If I am not for myself: Journey of an Anti-zionist Jew By Mike Marqusee, Verso, £16.99

Mike Marqusee’s first encounter with the bogey of Jewish ‘self-hatred’ was at the age of fourteen, when his father, a liberal left-winger in his own youth, accused him of being a self-hating Jew. Young Marqusee had argued over dinner that, going by the common sense of analogy, if the United States was wrong in Vietnam, then Israel was not in the right in the Six-Day War of 1967 — an illegal and undemocratic taking over of “all that Arab land”. He learnt that day that while analogies were welcome, certain analogies were off-limits. It was Marqusee’s first step towards realizing that Zionism and its ideas of the State of Israel and Jewish identity forbade debate and a pluralistic political and cultural discourse. This book is a memoir, portraying the development of Marqusee’s intellectual and political consciousness.

As an anti-Zionist Jew, Marqusee is not hostile to the idea or existence of a Jewish State. But he rejects the Zionist claim that there should be a Jewish State in Palestine. Zionists have accused Marqusee of “singling out” Jews and denying them a right to statehood when Jews should have analogous status with other national groups. But when the same logic is applied to Palestinians and their right to a State of their own, Zionists reject it. Similarly, they argue that the word ‘apartheid’ cannot be used to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Nor can the Holocaust be compared to any other mass murder.

Marqusee does not really break new ground in tracing the Zionist fear of Israel’s annihilation and insistence that being a Jew involves the acquisition of a sacrosanct, inviolate world view to the collective forgetting of the Haskalah (the 18th-century rationalist Jewish Enlightenment). But he does explore this history of forgetting illustratively and in depth. Even as the Jews came out of the ghettos after their emancipation, they suffered from rootlessness and a new form of pseudo-scientific anti-Semitism based on racial theories. Zionism exploited this crisis with the promise of “safety and security” and a deliverance from the ‘Jewish neurosis’. And once the Holocaust established that one could not hide one’s Jewishness (since the murdered six million meant that it was wrong to do so), Zionism created the bogey of Jewish self-hatred to curtail debate within Jewish society.

Marqusee contrasts the deadend of Israel and Zionism with the vibrant early days of the New York Jewry, tracing its history through his maternal grandfather, Ed Morand, and the Jews of Kovno in Lithuania. Ed, a political activist whose encounters with anti-Semitism forced him to become a militant Zionist, had, unlike assimilated American Jews, changed his surname to make it sound more Jewish. Ed’s journey informs and contrasts Marqusee’s own, the latter growing up in the Sixties among suburban American Jews, with his pro-Palestinian activism and the experience of living among Muslims as a Jew. Different as the two men are, Ed and Mike are bound together by an element of conviction — that one cannot deny what one sees close at hand, no matter how strong the argument against such obvious truths. Marqusee is, therefore, a child of the Haskalah in his belief that no one ideology can claim Jewish loyalty and that the chief claim to such loyalty must be based on reason. The diaspora, with its history of diversity and openness, will always remain the most authentic embodiment of Jewishness.