The Question of Zion, by Jacqueline Rose

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One might have thought the Question of Zion would have long been ripe for Answers, but Jacqueline Rose believes that a trawl through the basic sources of the ideology that enabled - or excused - the State of Israel might enlighten us about the present. She has delved into the works of Theodor Herzl, A D Gordon, Asher Ginszberg, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and other discoursers, pro and con. Palestinian and Arab readers might reflect that, while Jewish intellectuals agonised about their motives, they lost their lands and homes, despite the fantasies of Herzl that Jewish colonisation would be a boon for all. Zionism, for the Palestinian Arabs, was the physical presence of the settler, the soldier, the builder of checkpoints.

Professor Rose is sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Her highly critical presentation of the psychopathology of much Zionist thinking - and its denial of Arab grievances - will make her many enemies, particularly in the US. Writing from a position sympathetic to her own, one is therefore reluctant to accentuate the negative. But there are serious flaws in this work.

The main problem is an overriding shallowness. Rose does not access the primary sources, and relies on translations from the Hebrew. This need not cripple a researcher. But it does require a greater rigour and caution than is demonstrated in this book. An over-reliance on certain dissident Israeli historians, and avoidance of others, skews the analysis.

Rose has visited Jewish rightist settlers and interviewed their defender, "Bibi" Netanyahu, but she appears to have little grounding in the religious iconography that informs their thought. Who might blame her? Much of the material in that field is so extreme and racist as to feed the most rabid anti-Semites.

The mad Rabbi Kahane's Kach movement is mentioned but its influential fascist rhetoric is not properly analysed. As elsewhere in our 21st-century chaos, religion, in fundamentalist format, has flowed in where secular ideas have foundered. In modern Israel, Jewish vandals deface the tomb of Herzl with Nazi signs.

But even if omission is inevitable, lack of basic understanding is not. Rose has bought into the idea that the Holocaust "fully enters the [Israeli] national memory only after the 1967 Six Day War". This is nonsense. The Holocaust, and the "illegal" immigration of refugees, galvanised the Jewish resistance in Palestine in the aftermath of the Second World War. It fiercely fed the polemic of the new state from 1948.

The ethos of a rebirth from the ashes was paramount, as I can personally attest from primary and secondary schools in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, the Eichman trial gripped Israel in a frenzy of relived agony.

There is no mention of this in Rose's book. She is fixated on the Word, eschewing lived experience, condemning herself to the closed circle of the neo-Marxist neverland, obsessed with finding a Freudian, Lacanian or Hegelian term to fit the decline of the "non-violent" Zionist dream. "I approached two distinguished Hegelian philosophers," for the solution, she writes. She should have approached Abd el-Jawad X, on any street corner in Ramallah or Gaza, or Mrs Frieda Y, née of Dachau. They, like countless victims of the 20th century's ideological certainties, can bear witness to the result when force is deployed to achieve the ideas of polemicists and thinkers.

In the end, despite the undoubted influence of ideologies and nationalist delusions, the thinkers could not make the state of Israel out of pure desire or will. That creation was left to the 20th century's cataclysmic historical dynamics, which set the lovers of Zion, Jewish and Arab, so fatefully at each other's throats.

Simon Louvish's 'Mae West' will be published by Faber

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