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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,........

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