This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In recent years, and especially since October

7th in the war on Gaza that followed, I've tried to hear out a range of voices on the question of Israel and Palestine

on the show. We've heard from Palestinians like the poet Mosab Abu Toa, who won a Pulitzer Prize

for his essays in The New Yorker. I've spoken with the writers Roger Shehada and Yossi Klein

Halevi, the broadcaster Yonit Levy, the philosopher Avishai Marguli, the historian Rashid Khalidi,

I asked peace negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley about how this conflict could possibly end.

Now, today I'm in conversation with Omar Bartov, an Israeli-born historian of the Second World War

and the Holocaust and a professor at Brown University. Bartoff describes the terrible events

of October 7th as a war crime. But as Israel's war ground on, with a death toll that by now

exceeds 70,000 Palestinians, he wrote an essay in the New York

Times that described the war as a genocide, which for an Israeli and a scholar of genocide was a

startling thing and had an enormous impact on its audience. Omar Bartoff has now published a book

re-appraising his homeland called Israel,

What Went Wrong. Bartov was born in 1954, and as a kid, he was unquestioning of mainstream

Zionism. But in adulthood, as Israel began building settlements in the West Bank in Gaza,

his thinking began to evolve.

By 1973, Bartov was a young soldier

doing his required military service

when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, the so-called Yom Kippur War.

I was in uniform then. Everybody was entirely shocked. I should tell you, the first thing that came to my mind on October 7, 2023, was October 6th, 1973. Because the sense of shock, the lack of preparedness, the arrogance that had been there before both events,

was very similar.

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