The Fate of Zionism: A Secular Future for Israel & Palestine

While there are a few things about this book that I disagree with very strongly, I still think this book has many good points to make. Let's get the bad stuff over with first. Hertzberg, a very knowledgeable person, thinks that although a genuine peace between Arabs and Israelis is not possible, we ought to have an imposed peace. A peace imposed by the United States! No, not a peace. A ceasefire, in which we'd stop Israel from its "creeping annexation" of the West Bank! And use our troops to enforce it, rather than try to use any diplomatic options that might avoid committing American soldiers in such a manner. In my opinion, taking Hertzberg's advice literally is not a good idea here. Having the US enforce a cease-fire would risk getting our soldiers attacked by the Arabs, no matter where the lines were drawn. I think American policy in Iraq in 2004 would look positively brilliant by comparison. Still, this book is worth four stars. Let me tell you some of the good points the author does make: 1) Israel is basically secular, not dominated by religious leaders as many of its detractors imply. 2) Zionism is not colonialism, nor is it racism. 3) Many Western "liberals" act as if Israel's existence were "the worst outrage that exists today in the world," when in fact it is not even the biggest issue in the Arab world. 4) The antizionism of the British newspaper, the Guardian, and the French newspaper, Le Monde, is simply "disgusting." 5) Israel is not simply a US colony, unable to stand up by itself. 6) Those Westerners who demand the destruction of Israel will gain nothing from it. Certainly, they will not achieve peace, even if they succeed in destroying Israel. 7) Many attacks on Israel are really proxy attacks on the United States. Noam Chomsky's attacks on the United States are particularly "intolerable." By the way, Hertzberg does us a service by tracing a little of the history of Chomsky's views about Israel. 8) A partition of the former British Mandate of 1946 will not work. A "two-state solution," something Hertzberg has advocated for the past 35 years, will not work. This is an amazing concession to reality by Hertzberg, and I am impressed that he would not merely realize it but admit it. I actually recommend this book.

It's hard to believe that a self-proclaimed Zionist could write a balanced book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but Hertzberg somewhat succeeds. Hertzberg provides a brief history of both his beliefs and solutions regarding the conflict, and describes the problems and virtues of both the Jewish and Palestinian sides. But, as you might expect, there are problems with his account.1) He describes himself as a moderate Zionist who supports the two-state solution, and he elaborates in his book the various problems that have prevented resolution to the preeminent conflict in the Middle East. Herzberg distances himself from the hard-line, messianic Jews who seek to rule over all of Palestine, but at the same time, he fails to properly address the encroachment of settlements in the West Bank that are often supported and created by the hardliners. In his discussion of the proposed security fence between Israel and the West Bank (the fence had not started construction during the writing of the book), he does not give an opinion regarding what should be done about the settlements that were illegally established in the Palestinian territory.2) One of Hertzberg's main topics of discussion revolves around Palestinian identity and nationalism. Did the Palestinians regard themselves as such or just as Arabs before the Zionist movement, or did they become Palestinians as a reaction to the Zionist movement? Hertzberg spends a number of pages concerning this issue, and he seems to come to the latter conclusion thereby implicitly weakening the Palestinians reasons for both statehood and return to present-day Israel.3) Although he is very critical of terror tactics employed by various Palestinian terrorist groups, he fails to be critical enough of Israeli reprisals and consequent deaths of many innocent Palestinians.4) He does not appropriately criticize either Yasir Arafat or Ariel Sharon for their various mistakes and crimes in perpetuating the conflict.Those are just some of the problems I have with Hertzberg's book, but there are also several positives. He correctly identifies the US as the major player in mediating the conflict and supports American involvement in realizing the two-state solution. He casts aside religious reasons for the existence of Israel and relies instead on secular and humanitarian reasons - he argues that Jews needed to escape persecution from pogroms and the pre- and post-Holocaust atrocities to establish a homeland where they could live as a "normal" nation rather than argue that Jews have a divine right to inhabit their ancestral homeland.There are, of course, many other discussion points, good and bad, for this book. Finding a well-balanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult, but this book is pretty well-balanced for a self-proclaimed Zionist who is obviously biased.