Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

312 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:311
against Arab and Jews against Jew, significant tensions within the Zionist
movement.
His work has none of the richness of the late Arthur Herzberg’s now
classic collection, The Zionist Idea, with its brilliant and enduring essay on
Zionism as an ideology and as an outgrowth of Jewish life and thought and
the Jewish disappointment with the Enlightenment and its confrontation
with modern European thought. Cohn-Sherbok’s work also does not have
the philosophical acumen of Shlomo Avineri’s work, which grapples with
Zionist thought philosophically and politically, and his most significant
attempt to educate young Israelis who were leaning to a post-Zionist ideology
on the philosophical richness of the movement that made them Israelis.
Where does one begin Zionist thought? Just before I began reading this
book I had lunch with two women who were developing curricula for teaching
about Israel in Jewish schools. They begin their course in the Bible with
Abram’s call to begin the journey. A theologian by training and a rabbi by
calling, perhaps Cohn-Sherbok should have begun in the biblical era. He
certainly should have considered the central motif of the Jewish narrative—
exile and return—and the cry that culminates Yom Kippur prayers and
marks the end of the Passover seder: “Next year in Jerusalem.” With certain
Arab leaders denying any connection between Jews and the land of Israel,
refusing to acknowledge the archeological evidence of the land itself and
the scriptural writings of the Hebrew Bible, which were venerated by Islam,
such a beginning is essential.
The Jewish link to the land also underscored the half-hearted approval
and soon thereafter full-throated rejection of the Uganda option at the turn
of the century, the great clash between Zionism as a political program
divorced from its ancestral ties to the land and one that emphasized the
intimate connection between the people and the land. Cohn-Sherbok not
only begins too late; he also begins by being dismissive of the messianic
impulse in Judaism, even among secular Jews who were drawn to many
messianic movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is not as if Cohn-
Sherbok does not know this material, but he avoids even a suggestion of
grappling with it; in addition, though he has been an astute observer of post-
Holocaust thought and of the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish experience,
he avoids confronting the impact of those memories on the policies of
Israel in the post-1967 war.
Cohn-Sherbok has chosen to present a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict,
event by event, battle by battle. Here too much is attempted, not
enough is achieved. Details are given, but few overarching themes. Any
history of the conflict that takes shape in a book runs the risk of being
outdated even before its publication; hence, there is no discussion of the
Arab Spring, nothing of the threat that Israel perceives coming from Iran,