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Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion, Princeton University Press, 2005 208 pp.
INTRODUCTION
A PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS (PUP) RELEASE announcing Jacqueline Rose's book, The Question of Zion, instructively informs its potential readers and reviewers that Rose, while exposing Zionism's "apocalyptic jargon" and the "messianic zeal" that drove Jewish nationalism, is also to be credited for pointing out "the dissident Zionist writers of the early twentieth century, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Herzl, and Gershon Sholem, who, even before the founding of Israel, called into question the establishment of a Jewish state at the expense of the legitimate rights of the native Palestinians." Defining Herzl as a "dissident writer" or Arendt as a "Zionist writer" is a bit like calling Sigmund Freud a "dissident psychoanalyst," Alexander Hamilton a "dissident founding father," or Karl Marx a dissident Marxist. Also Sprach PUP? Or a sign that the Ivy League is not what it used to be?
No matter. While the reader may be left to wonder who should lose their jobs at the prestigious publishing house for this little oversight, one should not judge this book by the blissful ignorance of PUP's public relations personnel, which perhaps is just a welcome indication of how this book made it into print. In fact, their little stretch of imagination is reality television compared to Rose's reach for the stars. Rose's argument has little to do with the reality of Zionism or indeed of the current state of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is more a reflection of the state of mind of Jews who-like Rose and other radical Jewish intellectuals opposed to Israel's existence-do not want to be Jews, are ashamed to be Jewish, and take pride in saying it out loud-in short, her own state of mind. More than an indictment of Zionism then, as she no doubt conceived her book, The Question of Zion is Rose's pained and ultimately unsuccessful effort to grapple with Jewish identity in an age where Israel stands at its core. Unfortunately for Rose, her book is neither a confession nor a moment of truth face-to-face with her demons. It is more like a transfer-in the psychoanalytic sense, not in the sense attributed to the sinister designs of Zionists by post-Zionist historians. It is a projection...