Omer Bartov, a historian of genocide and the Holocaust who was born and raised in Israel and served in the Israeli army before becoming a scholar at Brown University, turns his professional attention to the country of his birth. Writing from the vantage of someone who studies mass violence for a living, Bartov asks how Israel arrived at its present crisis, tracing the political, ideological, and moral trajectory that led from the state's founding aspirations to the catastrophe of the war in Gaza. The book combines memoir and history: Bartov draws on his own experience of Israeli society, education, and military service alongside his scholarly command of the region's past. He examines the tension between Israel's self-image and the realities of occupation, the hardening of nationalist and religious currents in its politics, and the long consequences of policies toward Palestinians. As a genocide scholar, Bartov is unusually equipped—and unusually willing—to apply the analytical vocabulary of his field to Israel's conduct, a stance that has made him a prominent and controversial voice in public debate. His purpose is neither polemic nor apology but diagnosis: to understand how a society came to this point, and what the answer to the book's title question reveals about its future. Written with the authority of both an insider and a comparative historian of atrocity, the book is a sober and searching reckoning with a subject the author approaches as both scholar and native son.