Prophet with honour the wilderness

"My opnion," wrote Sigmund Freud, "is that we must as Jews, if we want to co-operate with other people, develop a little masochism and be prepared to endure a little injustice." In Andrea Dworkin's opinion, Freud's words were superfluous since Jews had, after the Masada uprising, become known for "their passivity and spirituality which, over the course of generations, had stamped itself on the Jewish people until it had become second nature". Jews did not simply suffer injustice but were ennobled by it. "To fight back would mean changing sides in the moral sweepstakes."

"My opnion," wrote Sigmund Freud, "is that we must as Jews, if we want to co-operate with other people, develop a little masochism and be prepared to endure a little injustice." In Andrea Dworkin's opinion, Freud's words were superfluous since Jews had, after the Masada uprising, become known for "their passivity and spirituality which, over the course of generations, had stamped itself on the Jewish people until it had become second nature". Jews did not simply suffer injustice but were ennobled by it. "To fight back would mean changing sides in the moral sweepstakes."

The imperative after the Holocaust was to ensure such suffering could never happen again. And the establishment of a homeland was not enough. Jewish men had been castrated by the Nazis - some literally, all metaphorically. Crudely, they were determined to prove they had balls. To do so required victims. Andrea Dworkin writes that "Israel shows how male dominance grows in a new state - it needs the subordination of one's own women and the subordination of a racial... other: it needs internal and external scapegoats."

The most compelling sections of this always thoughtprovoking, often fury-provoking, polemic show this process at work. Dworkin reclaims historical Zionism from responsibility for the oppression and injustice of the contemporary Israeli state. Whereas preIsrael Zionists believed in women's political equality, Israeli women today are second-class citizens. She highlights the estimated 10,000 agunot: "battered women, betrayed women, raped-in-marriage women". Unable to obtain a divorce, they are forced to live "in internal exile in the Promised Land". It is clear that the repression of women by orthodox Jews in Jerusalem is no different to that by mullahs in Tehran.

Inferior even to women in Israeli eyes are the Palestinians. Dworkin charts the ruthlessness of the early Jewish state in its devastation of Palestinian villages. She shows how the extensive murder of Arab civilians has been excised from official history. As might be predicted, she is particularly acute on the military's use of pornographic weapons, both their own penises (Israeli soldiers masturbate in front of crowds of Palestinian women to make them disperse) and their propaganda (Israeli intelligence produces doctored photographs of Palestinian women in sexually compromising positions to force them to collaborate). One consequence has been the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, designed to keep women secluded, and thereby completing the circle of oppression.

Dworkin provides an authoritative new perspective on the familiar theme of why a nation established with the goodwill of much of the world now attracts widespread condemnation. Her book, however, is not a sustained argument, but applies a scatter-gun technique to a variety of targets. She displays an enormous range of reference, quoting everything from Disraeli's first novel to a book on Argentinian torture. But, rather than dwelling on any one, she flits promiscuously from text to text.

She is forever moving off on tangents. Some are fascinating in themselves - such as her suggestion that postwar deconstructionists put forward their linguistic theories out of self-preservation, denying the meaning of language in order to deny their complicity in Nazi crimes. Others are more predictable and more contentious, as when she attempts to counter claims that in countries where women's status is low there is no pornography. She points to the collection of imported magazines owned by a Saudi prince. Yet the fact that the material is imported and the owner royal would appear to weaken her case.

Although her ostensible theme is the particular tyranny of Israeli men, the underlying theme is the world-wide abuse of women. On page after page, Dworkin documents contemporary and historical abuses, from the enforced prostitution of thousands of women in the Sino-Japanese war to the murder of daughters in China. Most horrific is the use of rape in Pakistan as a means of settling scores with the victim's male relatives. A recent UN report declared that "violence against women is the world's most pervasive form of human rights abuse".

The problem is that Dworkin does not allow these shameful stories and statistics to speak for themselves but repeatedly undermines them through overstatement, such as in her claim that "The courage of pregnancy and childbearing is trivialised... There is not a man alive who could stand it." Nor can I go along with the claim that women's self-assertion includes the "right to execute any man who batters, rapes or prostitutes her". Her insistence that "women need land and guns or other armament or defence" would seem the recipe for another Gaza.

Such passages not only play into the hands of critics who dismiss Dworkin as a shrill hysteric. They detract from the cogency of her central thesis. Her battering-ram discourse is - to use the word as loosely as she does herself - fascist. But this may be the inevitable result of her having been marginalised even within her own movement. So much of what Dworkin says is true and timely, one wishes she could have said it with a little more temperance and a lot more clarity.