Review by Choice Review
Historian Piterberg, who was raised in Israel and presently teaches at UCLA, has established himself as a vociferous critic of the Jewish state, and this book will only add to his anti-Israel reputation. He challenges what he describes as the three foundational myths that underlie Israeli politics and culture: "the negation of exile," which states that from time immemorial, the Jews constituted a territorial nation; the "normalization of the Jewish existence," or the return of the Jews to their land, which Zionist ideology defined as empty of inhabitants; and the Jewish "return to history," a myth that Piterberg attributes to the influence of German Romantic nationalism, which stressed that the natural and irreducible form of human collectivity is the nation, which, for Zionists, meant that as long as Jews were in exile, the Jews remained a community outside history. Elsewhere, Piterberg places the creation of Israel within the existing scholarly field of comparative secular colonialism, specifically agreeing with those historians who argue that the kibbutz was first and foremost a colonizing tool for the formation of the Zionist project that culminated in the founding of Israel, a settler state whose culture and politics were constructed on the exclusion of Palestinian Arabs. Summing Up: Recommended. Faculty/researchers only. J. Fischel emeritus, Messiah College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
