The Idea Of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

(Verso, £16.99)

The Jewish historian Ilan Pappe has devoted this hefty volume to a critical history of zionism and its critics in which he demonstrates that its claims to historicity are spurious.

He quotes an anecdote about David Ben-Gurion's attempt in 1937 to enrol distinguished Jewish historian Ben-Zion Dinur in his plans to document the Jews' occupation of the land of Palestine from as far back as Roman times.

Dinur agreed to do so but the research would take decades. Ben-Gurion gave him two weeks. "Reach your conclusion by then," he said, "and afterwards you can have a whole decade to prove it."

Pappe documents the way in which the zionist narrative became the bedrock of Israeli historical research - a sine qua non which could not be questioned - until, at first hesitatingly but with increasing confidence, Jewish historians began to stand up and be counted.

"When the idea of Israel was challenged from within," Pappe writes, "it meant that the ideal of zionism was deciphered as an ideology and thus became a far more tangible and feasible target for critical evaluation. This is what happened to a group of Israelis during the 1990s in what I characterise here as Israel's post-zionist moment.

"The journey ended as abruptly as it erupted. After less than a decade, it was branded by the state and by large segments of the Jewish Israeli population as dangerous, indeed suicidal - a trip that would end in Israel losing its international legitimacy and moral backing.

Post-zionism, as the journey was defined by most of its observers and students, became anti-semitism in the eyes of its enemies. In 2000 it was defeated and nearly disappeared."

But the breadth of Pappe's analysis is wider than that.

His second chapter is devoted to the place of the Palestinians in the zionist discourse: "The challengers proposed a total reversal in the common depiction of the Palestinians and Palestine in Israeli Jewish discourse," he argues. "They suggested transforming the Palestinians from villains into victims and, in some films, even into heroes. In this way, the zionists became both victimisers and culprits."

There are some important omissions. There are no references to the questioning of the very existence of such a thing as a specifically Jewish identity in books like Schlomo Sand's The Invention Of The Jewish People and his first book The Invention Of The State Of Israel

The latter was a bestseller in Israel and has been translated into more foreign languages than any other Israeli non-fiction. But it does not even appear in Pappe's bibliography which is surprising, to say the least.

Such caveats aside, however, this is an important contribution to the defence of that first casualty of racist propaganda - truth.

Ilan Pappe will be speaking about his book at Conway Hall, London, on Sunday, March 2, from 11am to 12.30pm.

Karl Dallas