THE JEWISH STATE

A history of and challenge to the Israeli antiZionist elite that threatens to deJudaize the Jewish state.

Hazony, a former Netanyahu aide and a contributor to periodicals like Commentary, is president of the Shalem Center think tank. His call to plug the leaking dike comes right after ``postZionist'' pundits rewrote Israel’s history books to read that undermanned Arab forces in 1948 were overwhelmed by a Zionist army that brutally caused the Arab refugee problem. Agreeing with the UN that Zionism is racism, these idealists contend that power, at least for Jews, corrupts. The Holocaust forced statehood, but these ``intellectuals, even in Israel, never became fully reconciled to the empowerment . . . entailed in the creation of a Jewish state.'' In Jerusalem in 1958 Martin Buber equated Zionism with ``the way of Hitler,'' and a guiltcleared world has often echoed the canard that Israeli soldiers are comparable to Nazis. Hazony traces the predecessors of today's postZionists to influential thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes, and Albert Einstein. The author documents how this once marginal clique of antinationalists got a toehold at Hebrew University, fought Zionists from David BenGurion on down, controlled the media, and now work to transform Israel into a binational state whose army is no longer mandated to protect Jews (say, in Entebbe) and whose national flag and anthem will be Jewfree. From the protocols of the elders of antiZionism, Hazony follows the pedigree to Shimon Peres, whose global New Middle East intends to eradicate nationalism and reduce the Jews to the influence of the Druse. A particular target of these messianic atheists is the Law of Return, which grants instant citizenship to Jewish immigrants only. The author believes Israel's many nonJews who accompanied RussianJewish immigrants to the nation have given anti-Zionism its suddenly sizable support.

Chapter notes and bibliography attest to Hazony's wellprepared, impassioned defense for history's most defenseless people.