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BOOK TALK: Israel: What Went Wrong?
Please note the change of venue to the Tun Razak Lecture Theatre at the Blavatnik School of Government. Registration is required: tinyurl.com/mecbsg19jan
Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and the author of many books, including Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, which won the National Jewish Book Award; Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past; and Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel–Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.
Professor Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv and served in the Israel Defence Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become an expert on the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.
In ‘Israel: What Went Wrong?’, Bartov explores the transformation of Zionism from a movement of Jewish emancipation and liberation into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians. He traces the process whereby Israel – whose establishment received international support in the aftermath of the Holocaust – stands accused of war crimes and genocide.
Less than eight decades after its founding in 1948 – the year in which the UN Genocide Convention was adopted in response to Nazi crimes – Bartov argues that, for the past two years, the Jewish state was engaged in a genocidal undertaking in Gaza. What are the implications of Israel’s near total impunity for the post-1945 regime of international law? And how do we understand the widespread support for these policies by Israel’s Jewish citizens?
Eye-opening and urgent, Israel: What Went Wrong? is a powerful and vital primer for anyone trying to understand this century’s most violent and devastating conflict.
Date:
19 January 2026, 17:00
Venue:
Blavatnik School of Government, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter OX2 6GG
Venue Details:
Tun Razak Lecture Theatre
Speaker:
Professor Omer Bartov (Brown University)
Organising department:
Middle East Centre
Organisers:
Middle East Centre Administrator (St Antony's College, University of Oxford),
Blavatnik School of Government (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
mec@sant.ox.ac.uk
Hosts:
Professor Janina Dill (University of Oxford),
Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)
Part of:
Book Talks
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/conversation-omer-bartov
Cost:
FREE
Audience:
Public
Editors:
Caroline Davis,
Jennie Williams
