Zionism: The author of this provocative and stimulating book is professor of English at Queen Mary College in the University of London. She is also Jewish, which gives a particularly poignant resonance to her train of thought.
She points out that despite the fact that in some political circles the word "Zionism" itself has become an insult, it is important to remember that Zionism emerged out of what she describes as "the legitimate desire of a persecuted people for a homeland". I completely accept this. I also accepted, the minute I read it, the statement of the late Golda Meir, who maintained that after 19 centuries of universal persecution of the Jews, it was essential for their survival that they should have a state in which they were the majority.
It takes courage for anyone to analyse the myths of their own people from inside and, in the case of Jacqueline Rose, a Jewish woman "appalled", as she says, "at what the Israeli nation perpetrated in my name", there are particular sensitivities.
There are three major sections in the book: Zionism as Messianism, Zionism as Psychoanalysis, and Zionism as Politics. The messianic idea is, of course, a fundamental part of the structure of Jewish religious thought. Rose powerfully demonstrates how divided the messianic vision itself is. On the one hand, there is the well-known positive idea of Jewish settlers in Palestine "making the desert blossom" (in the words of Yehuda Alkalai, "to build houses, dig wells, and plant vines and olive trees"); on the other, there is the dark vision of the settlers' movement, Gush Emunim ("We must show the master of the universe that we are willing to sacrifice our souls to the land"). She traces this sinister latter interpretation to its modern root in the figure of the 17th-century mystic and messianic figure, Shabtai Zvi. He created an immense stir in Smyrna by preaching blasphemous sermons and violating many of the religious taboos in an effort to shock a reticent God into taking a more personal intervention in the affairs of the world and assisting with the return of the Jews to their biblical homeland.
The examination of messianic Zionism leads on to a chapter in which Rose uses psychoanalysis to examine what, appropriately enough, was essentially a dream. In so doing she also analyses what, speaking of the American dream, Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, describes as "the foul dust that floated in the wake of the dream".
It is not surprising that there should be a neurotic element in Zionism as the natural reaction to the traumatic shock of the Holocaust. I think that, here too, we as Europeans must take our share of responsibility for the tragedy enveloping both Israelis and Palestinians. We attempted to solve the "Jewish question", a question that had essentially been raised by the unending cruelty of Christian treatment of Jewry, at the expense of the dispossession of the indigenous people of Palestine. This was compounded by an interpretation of Zionism that treated biblical myth as a legal title to land abandoned for 2,000 years.
Rose is very interesting on the mass psychosis that can affect an army like that of Israel and quotes Staff Sgt Liran Ro Furer speaking of his experience in Gaza as "a place to test our personal limits - how tough, how callous, how crazy we could be". And this is supported by people such as Moshe Nissim, who drove a tank during the assault on Jenin in 2003: "The moment I drove the tank into the camp something switched in my head. I went mad. I wanted to destroy everything."
Indeed, speaking of his attack on Jenin (horribly misnamed "Operation Defensive Shield"), the ambivalent Lt Gen Moshe Ya'alon told some of his soldiers that he did not care if the army "looked like lunatics". Unfortunately, as is evidenced in this brave book, some of them not only looked, but behaved, like lunatics.
Nevertheless there is hope, and that hope lies in the extraordinary moral courage of people such as the five teenage soldiers who declined to serve in the occupied territories and were denounced by the prosecutor as "ideological criminals of the worst kind" for refusing to violate international law. Or Rabbi Arik Ascherman, of Rabbis For Human Rights, who was recently on trial in Jerusalem for attempting to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes and who said: "Zion will only be redeemed through justice and those who can return it to her through acts of righteousness."
In the chapter titled Zionism as Politics, Rose demonstrates that many among the early Zionist leadership were aware of the lunacy that might be provoked and of the suffering caused to Jew and Arab alike by an unwise attempt to realise the tragic dream of Zionism.
Before the state of Israel was created, Theodore Herzl confronted this issue, as did the famous first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, who, with the Haganah High Command, put forward the so-called Plan D in 1948, which provided for the destruction of Arab villages and the expulsion of inconvenient Arab populations. The crux is put with cruel clarity by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who said quite simply: "Do you want ethics or do you want land?"
When I met the Dalai Lama in India some years ago, he told me he was praying for the souls of the Chinese because of the damage they were doing to their own spirit by the ruthlessness of their occupation of Tibet. There is a parallel in Israel. The problem is not just the pain and suffering of the Palestinians, it is also the corrosive moral injury being done to the Jewish people in Israel. It is difficult to resist the conclusion of the former Israeli general, Avner Azulay, that "what is happening in Israel is bad for the Jewish people".
Distinguished writers quoted in this book ask similar questions about who is a true friend of Israel: is it the loving critic or the unthinking patriot? The one who identifies with it automatically, or the one who wants it to be just? Those such as Rabbis For Human Rights, dissident scholar Prof Avi Shlaim, the author of the present work, and in my humble way myself, would like to be seen not merely as critics of Israel but very definitely as loving critics whose criticism springs from a genuine concern for the welfare of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Rose's book is a useful aid to understanding the situation in Israel in a balanced way. It would, however, be helped by a glossary of terms used, some of which will be quite unfamiliar to western Christian readers, and by a biographical note containing potted histories of the principal protagonists.
David Norris formerly taught as senior lecturer in the English department of Trinity College Dublin. He is one of three representatives of the graduates of Dublin University in Seanad Éireann and is the longest-serving member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs
The Question of Zion By Jacqueline Rose Princeton University Press, 187pp. £12.95