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.
