In the last two and a half years, Israel has intensified its core project of realizing a “Greater Israel.” Its ongoing drive to eliminate Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba has escalated into full-scale genocidal violence in Gaza. The intensification of Israel’s colonial violence has also included a forced displacement campaign in the West Bank unprecedented since the 1967 war, a renewed assault on the political rights of Palestinians in Israel, and the transformation of Israeli prisons into a network of torture camps in which unspeakable cruelty is the order of the day.Israel’s large‑scale attacks on Lebanon and Iran, and its use of the “Gaza doctrine” — particularly in Lebanon — have made the systematic targeting of civilians, neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals, and the infliction of mass destruction, suffering, and death, a regional reality. At the same time, the US-Israel war on Iran has caused an international economic crisis that underlines how genocidal regimes pose a threat on a global scale.It is difficult to imagine a future in the region beyond this horrific reality without the Israeli state, supported by a large majority of its Jewish citizens, facing accountability. Accountability demands centering the experiences and knowledge of Palestinians confronting Israeli elimination, yet the Jewish supremacy and anti-Palestinian racism that fuel the genocide also drive the silencing of Palestinians and their activism to end it. The result is that mostly Jewish voices critical of Israel manage to gain attention through the cracks of this censorship and suppression, though they offer little in the way of thinking about accountability.This is the case, most recently, with Israeli-American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov’s latest book, Israel: What Went Wrong? Just out in English and slated to appear in numerous other languages, the book asks readers to think about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza through a narrative that begins with…
