Two books, published into the same catastrophe, reach opposite conclusions about where to put the blame. Benjamin Moser’s “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History” argues that American Jews were raised on a benevolent story about Israel they never examined, that this naïveté let the community accommodate US empire, and that if the marriage of American exceptionalism with liberal Zionism produced genocide, then Zionism itself has to be abandoned.

Omer Bartov’s “Israel: What Went Wrong?” refuses the same move in the other direction. Bartov served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War; he argues the war on Gaza was genocidal. But he treats Gaza’s destruction, the West Bank apartheid, and the rise of the Israeli far right as products of political choice rather than national essence.

Isaac Chotiner’s review in The New Yorker takes Bartov’s side — on method, not on conclusions. His complaint against Moser is not the politics but the history:

  • Hitler’s große, translated as “great” to suggest Nazi admiration for Zionism, refers to the movement’s scale, not its virtues — and the sentences Moser ignores show Hitler describing Zionism as another Jewish deception
  • A quote attributed to “the introduction” to the Nuremberg Laws appears in no such introduction; it ran in a Nazi journal two months later, as propaganda
  • The historian Hava Eshkoli-Wagman is quoted as writing a sentence she was actually citing as a “widely held criticism” she went on to complicate; she concluded that the Zionist-Nazi collaboration thesis “fail[s] to meet the criteria of responsible historical research”
  • Moser writes that “in 1938, the Zionists therefore blocked a plan to bring twenty thousand Jewish children to the United States.” The bill was from 1939, and Rabbi Stephen Wise, the era’s most prominent American Zionist leader, testified in its favor
  • The claim that German exports fell 51 percent in early 1933, bringing the Reich to the “verge of collapse,” rests on a source that confused a shift in the trade surplus with a shift in export volume. Measured exports declined less than in the two years before the Nazis took power
  • A 1942 Davar dispatch Moser calls “laundering” Nazi atrocities is an account of spiritual resilience inside the Warsaw Ghetto: “The name ‘prison’ is too soft to suggest what this is. The Warsaw Ghetto is more like an animal enclosure that is right by the slaughterhouse… But they don’t torture the cows the way they torture Jews in the ghetto.”
  • Robert Weltsch’s 1933 response to the Nazi boycott of Jewish shops — “We will take it up and make of it a badge of honor” — is presented as an endorsement of the yellow star. Weltsch wanted a binational state

Moser’s book does real work: Edwin Montagu’s broadsides against the Balfour Declaration, the Revisionists’ partial admiration for European fascism, the Haavara Agreement that moved at least fifty thousand German Jews to Palestine, and the argument that anti-Zionism is a genuine Jewish tradition rather than an exit from Jewishness. Chotiner grants the tradition and disputes the evidence.

The distinction the title draws is the one that matters. Chotiner closes by quoting Bartov: instead of asking what Gaza’s destruction means for American Jews, ask how America helped make it possible. That is a harder question with a real answer, and it does not require believing a nation is made of villains.