This is an extract from Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here.
I was born and raised in Israel, a member of the first generation that came into the world following the state’s creation. Less typically, my father was also born in what was then Mandatory Palestine, shortly after his parents arrived there in the mid-1920s. My paternal grandfather, who grew up in dire poverty in Poland and was exposed to local antisemitism, was a staunch Zionist. Economically, the family did only marginally better in Palestine, and my father had to leave school and seek employment at the age of fifteen to help support the household. Two years later he volunteered to join the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, both to fight the Nazis and to escape the constraints of destitution and religion at a home that to his mind had retained all the hallmarks of a diaspora mentality, or galutiyut, as it is called in Hebrew. He, too, was a Zionist throughout his life. His encounter with the survivors of the Holocaust in Europe remained etched on his soul and found expression in several of the novels he subsequently wrote.
Unlike many other members of his generation, my father insisted that despite being a Sabra—a native son of Eretz Israel—he was first and foremost a Jew, rather than an Israeli. But he abandoned his father’s religious practice and was always attached to the Left in its various permutations.
He never quite reconciled with my departure from Israel as a young man, but in the last decade of his long life my father clearly detected the direction in which his beloved country was headed. In many ways he could no longer recognize it. He insisted with growing vehemence that Benjamin Netanyahu was the great destroyer of Zionism as my father had understood the movement to which he dedicated his life. Very few people listened to him, and even fewer were willing to grant the octogenarian journalist a space to publicly air his views. Nowadays, despite all the noise and fury about current-day Zionism, I think of my father as the last Zionist.
My mother, who was born in Poland, came to Palestine with her parents and two brothers at the age of eleven in 1935. Her father, too, was a staunch Zionist and an observant Jew. Economically quite well-off in Poland, the family was plunged into poverty upon arrival in the Promised Land. But no one ever complained about my grandfather’s choice to leave Poland, which was growing increasingly unstable, poor, and antisemitic. I was born in Israel thanks to my grandfather’s decision to leave that land where my family had lived for centuries. Had he stayed, I would likely have not been born at all.
Hebrew was my mother’s third or fourth language, but like my father, she pulled herself out of the mire by her own bootstraps, thanks to an educational system that rewarded talent, ambition, and perseverance, all of which she had in abundance. My parents were both students at the Hebrew University in 1948 when the war over Israel’s independence broke out. They went to fight straight out of the classroom, losing many of their friends who, like them, had joined those early “students’ platoons.” She, too, was a Zionist, though perhaps not as fervent as my father. Had he let her continue her studies in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s instead of insisting that the family go back to the Jewish state, I suspect she would have had an academic career at an American university, and I would have been a full-fledged American.
As I grew up, I realized that, although all families are different, most of those I knew in Israel had one thing in common—they had lost virtually all their relatives who stayed behind in Europe. I was lucky to have two sets of grandparents, but my father’s and my mother’s extended families in Poland were all murdered. We lived in mutilated families, and the sense of loss and mourning, compounded by personal trauma in those families that included Holocaust survivors, was ubiquitous, though rarely articulated. Told that we were the first generation of our people’s resurrection, we never questioned our presence, existence, and future in Israel. Yet over time, even as the visible signs of the destruction of Palestinian culture all around us were gradually demolished or covered over, some of us became increasingly aware that our resurrection had come at the price of another people’s catastrophe. That awareness could generate contradictory responses—guilt and regret, or negation and denial; a hope for redress and reconciliation, or a conscious and, just as important, unconscious will to eradicate and erase. The mental landscape of contemporary Israel is still filled with traces of these contradictory sentiments, although at the moment the urge for destruction and erasure has by far the upper hand.
Born in a resolutely left-wing kibbutz, I spent the first eighteen months of my life at a children’s home, as socialist ideology at the time perceived the family as an obstacle to collective solidarity. But I grew up in Tel Aviv, in neighborhoods built right next to or over the remnants of Palestinian villages whose residents had fled Israeli troops. In deliberating the issues discussed in this book, I cannot but draw on my personal and professional background. I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai, and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw firsthand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighborhoods. Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of Al-Arish—which was then occupied by Israel—pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.
Military service is mandatory for Jewish Israelis when they turn eighteen—though there are a few exceptions—and afterward, you can be called upon to serve again in the IDF, for training or operational duties or in case of emergencies such as a war. When I was called up in 1976, I was an undergraduate studying at Tel Aviv University. During that first deployment as a reserve officer, I was severely wounded in a training accident, along with a score of my soldiers. The IDF covered up the circumstances of this event, which was caused by negligence in allocating training areas at the base. I spent most of that first semester in the hospital of Be’er Sheva, but returned to my studies, graduating in 1979 with a specialty in history.
These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: What motivates soldiers to fight? In the decades after World War II, many American sociologists argued that first and foremost, soldiers fight for one another rather than for some bigger ideological goal. But that didn’t quite fit with what I’d experienced as a soldier: we believed we were in it for a bigger cause, which surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I completed my undergraduate degree, at the age of twenty-five, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible.
(c) Omer Bartov
Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.