Israel didn’t go wrong. Israel itself Is what’s wrong
JVL Introduction
Avigail Abarbanel is ferocious in her critique of genocide scholar Omer Bartov’s latest publication Israel: what went wrong?
Here, in a nutshell, is her argument:
“Bartov wants to preserve the myth that Zionism began as a genuine humanist project that then went wrong. But if the settler colonial framework is correct from the outset, there is no innocent origin to mourn. If what Patrick Wolfe called the logic of elimination — erasure, replacement, genocide — was present from the beginning, then there is no tragedy of a state that started with great ideals and was subsequently corrupted. There is only a crime that was always going to happen because it was always intended to happen. Israel didn’t go wrong. Israel itself is what’s wrong.”
The author is a Jewish peace activist and former Israeli citizen who renounced her citizenship in 2001 during the Second Intifada.
RK
This article was originally published by Avigail Abarbanel’s Fully Human Essays on Tue 30 Jun 2026. Read the original here.
Israel didn't go wrong. Israel itself Is what's wrong
Buying Time for Israel: On Omer Bartov’s Liberal Zionism and Colonial Blindness
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It is a cogent and sustained analysis of Omer Bartov and liberal Zionism in particular. However I don’t think that Avigail Abarbanel does herself any favours with her over emphasis on tribal loyalty and attachment. This of course true of many Zionists but doesn’t explain the phenomenon of liberal Zionism which owes far more to the concepts of a benevolent, liberal and paternalistic colonialism.
She says that ‘There is only a crime that was always going to happen because it was always intended to happen. Israel didn’t go wrong. Israel itself is what’s wrong.’ The question of intention is a thorny one. I would say that many Zionist settlers didn’t have that intention and came as convinced and sincere socialists but the rhythms and dynamic of colonialism and seeing Palestinians as the other were what turned them into genocidal maniacs such that the most ‘left wing’ of the Zionists in Palmach committed the worst atrocities.
How else do we explain the split in Poland’s Poale Zion between Left PZ and Right PZ when the former came out as much the stronger?
Avigail also says Omer ‘should be angry at the fact that a previously persecuted people decided to save themselves by committing the crime of settler colonialism’. In fact the Zionist settlers were probably the least persecuted people. This is often use in relation to Jews having been victims of the holocaust but by the time of the holocaust settler colonialism in Palestine had long been established.
It is also wrong. Most of the victims of the pogroms went West to the United States and Britain not East.
I found “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” very interesting. It is a 40 page pdf free from Ohio State University.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization_Is_Not_a_Metaphor
Imperial rule of subject populations for their own benefit by Britain and France was still “normal” until the mid 1960s when both empires began losing their African and Asian possessions. Racism and antisemitism in speech and action was still “normal”.
From the mid 1960s onward, European governments and their peoples wouldn’t have supported the founding of a new colonial state of Israel on another people’s land … and might even have backed the Palestinians’ and Arab states’ efforts to expel these European and American colonialists. Less than 20 years before then, the mindset was sadly different.
If a State of Palestine HAD been allowed to form (the 1923 “British Mandate” legally obliged Britain to foster such development), then Palestine might have welcomed survivors of the Holocaust as new citizens. Palestine’s export trade would have grown faster thanks to these refugees’ language skills, education, business knowledge and European connections. The new citizens would have had the safe new start they so desperately needed within a community untarnished by the antisemitism so many Jews endured in Britain and the rest of Europe.
Is a better future than today’s still possible for the Palestinians and Jewish Israelis?
Two brief points:
Bartov’s first words in “Israel – what went wrong?” define Zionism disingenously as “a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression and persecution…” This exclusive focus on intentionality one of the central flaws of the book.
A further flaw is its virtual omission – finally made good by a passing reference to the Bund on page 61 – of alternative strategies “to emancipate European Jewry from oppression and persecution”.
I might not be bright enough to see all the inuendos in this article. However Zionism has always depended on who defines it. Just because Herzl intoduced the idea and Ben Gurion was the first major manager of the project does not mean they define it for all time nor even during their life times. Every Jew who went to Palestine had his own view of Zionism. Every Palestinian who lived in Palestine had his own view. Menachem Begin had a view which I believe was different from that of Ben Gution. Moishe Sharret definitely had a different view from Ben Gurion.
We now see that Zionism is a barbaric project but it may not have been in the early years or specially after the end of the Holocaust for many people.
The family situations of Bartov and Schlaim may have affected their views of Zionism. Bartov’s grandparents came from Poland and therefore Palestine as it then was would have been a place they went to to avoid antisemitism and pogroms. In his early life Bartov would be surrounded by people who found Palestine a place of peace and security, and only later realised the security did not apply to the Palestinians. Schlaim’s family were very happy and prosperous in Iraq. For the Schlaim family Zionism was the cause of them having to leave a happy life, and try to make a living in Israel. I believe Schlaim’s father was very unhappy in Israel as he did not speak Hebrew and did not fit in with the customs.