A Poisonous Perspective

...Their successors are represented today by Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, "a bloody person who has not done anything in life apart from shedding blood" (the words, quoted approvingly, are the Israeli writer Uri Avnery's...

...Rose concludes that the Jewish state has long been riven by contradictory impulses it has never been able to master...

...Both men, she maintains, were animated by the deep passions that fuel Jewish messianism, which she associates with madness...

...Zionism thus appears to be both inspired and nightmarish, ruthless and deranged...

...Convinced that "a line runs directly" from this aberrant figure to modern Zionism, Rose proceeds to identify Theodor Herzl as his kindred spirit...

...To Rose, the emergence of such a Zionist state was "nothing short of a political and spiritual catastrophe...

...On her way to these pessimistic judgments, Rose asks questions that are properly historical, although her book is primarily a highly politicized postmodern pastiche-a loose and tendentious gathering of quotations from sources that begin with the Hebrew Bible and span the millennia of Jewish history, literature, religious and political thought, psychoanalytical theory, and popular culture...

...As if to head off a more obvious explanation, the author more than once feels compelled to declare that criticism of Israel is not tantamount to anti-Semitism, and of course she is right...

...The author does not deny "the legitimacy of the Jewish people's desire for a homeland," but she rues the form it took and believes Israel, now in "decline," is manifestly "in danger of destroying itself...

...Instead, following the example of Said's The Question of Palestine, Rose offers an account of Zionism from the standpoint of its victims, the only difference being that in her telling the alleged victims are Jews as well as Arabs...

...Never mind that anyone familiar with the country knows it has a robust, even boisterous, press, and that opposition voices of every stripe have no difficulty being heard...

...Readers who favor such a poisonous linkage may find this book bracing...

...Violence," she writes, "would be the destiny of the Jewish state...

...Consequently, instead of a pacific and cooperative Zionism, "devoted to the life of the spirit," a political and militarized version of Zionism prevailed and brought Israel "into the world of nations" as a sovereign entity...

...Because Rose closely aligns herself with their view-"I believe the creation of Israel in 1948 led to a historic injustice against the Palestinians"-her lexicon of descriptive terms for Zionism is overwhelmingly derogatory: "agony," "anguished," "belligerent," "brutal," "cataclysmic," "corrupt," "dangerous," "deadly," and "militaristic" alternate with "apocalyptic," "blind," "crazy," "delusional," "defiled," "demonic," "fanatical," "insane," and "mad...

...At a time when progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian accommodation seems more promising than it has been for years, it is disorienting to read that "the possibility of a viable Palestinian state, and hence a two-state solution, recedes by the day...

...Dubious scholarship and often murky prose explain merely a small part of its distortions...

...Fashioned as a companion piece to Said's The Question of Palestine, Jacqueline Rose's The Question of Zion is, in fact, so decidedly partial that it reads more like an indictment than an examination of its subject...

...Another is to Achad Ha'am, the leading spokesman for cultural Zionism...

...Actually, she exhibits only antipathy for collective identities of any kind, and most especially for ethnic or national identities...

...It begins with an extended reference to one of the most ruinous personalities in Jewish history-Shabtai Zvi, the 17thcentury messianic pretender and apostate from Judaism (he converted to Islam), who is identified as a "proto-Zionist...

...she is developing a psycho-political myth of Israel's origins and later progress...

...Moreover, the "cruel powers" of this state have not only brought "injustice" to the Palestinians but subverted "the moral mission of Israel," put at risk the Jewish nation's own "safety and sanity," and right now are even "endangering the safety of Diaspora Jewry" by helping to provoke a new anti-Semitism...

...The book is otherwise badly skewed, too...

...One is back to Martin Buber and a small circle of academics and intellectuals around him who, before 1948, were advocates of a binational state...

...Most scholars these days are reluctant to think about national histories as manifest destinies and unbroken lines of continuity across centuries...

...When she writes that "Israel inscribes at its heart the very version of nationhood from which the Jewish people had had to flee," she comes uncomfortably close to equating Zionism with German antiSemitism at its worst...

...It is of a piece, however, with much else one confronts in this slim, mean-spirited volume...

...Convinced the Jews of Israel have imposed upon the Palestinians an almost unparalleled degree of suffering, she does not hesitate to pose the loaded question: "How did one of the most persecuted peoples of the world come to embody some of the worst cruelties of the modem nation-state...

...Whatever Israel's policy errors and misdeeds, the Jewish state that visitors to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv encounter will barely resemble the country presented in The Question of Zion...

...All the early Zionist thinkers and activists were touched by the messianic furies in one way or another...

...But visitors to Israeli bookstores or libraries are likely to find their writings on the shelves...

...Or that Sharon will not consider "even the possibility of a negotiated settlement...

...These figures are joined by Noam Chomsky, Said, Marc Ellis, Ilan Pappe, and other post-Zionist historians, plus an array of Israeli dissidents...

...In sum, Israel on its present course "is bad for the Jewish people" and also bad for just about everyone else...

...She even indicts it for the suicides within Herzl's family, remarking that "Zionism demands too much...

...Since hers is an emphatically negative myth, matters only get worse after the Jewish state's creation...

...This word, repeated again and again, is hardly neutral in discourse on the Middle East conflict...

...Israel, Rose further charges, "dreads [and] silences dissent...

...The Question of Zion is less areasoned argument, therefore, than a hodgepodge of citations from an array of disconnected sources assembled to demonstrate that Zionism is a compelling yet basically neurotic and destructive idea responsible for an excess of chaos, fear, injustice, and suffering...

...According to Rose, they have brutally activated the "latent violence" withinZionism and brought "tragedy" to "both peoples in Israel-Palestine...

...director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts, Indiana University A book on Zionism dedicated "To the memory of Edward Said," the Columbia University professor of English who was a member of the Palestinian Parliament in Exile, is not likely to be a disinterested work...

...She devotes many pages to Jewish messianism, mysticism and Zionism, but she writes as a newcomer to these subjects and treats them derivatively and haphazardly, paying scant attention to historical contexts or the relative weight of the materials she presents as evidence...

...As for Israel, we are told "the soul of the nation was forfeit from the day of its creation...

...The psychic and historical forces that have shaped Zionism and brought the Jewish state to this perilous point constitute the ostensible subject of this deeply flawed work...

...Like other postmodernists, the concept of the "nation" is suspect to her, and large, enveloping national ideas like Zionism are anathema...

...that inspired Herzl to write Der Judenstaat and Hitler Mein Kampf" ("they were both present on the same evening...

...Gershom Scholem is frequently cited, as is Hannah Arendt...

...On several occasions she tells us she is "appalled by what the Israeli state perpetrates on a daily basis in the name of the Jewish people...

...So it is logical to "take Zionism to be a form of collective insanity"-and see those who embrace it as part of a group neurosis...

...But Rose, a professor of English at Queen Mary University in London, is not writing history...

...But then how do we account for constant references to "the injustice of Israel," to its "capacity for evil," to its fundamental "belligerence" and inherent "violence," while no such damning qualities are ascribed to any of Israel's neighbors, who are not generally known for their tolerant and peaceful ways...

...A positive word about the movement and its many accomplishments in state-building is hardly to be found...

...She is fond of using the language of "tragedy" to describe the sins of Zionism, but more often she pitches the register of her alarm and disapproval higher still and speaks of "catastrophe...

...it is the English equivalent of al nakba, the Arabic term Palestinians commonly use to define the events of 1948 that led to an independent state for the Jews and to defeat and dispersion for the Palestinians...

...Rose is intrigued by Zionism but "appalled" by what she sees as its encouragement of gross wrongdoings...

...Her overwrought rhetoric notwithstanding, nothing in her book expresses any genuine concern for the Jews as a people...

...The search for answers steers Rose in several directions...

...Another Rose canard claims the dissenting voices of earlier critics of ZionismBuber, Arendt, Hans Kohn, and Achad Ha'am-have "been mostly silenced...

...And how vital is it for our knowledge of Zionism to learn that "it was the same Paris performance of Wagner...

...The linkage of Herzl and Hitler-a truly egregious instance of guilt by associationis not only gratuitous but vile...