The Question of ZionPrinceton University Press, 2005 - 202 pages Zionism was inspired as a movement--one driven by the search for a homeland for the stateless and persecuted Jewish people. Yet it trampled the rights of the Arabs in Palestine. Today it has become so controversial that it defies understanding and trumps reasoned public debate. So argues prominent British writer Jacqueline Rose, who uses her political and psychoanalytic skills in this book to take an unprecedented look at Zionism--one of the most powerful ideologies of modern times. Rose enters the inner world of the movement and asks a new set of questions. How did Zionism take shape as an identity? And why does it seem so immutable? Analyzing the messianic fervor of Zionism, she argues that it colors Israel's most profound self-image to this day. Rose also explores the message of dissidents, who, while believing themselves the true Zionists, warned at the outset against the dangers of statehood for the Jewish people. She suggests that these dissidents were prescient in their recognition of the legitimate claims of the Palestinian Arabs. In fact, she writes, their thinking holds the knowledge the Jewish state needs today in order to transform itself. In perhaps the most provocative part of her analysis, Rose proposes that the link between the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state, so often used to justify Israel's policies, needs to be rethought in terms of the shame felt by the first leaders of the nation toward their own European history. For anyone concerned with the conflict in Israel-Palestine, this timely book offers a unique understanding of Zionism as an unavoidable psychic and historical force. |
From inside the book
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... Palestine . Today it has become so controversial that it defies understanding and trumps reasoned public debate . So ... Palestinian Arabs . In fact , she writes , their thinking holds the knowledge the Jewish state needs today in order ...
... Palestinian intifada . It is a fact that emigration to Israel increases at times of the worst conflict ( this was true of 1973 and of the settlers of the 1920s and 1930s in Palestine ) . Although the settlement is surrounded by barbed ...
... Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century and into the heart of Israel today . My cast of characters includes early visionaries for whom Zion was indeed but a dream , such as Theodor Herzl ; the leaders of the nation in its very ...
... Palestine . Having felt , most simply , repeatedly , appalled at what the Israeli nation perpetrated in my name . It will be clear from what follows that I believe the creation of Israel in 1948 led to a historic injustice against the ...
... Palestinian state , and hence of a two - state solution , re- cedes by the day . The policy of home demolitions , tar- geted assassination , curfew , and overall destruction of the infrastructure in the occupied territories has intensi ...