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The Political Philosophy of Zionism: Trading Jewish Words for a Hebraic Land . By Eyal Chowers . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2012. 286p. $99.00.
Book Reviews: Political Theory
On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted resolution number 3379, which labeled Zionism, the national ideology of the Jewish people, as a form of racism. In response, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Chaim Herzog, tore up the document in front of the assembly. Yet, this dramatic act was futile. Over the following decades the resolution fed the struggle against the State of Israel and against Zionism.
By the 1980s, the war of words made its way into the academic arena. Prominent historians, mostly from Israel, challenged the official narratives that the State of Israel put forward and offered alternative perspectives on the evolution of the state and the policies that were shaped by the Zionist ideology. These groundbreaking studies were confronted by seasoned responses of equally distinguished scholars. The ensuing dialectical debate was invaluable. It paved the way for a new generation of scholars whose works advanced our understanding of Israel's history, society, and political system.
While the disputes regarding the histor(ies) of Israel motivated researchers to visit archives around the world in an attempt to unveil new evidence, the philosophical analysis of Zionism lagged behind and remained intangible. Critical theorists, most notably sociologists, anthropologists, and historians whose worldviews were shaped by the neo-Marxist, postmodernist, and postcolonialist paradigms that flourished in Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s had begun to apply these frameworks to the analysis of Zionism. Yet, according to Eyal Chowers, political theorists kept their distance from the issue (p. 10). With few exceptions, they preferred to remove themselves from either analyzing or contributing to the Zionist philosophy. Chowers's intriguing observation was supported by a search of academic articles on Zionism in the social sciences and humanities databases of...