Jacqueline Rose is a formidable scholar who has applied her deep practical understanding of psychoanalysis to explorations of English literature, and she now turns that understanding on Zionism. She approaches the subject ‘as a Jewish woman’ who has been ‘appalled at what the Israeli nation perpetrated in my name’. She fears that Zionism is doing damage to the Jewish world, the Palestinian Arabs, and ultimately to Israel itself. 

Yet Zionism seems impermeable to criticism, not least because its adherents often disregard opposition as anti-Semitism. Rather than reciprocate dismissively, Rose uses psychoanalytical tools to work out how Zionism was fashioned in such a way as to confound criticism. How did it conquer Jewish opinion so completely, and why did