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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... dangerous — of Israel's dominant vision of itself as a nation . How did this vision first arise , and apparently unanswerable — take hold ? Golda Meir's view is widespread . I encountered a strong ver- sion of it from the audience at ...
... danger was no obstacle . The land was biblically destined to be theirs , and that destiny , despite or even because of the violence , was being fulfilled . We urgently need to understand the mind - set that runs back and forth from the ...
... danger to its citizens — the threat to the nation , the one thing that cannot be countenanced , was collapse of conviction , or loss of belief . In each of the chapters that follow , I track one strand in Zionism's view of the world and ...
... dangers into which they saw that the newly trium- phant and exhilarated nation had stepped . To those who object to criticism of Israel on the grounds that it is being singled out , a question must nonetheless be put . Why is criticism ...
... Dangerous Li- aison : Israel and America — screened on Channel 4 Tele- vision in August 2002. I am enormously grateful to David Lloyd for commissioning the program and to George Carey , Nick Read , Andy Cottam , and Fran O'Brien . The ...