AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Israel: What Went Wrong? That’s the title of a new book by the renowned Israeli American Holocaust scholar and historian Omer Bartov. In late 2023, Professor Bartov published a widely cited article in which he said it’s very likely that war crimes and crimes against humanity are happening in Gaza, but concluded then that, quote, “there is no proof that genocide is taking place,” unquote. Then, in 2025, he sent shockwaves through academic and legal circles by reversing his position, publishing an essay in The New York Times headlined “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

That Israel has committed or is committing genocide in Gaza is a conclusion that’s been reached by many international bodies, including the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Independent Commission of Inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, Doctors Without Borders, the leading Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and many others. Governments have also come to this conclusion, including South Africa, which has brought a formal case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

In his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, professor Omer Bartov asks, quote, “How is it possible that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust stands today credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes, forcible displacement of civilian populations, and crimes against humanity? By what bitter cunning of history?” he asks.

Omer Bartov is the dean’s professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, has been described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Professor Bartov.

OMER BARTOV: Thanks so much for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could start off by answering your title of your book, Israel: What Went Wrong?

OMER BARTOV: Yes, so, I wrote a whole book about that. And, of course, it’s not just one thing. It’s a process. But I’m interested in the process from the beginning of Zionism, in the late 19th century, which was really a movement that tried to liberate, emancipate the vast majority of Jewry, about 80% of world Jewry, which was living in East-Central Europe, from increasing oppression, increasing violence, the rise of ethnonationalism. And what Zionism tried to do was to, in many ways, copy what those ethnonational movements surrounding the Jews were doing — that is, to declare that the Jews, too, were a people with a right of self-determination, and to liberate them from being a persecuted minority.

Of course, the issue was that Jews could not claim any territory in Eastern Europe, and the result was that Zionism suggested that Jews go back to their ancestral homeland, historical, mythical, religious, in what Jews called Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. And once Jews started coming there, this process of liberation became also a process of settler colonialism, of encroaching on the land of people who were already living there — that is, Arab Palestinians.

So, during the 1920s and ’30s, you have these two aspects of Zionism happening at the same time. One is the Jews are persecuted and increasingly at risk for their own existence in Europe, and fewer and fewer countries willing to take them in. This country, the United States, closed its gates of immigration already in the early 1920s.

AMY GOODMAN: The Voyage of the Damned.

OMER BARTOV: Exactly. And in that sense, Zionism could say, “Well, we are providing a safe haven to the Jews.” And hundreds of thousands of Jews actually migrated to Palestine, not all of them because they were Zionist, but because they were seeking some refuge in the ’20s and ’30s. But at the same time, these very same people who were coming to Palestine are beginning to encroach on Palestinian lands, and that creates a conflict between Jews and Palestinians. It leads to the creation of a Palestinian national movement that claims also self-determination and wants to create a Palestinian national home there.

To my mind — and that’s what I try to argue in the book — in 1948, that is the crucial moment. We heard before, of course, this is the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, of the expulsion of the Palestinians. In 1948, the state of Israel was created. And that state is faced with a choice: Does it make itself into a normal state? Does it fulfill its promise, in its own proclamation of a state, to issue a constitution that would provide equality to all its citizens, would define its borders and would create a legal framework within which it would operate, a constitution that might have also led to some kind of restitution, of coming to terms with the events of the Nakba, with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians?

But the state decides not to do that. And instead, Zionism becomes a different thing. It becomes the ideology of the state. And over time, although this was not predetermined, and we can’t say that everything had to happen, but over time, Zionism becomes increasingly militaristic, centralized, expansionist, racist and, as we’ve seen since October 2023, genocidal. And as such, it really loses its very — I would say, its very legitimacy as a political ideology.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, you grew up as a Zionist. You served in the IDF during the 1973 war. Yet you’ve now said that Zionism is not reformable. Would you still consider yourself a Zionist, or would you describe your own position now as one of anti-Zionism?

OMER BARTOV: Yeah, that’s a good question. Look, as I was trying to say, I think if you understand Zionism as the claim the Jews made already in the late 19th century that Jews, like all other people, have the right of self-determination, while I myself — and I’ve written two books on that — am not a great supporter of nationalism, if you make that claim, then you have to be consistent. That is, if you support the right of self-determination for Jews, you would support it for anyone else, including, of course, for Palestinians. The one right you do not have with self-determination is to exercise it while oppressing or removing others from the land that you claim to be your own. So, I would not define myself as anti-Zionist, in the sense that I think that all groups, including Jews, have a right of self-determination.

I do think, however, that Zionism, as it has evolved and what it has become now, is no longer supportable. I don’t think that one can reform it anymore. And I think that the state of Israel, if it wants to become again a normal state, if it wants to be a member of the international community, it must discard Zionism, it must put it on the garbage heap of history, and it must redefine itself, going all the way back to 1948. In other words, it has to find a way, together with Palestinians, of how these two groups that live there — 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians — how they can share the space.

And the kind of dreams, the kinds of policies that are being pursued by the Israeli government today under the mantle of this kind of fanatical, messianic, racist and Jewish supremacist Zionism, what they try to do is to empty the land of the Palestinians. That’s what happened in Gaza. It was an attempt to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Israel denied the Nakba and then said that it was doing a second Nakba in Gaza. That failed, of course. The Palestinians are still there, although living, as we just heard, under absolutely atrocious conditions in only a sliver of what was, before the war, one of the most congested areas of the world. But that failure of ethnic cleansing meant that Israel actually conducted the genocidal operation there. That has to be discarded. No one is leaving that place, not the Palestinians, not the Jews. They have to find a way to share it, rather than Israel trying to cleanse the territory, both of Gaza and, of course, as we know, also ongoing creeping ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring into this conversation, in addition to Brown University Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, author of the new book, Israel: What Went Wrong? — I want to bring in Gideon Levy from Tel Aviv, award-winning Israeli journalist who writes for Haaretz. His recent piece is headlined “Zionism Didn’t Go Wrong, It Was Always Built This Way.” If you can respond to Professor Bartov and make the argument you made in your piece?

GIDEON LEVY: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Amy.

I can’t agree more with my friend, Omer Bartov, Professor Bartov, except of two small remarks, which I noted in my piece. The first of them is — and we just heard Professor Bartov now — hesitating — and I understand this hesitation. It’s emotionally a very painful process. But he’s hesitating in defining himself as an anti-Zionist, and in the same time he has so much critic, very justified critic, about Zionism. And he comes to the conclusion that Zionism must vanish. So, either/or. I mean, so, either you are anti-Zionist because it’s terrible, or you are a Zionist, and you can live with it. But I believe that Omer Bartov cannot live with it, and he says it very clearly. And therefore, there is no room for this hesitation, even though emotionally I went through the same process for an Israeli who was brought up in — Omer and me are the same age. We were brought up in the same city, Tel Aviv. I guess our childhood was quite similar. For us to release ourselves from Zionism is extremely painful.

The second remark, which in my view is more important, is the belief of Omer that Zionism was very justified and had good reasons, a legitimacy, and Israel has a legitimacy, and then something went wrong, while I’m claiming that from the very beginning Zionism took a wrong direction, because the Jews who came to Palestine, like my parents and Omer’s parents, had no other place to go, and it was for them a real safe haven. It was a real — the only place they can rescue themselves. But this could have been done in a different way. You don’t come to a neighborhood and turn your back to the people who lived there centuries before you. And what Zionism did from the very beginning — not it went wrong, it started wrong — without the belief or the conviction that we can live together. Zionism never really tried to [inaudible] Palestinians. It was always to conquer them, to transfer them, to take their jobs, to take their lives, to take their properties, in order to become the only people who lives between the river and the sea. And here, we really differ, because not something went wrong, something started wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response?

OMER BARTOV: Yes, look, I mean, I also agree with most of what my friend Gideon says. Zionism begins precisely like the movements from which it — to which it was responding. That is, there was a rise of ethnonationalism in Eastern Europe, Polish ethnonationalism, Ukrainian ethnonationalism, Lithuanian, Latvian and, of course, German. And it emulated exactly these kinds of ideological notions, only the only difference was that the Jews, being a minority in Europe, could not realize their ethnonationalism in Eastern Europe, because they had no claim, no stake on the land there.

Once they came to Palestine, they started doing exactly what other ethnonationalisms were doing. And as we know, that was a very violent process in Eastern Europe, where hundreds of thousands, millions of people were removed. Ethnic cleansing was the norm. Populations were unmixed. And Zionism started doing precisely that also in Palestine. But because it moved to Palestine, it moved the Jews to Palestine, it became also a settler colonial movement, because these Jews moved from one continent to another and were trying to take over that land. The goal of Zionism, from the very beginning, was to stop the existence of Jews as a minority, to create a Jewish-majority state. That was the conclusion that they reached, because, as minority, as a minority in Europe, they came under greater and greater threat. So, yes, of course, Zionism, like all ethnonational movements, had violence built into it from the very beginning.

And at the same time, until the state was created, those people who came to Palestine in the '20s and ’30s, like Gideon's parents, like my mother, we know that had they not left, they would have been murdered. Both Gideon and I would not have been born at all, had our grandparents not decided to leave Europe and to come there. Everybody who was left behind was killed.

That’s why I say there was a moment when the state was created that a choice faced those who created that state. And they made the wrong choice. They could have created a different state. It would not have been perfect, and no states are. It would not have been perfectly just, and no states are. But there, it definitely made the wrong choice, and that choice determined much of what occurred afterwards.

It could have been also corrected over time. The Oslo process was a moment in which people in Israel actually talked about a state of all its citizens. But it failed. In 1995, Rabin, who was a general and was not a great peacenik, but had come to a conclusion that the occupation was no longer supported — in 1995, he was assassinated. He was assassinated because of incitement by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has his blood on his hands to this day. That killed that process and accelerated what we are seeing now as an attempt to entirely empty the land of its Palestinian population. It will fail. It will not succeed, because this sumud by Palestinians will continue. Palestinians will hold on to their land.

But that has to — I would say that only going backward and only arguing Zionism was wrong from the beginning, what we need to do now is to think about a future. And that future is a future for both Jews, who are also not leaving — most of them will stay there — for both Jews and Palestinians to find a way to share that space. That is where the conversation, to my mind, has to move now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Gideon Levy, your response? But also, you’ve talked about the conquest of labor that occurred in the Zionist dispossession long before the creation of the state, and this whole issue of how would Israelis create, or how would Jews create a state where — in a territory they were still at that time a minority.

GIDEON LEVY: Yeah, it’s a very complicated question to answer. But, for sure, fighting the Natives is not the only option. It could have go hand to hand, and there were times in which there were quite many Palestinians, and some Jews, who dreamt about such a possibility, an organization like B’Tselem of Jewish intellectuals who believe that we should, from the very beginning, try to do it together, and not by force and not by pushing the Palestinians away from here.

Now, the main problem of the whole thing is not '48 anymore, because ’48, as we all know, is over. The problem is that this very same attitude, this very same policy never stopped ever since ’48. And when you go today to the West Bank, you see exactly the same scenes like in the ’20s, in the ’30s, in the ’40s, the very same scenes with the same cruel, violent methods. Now, now we are not talking anymore about getting a Jewish state. Now we are not talking anymore about being a majority. Now it's pure colonialism and racism, with the pure ambition, which is declared and admitted, a pure Jewish state between the river and the sea. This is Zionism today. And with this, I cannot live.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end by asking you the same question I put to Muhammad Shehada about the Israeli government threatening to file a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. This is after the paper published a column by Nicholas Kristof headlined “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” Kristof details, quote, “the pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women, and even children” carried out by soldiers, settlers, interrogators and prison guards. He also wrote about reports alleging dogs were used to sexually abuse Palestinian prisoners. And I wanted to get both your responses very quickly on this. Professor Bartov?

OMER BARTOV: Well, I mean, I will say, just as Muhammad was saying, this is well known. I’m glad that The New York Times published information about that. But in Israel, it’s been well known. The minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been photographed visiting Israeli jails, humiliating — on TV, humiliating Palestinian prisoners. That has become the policy of the country, to abuse, to humiliate, to rape systematically.

And what I find I would say particularly appalling is that in Israel — and that’s part of what happens when a society becomes a genocidal society — generally speaking, apart from some articles in Haaretz and in +972, no one is speaking out. The physicians’ association in Israel has not spoken out. The Bar Association in Israel has not spoken out. Academic associations have not spoken out. University presidents have not. The media is not really interested in that. That is, what you see is a brutalization of Israeli society, a kind of joy at this kind of horror that is happening all over Israeli jails.

AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 30 seconds, but, Gideon Levy, that same question: How Israeli society, as you’re in Tel Aviv, is responding to this New York Times report and Israel’s threat to sue the Times?

GIDEON LEVY: [inaudible] that it is reacting to all the just accusation against Israel by attacking the messenger. Nicholas Kristof is a great journalist. I believe to every word he writes. But he is not the only one, as Omer just mentioned. And the only way to fight it for Israel is to attack the messenger, instead of looking upon ourselves, looking in the mirror, realize that in our jails there is a real barbaric catastrophe, and to draw the lessons out of it. But this —

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there.

GIDEON LEVY: Sure, sure.

AMY GOODMAN: I thank you very much, Gideon Levy, award-winning Israeli journalist for Haaretz, speaking to us from Tel Aviv, and Omer Bartov, dean’s professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong? Israeli American scholar described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide.

That does it for our show. Happy birthday to Nicole Schonitzer! I’ll be in Atlanta tonight for screening of Steal This Story, Please!, about Democracy Now!, at the Tara Theatre, and then in Houston, Texas, for a benefit screening for KPFT at the River Oaks Theatre, then, finally, to Austin. Check our website at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.