Last Friday, I had the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov on the livestream. His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong, distills his perspective on the path that led from the formation of the Jewish State to the current situation in that country, with an emphasis on Gaza and the West Bank. How, Omer asks, could a nation that has offered safe haven to so many of its own people have presided over the expulsion, killing, and persecution of another people?
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Omer’s book offers an impassioned and rigorous account of legal, political, and religious contradictions present since Israel’s founding. Those internal tensions have led, Omer argues, to belligerence in the occupied territories and the slow waning of democratic practices within its own government. Reading Omer’s book feels like watching an extraordinarily accomplished scholar marshaling a lifetime of learning and experience to try to explain the inexplicable to himself. For all its clarity, it also communicates an emotional ambivalence, as he struggles to come to terms with his own disappointment with his homeland.
I find myself in a delicate situation. I’m neither a Jew nor an Israeli, and I’m no expert on Israel’s internal politics and self-understanding. I often find myself asking if it’s my place to comment on what I see of Israel in the news. Omer’s personal investment in Israel—he was born there, served in combat with the IDF, and began his career there—and his knowledge of the nation’s history provide a way into what can seem to non-Israelis like an impossibly complex situation, where subtle distinctions between one position and another can have outsized consequences.
Not everyone will agree with Omer’s analysis, or indeed that something has gone “wrong” in Israel at all. But with the news flooded with grandstanding and virtue signaling, it can sometimes be difficult to separate serious, informed criticism from rank punditry. Even if you find yourself opposed to Omer, his expertise and intelligence cannot be dismissed. So I humbly recommend this episode both to those seeking to understand and to those interested in the strongest version of the opposing view. It’s not an easy conversation. But then, this is The Glenn Show. We don’t do “easy.”
