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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.
| Ch. 1 | "The apocalyptic sting" : Zionism as Messianism (vision) | 1 |
| Ch. 2 | "Imponderables in thin air" : Zionism as psychoanalysis (critique) | 58 |
| Ch. 3 | "Break their bones" : Zionism as politics (violence) | 108 |
Anonymous
Posted June 27, 2005
The Arab dictatorships saw to it in 1948 that no Palestine came into existence alonside Isarel, which was what the UN resolution had intended. A half century later, Arafat saw to it, at Camp David and at Taba, that no Palestinian state came into existence, and proceeded to wink at Hamas's self-defeating program of suicide bombings. But you'd never know a thing about this long tragic history of Arab misrule -- by which legitimate Palestinian hopes have been laid waste -- from reading Prof. Rose, who dwells in a polemical realm of her own where Palestinians are pure victims and Israelis are pure perpetrators and that is that.
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Overview
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 ...