MixedFull StopLinfield clearly finds the represented authors fascinating, and so offering a book on Zionism in the middle of a conflicted series of Israeli political scandals is a great way of trying to connect her own personal obsessions, which she indulges in writing the book, with a larger political issue. How she frames that issue is confused at times, it is based around her notions of what a \'correct\' position would be for the Left, one many anti-Zionists (but not all of Israel’s critics) she believes have abandoned. In doing so she claims to search for a Left universalism, but fails to show how that universalism would somehow immune Israel from the harsh denunciations it regularly receives from Left social movements ... The book is thus a complicated and well written polemic about the fractious way the Left has dealt with Israel. The hope for Linfield is that she will find an audience for such a narrow study by connecting it to the larger debates on Zionism (it worked on me, to a degree), but I do wonder if there is actually an audience enough for a book like this. All the represented authors besides Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt will be completely unknown to most readers ... Besides being a book that is ostensibly about the Left and Zionism, you learn very little about how the Left actually sees Zionism ... Linfield’s study suffers from the narrowness of its scope. The authors she studies are, largely, of the Old Left, so not representative of the shift Linfield hopes to analyze ... The absolute lack of a Palestinian perspective is glaring from the volume, where casually insulting characterizations of Arab politics are dotted throughout ... All of this should not ignore that Linfield actually weaves the stories and analysis masterfully; the writing is clear, arguments clear, and it is an enjoyable read throughout ... It is doubtful that the book will change any minds (it even hardened my own against the viability of the two-state solution Linfield argues for), but a difference of opinion may be less important in this situation than the ability to see three dimensions.
