Book Review

Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Introduction to Zionism and Israel: From Ideology to History. London and New York: Continuum International, 2012.  xiv + 250 pp + 4 maps.

We live in a time when anti-Semitism, under the guise of anti-Zionism has come to levels unseen since the late 1930s and when many parts of the Jewish world are split on what Israel means in the twenty-first century, misunderstandings abound, differences of opinion have catastrophic consequences, wars fought, terrorist acts committed, and lives ruined. Every generation needs a new synthesis of the founding ideas in the light of current events. But does this book stand up to or stand out more than Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (JPA 1960) or the scores subsequently published? Cohn-Sherbok’s book is a long list of events and quotations. The text is neither analytical nor interpretive; and both Zionism and Israel are treated as abstractions, while the matrix of culture, religion and history are at best skimmed.  Lacking moral contexts, this endless series of “facts” creates a cumulative anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli screed.

Contexts are merely implied or sketchy, connections confusing.  What is missing are the dates of birth and death for each of the main figures, their education and development within Ashkenazi and Sephardi culture, and, for books and pamphlets, the details of their publication—language, translations, re-editing; all are necessary to see the actual shape of how Zionism developed and how the State of Israel came into being.  On the one hand, there is a great deal of anecdote about the leading organizers and ideologists of Zionism but political and religious ideas are vague.  On the other, nothing is done to describe non-Jewish opponents to Zionism or to explain their assertions and actions.

There has never been one simple definition of Zionism.  From the beginning in the 1890s, debates were deep and subtle; yet as conditions changed in Europe, so too did the arguments about what was to be done.  In the short run, the aim was to rescue Jews from imminent danger; in the more intermediate future, it was to create a working-system of international cooperation among Jewish communities, to develop the commercial, administrative and political infrastructures in order to develop national institutions and negotiate with the Great Powers, as well as surrounding states and peoples; and, then, there were long-term goals—to establish a national homeland, to rescue as many people from Nazi persecution as possible and to break the bottlenecks of escape into western states unwilling to accept large numbers of refugees, as well as to ensure the survival of Jewish cultural and social values, thus enhancing and protecting that identity. 

The complexity grew, as Cohn-Sherbok explains, because of the rivalries of the Cold War, the reliance of the West on Middle Eastern oil, and the transformation of the UN into an organization dominated by former colonized peoples who accepted the lies about Israel as an aggressive intrusion into Palestinian lands.  Yet this very complex story is not as easily told as the book suggests from its one-sided perspective.  For it makes no reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, appeals for a return to the Caliphate, Greater Syria, or creation of a Palestinian identity and history.  For Jews, Zionism eventually becomes the Jewish need for a safe homeland after thousands of years of wandering, persecution and attempts at extermination. This book obscures the painful story under a barrage of undigested details.

Despite its subtitle, “From Ideology to History”, Introduction to Zionism and Israel is probably too unbalanced for young people, certainly high school students, though undergraduates might be able to navigate the text, if guided by a teacher and given additional documents.  Alexander Pope hits the nail on the head: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”  Selected facts and bare narrative alone do not constitute the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  Cohn-Sherbok depends on existing anthologies, and he neglects to explain any difficulties in translation from Arabic and Hebrew or how he made his choices. 

Because Israel’s nationalist ideology is deeply enmeshed in Jewish history, particularly as it develops in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship to religion does not emerge forcefully in the author’s argument. Ideas within Jewish consciousness and discourses develop strongly in response to events in contextual societies, not least to the varying pressures of secularization and religious fundamentalism, tolerance and fanatical exclusivism, and more so, to the various intensities of anti-Semitism based on theological, social, political and racial ideologies. So-called secularist and post-Marxist versions of anti-Zionism, for example, do not exclude deep mythical structures or apocalyptic agendas.  Similarly various strands of religious Jewish nationalism embrace political and social programmes that recast old structures of Jewish institutional religion.  Without discussion of these complexities, a naïve reader could easily be led astray by the author’s political correctness, post-modernist focus on the instant, and thus not see the continuing hatred of Jews around the world. To be sure, Cohn-Sherbok mentions the Holocaust (or Shoah) in passing, he does not see it as the over-riding and mythic event of modern Jewish history, the disaster that changed history, reshaped Jewish aspirations about a homeland, and continues to colour all decisions concerning Israel’s existence as a homeland and refuge.

Moreover, the closer the book—or this string of undigested facts and highly selective statements—comes to the present moment, the more its façade of neutrality and objectivity falls away. By the time the new millennium opens up, almost all the statements turn the truth upside down, inside out and backwards: everything blamed on the Israelis and the poor innocent Palestinians are noble victims.  Mohammed al-Durrah is said to have died a sacrifice to Israel’s mythical perfidy twelve years ago, whereas all recent investigation shows the boy was neither killed by IDF bullets or even hit at all: in fact, he was moving about after the end of the staged France-2 video in the remaining seconds never shown on television, and may be walking the streets of Gaza today.  I am afraid I have to warn all but the most mature and sophisticated readers from approaching this dangerously inadequate book.