bartov writes, “What had been for long the ‘never again’ syndrome, thus became its exact opposite, the ‘again and again’ syndrome—an internalized, irrational and misleading terror of another Holocaust, always lurking behind the corner, from which one can liberate oneself only by lashing out, pressing down, breaking in, and blowing up both one’s own doubts and unease and any real or perceived external threat.”
Israel: What Went Wrong?, Omer Bartov, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 256 pp., $28, April 2026
Bartov acknowledges that Israelis were traumatized by Oct. 7, in which Hamas fighters killed some 1,200 Israelis and took another 250 as hostages. But he wants them to put the attack into perspective—to understand the roots of Palestinian rage, appreciate the fact that international law countenances resistance to oppression and occupation (albeit not unrestrained violence), and, above all, to get over their Holocaust complex.
That is a tall order. Oct. 7 was an atrocity that was filmed live and has been repeatedly re-aired, its horrors reinforced by accounts of survivors and hostages who endured months of suffering. For Israelis, it served as a taste of things to come if they fail to remain vigilant. And, while the Hamas attack was the bloodiest day in Israel’s history, it was not an isolated event: Since 1948, Israel’s existence has been contested through war and terrorism. Bartov is right to decry Israel’s use of the Holocaust to justify unrestrained violence, but it is unfair to dismiss it as a paranoid delusion.
The second thing that went wrong with Israel, according to Bartov, is the absence of a formal constitution. He correctly asserts that Zionism’s progressive values and goal of emancipating the Jewish people have always been in tension with its nationalist ideology and the presence of Palestinians in its designated homeland. Had Israel written a liberal constitution soon after its founding in 1948, Bartov believes, Zionism’s liberal values would have been enshrined, leading Israel to treat its Arab minority more equally. Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, which has become a component of its de facto constitution, does speak of freedom and equality, and a series of quasi-constitutional Basic Laws enacted over the years has cemented rights such as freedom of movement and privacy. But Bartov is highly critical of the way that the declaration was written, with an eye to pleasing the United Nations and international public opinion rather than a deep commitment to democracy and human rights, and of the time it took for the Basic Laws to be enacted. He thus concludes that Israel’s “relationship to democracy is a troubled one.”
Bartov’s assessment fails to recognize that a constitution is only as good as the government that enforces it; history is littered with constitutions that failed to honor their promises. The proof of freedom and democracy is found less in founding documents than in everyday practice and in case law. In that regard, Israel has not fared badly. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index puts it firmly in the ranks of liberal democracies, a notch or two below the United States. The index doesn’t take into account Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its treatment of the Palestinian population, which clearly violates democratic norms and constitutes a deep stain on Israel’s record, but that hasn’t sapped democracy at home so far. Israel is a flawed democracy—and one that is becoming more flawed under its current government—but given the constant pressure of war and terrorism, it is remarkable that it is a democracy at all.
The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land, Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, Crown, 240 pp., $30, April 2026
Whereas Bartov focuses on what is wrong with Israel, peace activists Abu Sarah and Inon seek to lay the foundations for a reconciliation in the century-plus conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in The Future Is Peace. They do this by way of an eight-day journey across Israel and the West Bank, meeting with friends and family and sometimes accompanied by fellow activists. Along the way, they recount their personal and family histories. In the case of Abu Sarah, that includes the death of a brother from injuries sustained in an Israeli prison; for Inon, it is the murder of his grandparents on Oct. 7.
Most readers will probably come away from The Future Is Peace feeling more empathy for Palestinians than for Israelis. Part of Israel’s problem is that, since 1948, Israel is no longer the victim in this conflict (with the notable exception of Oct. 7). For every Israeli tale of suffering, Palestinians have 10, including the Gaza war and the indignities and repression of the occupation. The other is that Inon, as a leftist activist, doesn’t really provide a full-throated Israeli narrative about the history of antisemitism and the justice of Jews having a state of their own. He arouses empathy for the deaths of his grandparents and the others who were killed, raped, and kidnapped on Oct. 7, but he doesn’t make a case for Israel’s existence.
Interestingly enough, in contrast to Bartov, Abu Sarah doesn’t demand that Jews get over the Holocaust. Indeed, he recounts visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, recalling that “as I moved through the exhibits, taking in the photographs, artifacts, and stories, I found myself identifying with their suffering. I forgot that they were Jews, forgot they were my so-called enemies.” Abu Sarah’s experience captures the book’s message, which is that each side should listen to the other’s narrative and learn to empathize. The point is to share these stories without attempting the impossible task of reconciling them into one that both sides can accept.
According to Abu Sarah and Inon, ordinary Israelis and Palestinians need to reinterpret their suffering as a reason to seek peace rather than as the basis for an endless cycle of revenge and war. Both men have done just that. Recounting the death of his brother when Abu Sarah was 10 years old, he writes, “What I didn’t understand then was that the men who tortured Tayseer didn’t just murder my brother; they had also made me their prisoner. It would take me years to learn that I didn’t have to be consumed by rage, that there was another path through my grief.”
Their call for Israelis and Palestinians to appeal to the better angels of their nature is heartfelt and inspiring. But the reality is that events are leading in the opposite direction. The 1993 Oslo Accords, which were the most serious attempt to end the conflict, failed miserably. Today, Israel is led by a government that regards Oslo as a crime and is determined to annex the West Bank (and Gaza, if it gets a chance). Even if the majority of Israelis don’t subscribe to these extreme goals, they have little interest in reaching a deal. On the Palestinian side, a corrupt and ineffective Palestine Liberation Organization leadership has largely been supplanted by Hamas, an extremist religious movement that rejects Israel’s existence and sees armed force as the only path to establishing a Palestinian state. The last time that Israeli and Palestinian leaders held direct peace talks was in 2014.
Diagnosing the obstacles to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and a lasting peace still leaves open the daunting question of what such an agreement would look like and how it could possibly erase the effects of such a bitter conflict. On that account, neither book offers anything new or original.
Bartov believes the burden is on Israel to achieve peace, since it is the more powerful party. If it fails to do so and continues to exist as an “authoritarian and apartheid state,” he writes, it will probably implode. The best alternative is two states joined by a confederation that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to live in whichever one they choose.
Abu Sarah and Inon are less explicit about the future, though Abu Sarah also proposes a confederation as a short-term solution in the hopes that it will one day lead to a binational state. In the meantime, they write, it will be important to rely not on politicians and diplomats but on the goodwill of ordinary people to push them into an agreement. The details will sort themselves out later. “We don’t need to convince everyone—we just need to convince enough people. We don’t need to convince them what the solution is, but to convince them that a solution is possible,” Inon writes.
This kumbaya-style vision, however, doesn’t square with political, religious, and social realities and glosses over difficult subjects such as borders and the right of Palestinian return. Still, Abu Sarah and Inon at least acknowledge that the conflict cannot be solved from on high by diplomats with maps and will instead depend on broad popular support for bringing it to an end. That has happened in places such as Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the former Yugoslavia, to name a few. If not always a true reconciliation, exhaustion finally tipped the balance. At least for now, however, neither Israelis nor Palestinians are in the mood to reconcile.
