Explores the Israel–Palestine conflict’s historical and philosophical roots, revealing its ideological foundations and advocating a one-state solution.
This scholarly yet readable and accessible book explores the Palestine–Israel Conflict, explaining its historical and philosophical context while arguing for the need for a one-state solution. The conflict is such a complex and charged topic that finding the right approach, which balances history, politics and human experience, is vital but rarely achieved.
Certainly, there is an extensive literature on the Palestine–Israel conflict, much of which framed by supposed two-state solutions and the so-called ‘peace process’. However, there is rather less on the ideologies that lie behind today’s Jewish state, despite them directly feeding the increasingly vicious politics of modern-day Israel. Through explorations of key works in Jewish and Zionist political philosophy, along with the arguments of Israeli politicians today, Cohen explains why the conflict should not be seen as a religious one, but rather how it has its roots in European racism and American fundamentalism, forces that have combined to produce not so much a ‘Jewish homeland but what has legitimately been classified as a settler-colonial state.
By deconstructing Zionism’s dangerous ideas, drawn primarily from Italian Fascism but also feeding off the ethnic politics of Russian Bolshevism and even Nazism, new light is shed on the conflict and its historical and psychological roots. The overt militarism and implied racism of writers like Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Carl Schmitt, all three celebrated as ‘Founding Fathers’ of today’s Israel, is recalled and dissected carefully. Echoing key Palestinian voices today, Martin Cohen makes the case for a one-state solution, the approach always favoured by liberal Jews, Arab nations and the Palestinians themselves.
