Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement Book

I was disappointed when I first received this book in the mail and had a preliminary flip through it. Based on the title, I had expected the book would be a walk-through of clearly identified "myths," perhaps even with one myth per chapter, carefully identified and deconstructed. Instead Laor, who is a poet, meanders, jumps around, interweaves all the ideas together- and asks more questions than he gives answers. So, at first glance, instead of simplifying and decoding, Laor seems to heap complexity on top of complexity - perhaps even hiding amid complexity for fear of having to overtly defend one's ideas.

Yet upon closer inspection, the complex tapestry Laor has woven is more valuable than a simple and straightforward decoding would have been. This is not only because these myths are not so easily seperable from one another. His approach of asking questions to the reader provokes, allows the reader to complete thought processes themselves, and allows him to raise more issues than otherwise. More than this, it allows him to lead the reader toward the conclusion, which is made all the more powerful precisely because it is not a stark soundbite ready for prime time.

The central question that Laor asks is not, "what is paradoxical or hypocritical about liberal Zionist premises," but rather "why are liberal Zionist premises so popular in Europe?" Along the way toward answering the second question, he manages to address the first question. Laor, rightly in my opinion, implies that the dog wags the tail. This contrasts with much of contemporary news analysis that, philo-/ anti-semetically, over-attributes Jewish power and assumes tail wags dog.

Laor's perspective has been verified by recent turns of events. As the Netanyahu government has pulled Israel and Israeli society toward a more overt/ stark/ conservative Zionism, we have witnessed Europe seek to reign in its wayward creation. But Europe has not done so in an anti-Zionist manner that seeks to enforce Palestinian human rights. Rather, it is encouraging an Israeli return to its liberal Zionist mean and connected liberal Zionist two-state rhetoric.

Laor's emphasis on the centrality of Europe's Liberal Zionism, an external audience for whom authors like Oz and Yehouda ultimately write, also for the first time helped me understand previous comments I had heard from Jewish-Israeli allies of the Palestinians, in which they spoke of secular Israeli persecution of religious Jews in Israeli society. In MLK's language, Laor might call Israel a tyranny of the 'white moderate' more than that of the Klu Klux Klanner.

Israel's paradoxical bargain with its European metropole - to include Jews in conceptions of "the West" so long as they physically exclude themselves via a peripheral nation-state - is laid bare. Halfway through the book, Laor begins to focus on two authors, each taken in turn. He begins with the Ashkenazi Oz, in order to set up the baseline argument, and then proceeds to the Mizrahi Yehouda, in order to demonstrate how Israel's internal racist divisions add yet another layer to the paradox. Through these explorations it becomes clear just how Israel is, by design, destined to be forever in the position of outsider seeking to prove its insider status - unless, of course, it can make a fundamental change in its nature to indigenize itself into the region where it lives and from where the majority of its citizens come.

For work that thinks in a similar fashion, but takes more accessible forms, Victor Kattan gives a historical treatment of the same in the first chapter of his book From Coexistence to Conquest; and Gabriel Piterberg provides both historical and political treatment in his book The Returns of Zionism and in articles for the New Left Review and Settler Colonial Studies.