After a career in journalism, Zertal began a career as a professor of history and cultural anthropology at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been a visiting professor at several universities, including the
University of Chicago and the
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Zertal is considered one of the
New Historians. In
From Catastrophe to Power, she examined Zionist immigration policy after the end of World War II for survivors of Nazi extermination camps, and in particular the divergence of interests between the Jewish community in Palestine and the survivors. According to her, while Zionist organizations acted in the interests of the victims of the
Final Solution, there was also a political instrumentalization of this suffering in order to fight the immigration quotas imposed by Great Britain. Zertal highlights another fault line: that between the Jewish diaspora and the Jews of Palestine, the latter of whom, according to her, were filled with remorse for not having done enough to save the Jews of Europe. In ''Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood'', she questions the place of the Holocaust in the discourse and politics of Israel. In particular, she accuses the Jewish state of instantiating the Holocaust to justify "the abuses of the Palestinians". She also wrote a book critical of the occupation of the
Palestinian territories,
Lords of the Land, together with
Akiva Eldar. ==Political activism==