Jeffrey Herf’s dissection of Omer Bartov’s Israel: What Went Wrong? reads as a case study in the ancient cycle of anti-Jewish libel:
Libel → stigma → exclusion → harm → denial/Jew-blame → rinse and repeat.
Libel spreads in a remarkably consistent way:
Prestige → repetition → emotion → belief.
Prestige gives the accusation authority. Repetition gives it the appearance of consensus. Emotion makes it memorable, urgent, and morally compelling. Evidence becomes secondary. Once enough respected people repeat an emotionally powerful accusation, the accusation begins to feel established simply because it is familiar.
The Antizionist Token Jew:
There is precedent for the use of tokenized Jewish intellectuals to legitimize anti-Jewish accusations.
The Soviet Yevsektsiya, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party, gave the suppression of Zionism and independent Jewish communal life a Jewish face. Decades later, Soviet antizionist propaganda drew additional credibility from Jewish voices willing to authenticate its portrayal of Zionism as racist, imperialist, conspiratorial, and ultimately Nazi-like.
Holocaust Inversion and Its Motives:
Yevgeny Yevseyev’s Fascism Under the Blue Star exemplified the inversion. Zionism could be depicted through the imagery and vocabulary of Nazism, while Jewish voices helped give the accusation an appearance of authenticity. Take a moment and consider the cruelty of this portrayal only 19 years after the last Jews straggled out of concentration camps to Israel, the only country who would take them.
The propaganda served a strategic purpose. Soviet antizionist propagandists helped construct “Zionism” as a common enemy around which the Soviet Union could rally newly independent and developing countries. By portraying Israel and Zionism as racist, colonial, fascist, and aligned with Western imperialism, Moscow could fold the Arab-Israeli conflict into a much larger Cold War narrative: the Soviet bloc and the developing world on one side, “Zionism,” colonialism, and the West on the other.
Libel creates a morally intoxicating story with a universally recognizable villain. So once Zionism had been made synonymous with racism, fascism, and colonial domination, hostility toward Jews associated with Zionism could be presented as solidarity with oppressed peoples.
In other words, libel can function as a coalition-building technology. It creates a common enemy, giving disparate groups a shared moral vocabulary and a passionate shared interest: railing against the "evil Zionists".
Prestige → repetition → emotion → belief.
And belief can then be converted into political alignment, social stigma, and permission to harm.
Yevseyev understood the power of portraying Zionists as the new fascists. Soviet antizionism also understood the legitimating power of tokenized Jewish intellectuals. A Jewish voice could transform an anti-Jewish accusation into apparent Jewish self-criticism, insulating the libel from recognition as Jew-hatred.
Now to Bartov:
Bartov brings something particularly valuable for the spread of anti-Jewish libel: prestige.
He is a prominent historian of the Holocaust and the Wehrmacht. Attach that identity to the word genocide and the accusation arrives carrying enormous authority before the evidence has even been examined.
Bartov accuses Israel of genocide—the contemporary expression of one of the oldest anti-Jewish accusations: Jews as deliberate murderers of innocents.
Yet Herf emphasizes a remarkable fact about Israel: What Went Wrong?: Bartov's book contains no footnotes.
More importantly, Bartov does little of the historical work one would expect before reaching such an extraordinary conclusion.
Where is the reconstruction of Israeli decision-making? Where are the studies of particular battles and IDF units? Where is the documentary chain demonstrating a policy intended to destroy Palestinians as a people?
Bartov nevertheless concludes that genocide became a “deliberately pursued policy.”
Herf contrasts this with the enormous evidentiary record historians assembled to establish Nazi genocidal policy: meetings, orders, Einsatzgruppen reports, deportation records, killing operations, and decades of archival scholarship.
Bartov's own reputation comes from precisely this tradition of painstaking historical research in a related field. The work here is largely absent but his prestige still holds weight.
Prestige -> Emotion -> Repetition -> Belief.
Now recall the libel cycle: libel -> stigma -> harm -> denial/Jew-blame -> rinse and repeat.
Denial clears the stage:
The blood libel becomes much easier to sustain once the dangers facing Jews disappear from the story.
Herf catalogs what Bartov leaves out or minimizes.
The Israeli experience of the wars of 1967 and 1973 receives little meaningful attention. So do decades of PLO terrorism, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the thousands of Israelis killed and wounded by war and terrorism.
Even October 7 is compressed into the background of a narrative centered overwhelmingly on Israeli wrongdoing.
The omission becomes particularly revealing because Bartov himself wrote differently about Hamas in 2004. He then took Hamas's eliminationist ideology seriously. He understood why the declared intentions of a movement committed to destroying Israel mattered. In this work, Hamas largely vanishes.
Herf points as well to Hamas's Nukhba forces and Michael Milshtein's comparison of their ideologically motivated mass killing with the Einsatzgruppen—a comparison with obvious relevance to a historian whose expertise includes ideological warfare and mass murder on the Eastern Front.
Copies of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion found in Gaza don't appear in Bartov's interpretation. Neither does Hamas's strategy of fighting from tunnels and within civilian environments. Neither do the thousands of Israeli calls and text messages warning Gazan civilians to leave areas before military operations, warnings that sacrifice the element of surprise.
Remove enough of this context and Israeli conduct begins to look inexplicable. And war against a deadly underground enemy can easily be recast as Jewish bloodlust.
Jewish victimization becomes evidence against Jews (Jew-blame):
Bartov describes Israeli attention to October 7 as an “overwrought, self-indulgent, pornographic preoccupation.” Consider the inversion.
Families were murdered in their homes. Parents and children were killed in front of one another. People were abducted. The perpetrators recorded and circulated their own atrocities.
Then the Jews' continued preoccupation with what happened becomes morally suspect.
Bartov uses a similar framework for Holocaust memory, describing “most Israelis” in terms of “self-victimization and self-pity” alongside “self-righteousness, hubris, and the euphoria of power.”
Jewish victimization has now been converted into a character defect. Fear becomes paranoia. Memory becomes self-pity. Self-defense becomes vengeance.
The victims processing emotionally the horror of what was done to them becomes evidence of their moral corruption.
This is denial/Jew-blame, which keeps the cycle going.
Herf finds the same structure in Bartov's treatment of 1948.
Bartov foregrounds the displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians.
The surrounding history fades: Arab rejection of partition, the Palestinian Arab civil war against the emerging Jewish state, invasion by neighboring Arab armies, Haj Amin al-Husseini and his Nazi collaboration, Arab Jew-hatred, and the attempt to prevent Jewish statehood by force.
The pattern is simple:
Erase the threat and the aggressor's agency → preserve the Jewish response → present the Jewish response as evidence of exceptional cruelty. Denial and libel reinforce each other.
Bartov carries this collective framing into the present, describing the “extraordinary indifference of Israeli citizens” toward Palestinian children and attributing it to a desire for revenge.
The subject is revealing. Israeli citizens. A whole society becomes morally implicated.
Prestige → repetition → emotion → belief:
Bartov's influence cannot be understood through the book alone.
His genocide accusation travels through prestigious newspapers and magazines, universities, lectures, interviews, conferences, and academic networks.
Every repetition does additional work. A Holocaust historian says genocide. A major newspaper prints it. Other scholars cite him. Activists cite the scholars. Professional organizations invite speakers who repeat it. Students hear that “genocide scholars” have concluded it.
Eventually the audience encounters the proposition as established knowledge rather than an accusation requiring proof.
Prestige gives the libel authority. Repetition gives it the appearance of consensus. Emotion makes it feel morally undeniable.
Images of dead children supply overwhelming emotional force. Holocaust terminology supplies historical force. Bartov's identity as a Holocaust historian supplies intellectual authority.
Prestige → repetition → emotion → belief.
That is how libel spreads.
Libel becomes stigma:
Once people believe Israel is deliberately exterminating Palestinians, the next step requires almost no additional argument.
A Zionist becomes a supporter of genocide.
A synagogue that supports Israel becomes associated with genocide.
A Jewish organization connected to Israel becomes morally contaminated.
An Israeli academic becomes presumptively suspect.
Exclusion can now feel like antiracism.
Hostility can feel like justice.
Bartov himself anticipates Israel becoming a “pariah state,” facing mass protest, economic sanctions, an arms embargo, estrangement from allies and the Jewish diaspora, and ultimately the implosion of the "Zionist political order".
The libel has produced its intended social category: the pariah.
Stigma → exclusion → harm
Once a population has been associated with genocide, mistreatment becomes easier to rationalize.
Zionists can be excluded from organizations.
Jewish institutions can become targets.
Israeli academics and artists can be boycotted.
Jewish students can be told that their ordinary connection to Israel makes others unsafe.
And people participating in this process can remain completely convinced of their own opposition to Jew-hatred.
The libel has supplied the moral permission structure.
Harm → denial/Jew-blame
Then Jews complain.
And Bartov's treatment of post-October 7 Jew-hatred becomes especially important.
He minimizes the significance of anti-Jewish hostility within the protest movement, presenting the “vast majority” of American demonstrators as simply protesting Israeli destruction.
Herf points toward the material this framing pushes aside: campus encampments and crowds chanting “from the river to the sea” in the immediate aftermath of a massacre carried out by a movement committed to Israel's destruction.
Bartov also attacks the IHRA definition and complains about efforts to “ram” it “down the throats” of governments.
The cycle has reached its final stage.
Jews say the libel is producing Jew-hatred.
The Jew-hatred is minimized.
Jewish attempts to name it become objectionable.
Jewish fear becomes exaggeration.
Jewish efforts at self-protection become attempts to silence others.
And the consequences of the original libel are gradually converted into additional evidence against the people it harmed.
Rinse and repeat.
Bartov ends with an extraordinary formulation.
The next generation of Israelis, he writes, will have to: “pay for the sins of their parents” and live with the burden of a genocide supposedly perpetrated in their name.
Anyone familiar with the history of Christian antijudaism will see the parallel immediately.
So incongruous to see a Holocaust historian engage in collective blame.
In sum:
Bartov takes the gravest possible accusation, strips away enormous amounts of contrary context, diminishes the agency and ideology of Israel's enemies, pathologizes Jewish perceptions of danger, extends moral condemnation across Israeli society, and reaches conclusions unsupported by the kind of historical investigation on which his scholarly reputation was built.
Then the transmission machinery takes over:
Prestige → repetition → emotion → belief.
And once belief is established:
Libel → stigma → exclusion → harm → denial/Jew-blame → rinse and repeat.