A Genocide Scholar Asks “What Went Wrong” in Israel

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In recent years, and especially since October 7th and the war on Gaza that followed, I've tried to hear out a range of voices on the question of Israel and Palestine on this show.

We've heard from Palestinians like the poet Mosab Abu Toa who won a Pulitzer prize for his essays in The New Yorker. I've spoken with the writers Raja Shehada and Yossi Klein Halevi, the broadcaster Yonit Levi, the philosopher Avishai Morgali, the historian Rashid Khaledi, I asked peace negotiators Hussein Aga and Robert Malie about how this conflict could possibly end. Now today I'm in conversation with Omer Bartov, an Israeli born historian of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and a professor at Brown University. Bartov describes the terrible events of October seventh as a war crime.

But as Israel's war ground on, with a death toll that by now exceeds 70,000 Palestinians. He wrote an essay in the New York Times that described the war as a genocide, which for an Israeli and a scholar of genocide was a startling thing and had an enormous impact on its audience. Omar Bartov has now published a book reappraising his homeland called Israel What Went Wrong. Bartov was born in 1954, and as a kid he was

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