What do you think?
Rate this book
The Lions' Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky
A lively intellectual history that explores how prominent midcentury public intellectuals approached Zionism and then the State of Israel itself and its conflicts with the Arab world
In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how eight prominent twentieth-century intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism, and then with Israel and its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal and the political, the book includes philosophers, historians, journalists, and activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. In their engagement with Zionism, these influential thinkers also wrestled with the twentieth century’s most crucial political socialism, nationalism, democracy, colonialism, terrorism, and anti‑Semitism. In other words, in probing Zionism, they confronted the very nature of modernity and the often catastrophic histories of our time. By examining these leftist intellectuals, Linfield also seeks to understand how the contemporary Left has become focused on anti‑Zionism and how Israel itself has moved rightward.
In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how eight prominent twentieth-century intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism, and then with Israel and its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal and the political, the book includes philosophers, historians, journalists, and activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. In their engagement with Zionism, these influential thinkers also wrestled with the twentieth century’s most crucial political socialism, nationalism, democracy, colonialism, terrorism, and anti‑Semitism. In other words, in probing Zionism, they confronted the very nature of modernity and the often catastrophic histories of our time. By examining these leftist intellectuals, Linfield also seeks to understand how the contemporary Left has become focused on anti‑Zionism and how Israel itself has moved rightward.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published March 26, 2019
54 people are currently reading
673 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
Read
November 29, 2020I’m refraining from rating this book, simply because I think there was too much within it that I disagreed with. That being said, this was a well-written and engaging text, with lots of fascinating details. There was a lot that I learned and it’s fascinating to read about how leftists of various stripes (communists, anarchists, anti-colonial socialists, and members of the ‘New Left’) engaged with the ideas of Zionism.
What diminished this text for me was that it was relentlessly polemical. At almost every turn, Linfield praises statements that can be understood as pro-Zionist, and takes every opportunity to assert that any writings critical of Zionism were hopelessly ignorant and naïve, or somehow dishonest. More importantly though, Linfield bemoans the shift of leftist politics, which she frames as a move a way from anti-fascism towards anti-colonial Third World revolution and anti-imperialism. I found that curious because even early communists like Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg (which she mentions) were against the idea of Zionism, and so this antagonism was not principally a matter of that shift in leftist politics. Either way, Linfield seems rather condescending towards Third World socialism, which is still a prevalent theme in a lot of leftist discourse I’ve encountered today. It’s remarkable how condescendingly and dismissively she writes about the Black Panthers, as well as the way she paints Fanon as almost having some sort of blood lust.
The way Linfield talks about Arabs was also a at times troubling to me, and she subscribed to numerous Orientalist tropes, claiming that any opinion beyond such tropes were naïve or out of touch with reality. It’s not that she’s unaware of this post-colonial discourse. She takes enormous efforts to attack Edward Said numerous times throughout the book, obviously having read his work. (As an aside, she includes a slightly amusing comment by the anti-Zionist communist Maxime Rodinson who called Said’s Orientalism “a bit Stalinist” and didn’t much care for it). Linfield does the same with Palestinian scholar Joseph Massad (especially criticizing Massad’s skewering of Halliday as a “pro-imperialist apologist”). Massad was the professor from whom I first encountered the history of early Zionists who ‘collaborated’ or engaged with Nazis. He frames Zionism as a principally Christian apocalyptic invention and ruse to remove Jewish communities from Europe. I did not know that these sorts of observations are actually found in Arendt’s anti-Zionist writings as Linfield writes about in this book, and which she denounces as ill-informed and untrue. Curiously, Arendt never identified as a ‘leftist’ and I would not consider her as such. I read a few academic reviews of this book that found the title rather curious, as Arendt’s name is in this book’s subtitle.
Likely most disappointing was Linfield’s chapter on Chomsky. I cannot recall her mentioning anything about Chomsky’s identification with Zionism or rather his alternative understanding of it. It was just scathing fury, beginning to end. She painted him as some sort of self-absorbed lunatic, presenting evidence that was either just his own prior work, or obscure mis-contexualized events that were not relevant to any ‘established’ scholarship on the Palestine-Israel question. She is continually emphasizing how the left points out the faults of Israel and the violence it enacts, but fails to equally criticize the violence of Palestinians, who believes should be held to the same standard. She makes no account for how power imbalances should factor into adjudicating how justified or understandable violence is in different contexts, and scorns those who make such distinctions as apologists for authoritarians, even ‘fascists’. And the principle people she criticizes in these passages are members of the New Left – people like Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali. These intellectuals are not cold, rigid Stalinists. If anything, they are the opposite. These are fairly moderate leftist intellectuals who I see continually criticized by younger leftists today like Vijay Prashad, for being overly critical of Third World socialist projects and being too enamoured with ‘Western Marxism’. And it’s not just these Marxists she denounces, but even a soft progressive like Judith Butler gets disproportionate scorn from Linfield for her anti-Zionist writings.
For Linfield, Arabs against Zionism are for some reason framed as Arab fascists in cahoots with British imperialism, and Zionism is the true leftist project that has been hijacked by Likud and the Israeli right. She spends a significant portion of the book, saying those advocating a one-state solution are either delusional and lack adequate suspicion of Arabs, or are basically de facto advocating what is a fantasy for the Israeli right, because that one-state will result in a complete erasure of Palestine, not Israel. She believes a two-state solution was the only correct position from the beginning, and any assertion otherwise basically amounted to justifying another Jewish genocide.
So a few of Linfield’s subjects were leftists with anti-Zionist leanings. Other than Memmi (the other pro-Zionist leftist that Linfield had great affinity for), Linfield exhorts the work of Fred Halliday. I would later read that his brother was Jon Halliday, who has written oppressively didactic anti-communist polemics with his partner Jung Chang. Their books are fairly popular in the West, especially among Conservative crowds. Fred Halliday himself wrote quite a lot for the New Left Review, and found himself in sharp disagreement with Perry Anderson – especially on the issue of Israel. Halliday himself was not Jewish, but an Irish republican socialist.
I found the chapter on Memmi fairly interesting, although I disagreed with a lot of what he had to say. I found Memmi’s association with Sartre and Fanon rather interesting. I was fascinated to read that Sartre supported Israel for a time and spoke out in defense of Memmi. I later read that Fanon’s widow denounced Sartre after he spoke out in support of Israel following the 1967 Six Day War, asking his introduction to Wretched of the Earth be removed from future publications. I believe Sartre’s views would reverse in the 1970s towards Palestine, although I think it was always an issue full of nuance for him.
The last comment I wanted to make was Linfield’s mention of Daniel Berrigan – who is still an enormous anti-war hero among the Christian left. Linfield sharply criticizes Chomsky’s defense of Berrigan when the Catholic priest criticized Israel in a rather unsavoury fashion. As a Christian, I think it’s so important to recognize the central role that Christians played in creating this mess. Unfortunately, I think anti-Semitism is still an issue among some portions of liberal Christianity. In a bible study at a United Church, which is supposedly one of the more progressive denominations in Canada, I still encountered comments basically criticizing ‘Jews’ writ large, not even making an effort to distinguish Israeli state policy with a very diverse faith tradition. I think Christians have a lot to answer for, and I’m still trying to more carefully examine if I’m inadvertently contributing to anti-Semitism.
It was the horrors of the Shoah/Holocaust and the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism that effectively displaced so many Jewish people, and provoked a need for some type of safe homeland. Today, when one ponders the Palestinians who suffer a horrible undignified existence (as Linfield does recognize on numerous occasions in this book), one of course is drawn to ponder the responsibility of the state of Israel, especially the Likud. But even more than that, it is Christian imperialism and European anti-Semitism that must account for its wrongs here. Linfield has this incredible quote at the beginning of her book, from the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish:
“Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy… Yes, the interest is in you, not me! …We are lucky that Israel is our enemy, because the Jews are the center of the world… I do not have any illusions. The international interest in the Palestinian question is only a reflection of the interest in the Jewish question.”
The hyper-militarization of Israel, its stockpile of nuclear weapons has become an undeniable arm of American intervention in the Levant, which I think Linfield would also recognize to be true. Other Zionists of the left can recognize that fact also I think.
I am far too ignorant to know how viable Linfield’s claims are that the various anti-Zionist polemicists of the left she portrays in this book are simply ill-informed, naïve, or dishonest. I did not find her arguments on that front compelling, but I still think this book was worth reading for all the fascinating intellectual history it covers. I always looked forward to getting back into this book during my breaks and found it a very engaging read.
What diminished this text for me was that it was relentlessly polemical. At almost every turn, Linfield praises statements that can be understood as pro-Zionist, and takes every opportunity to assert that any writings critical of Zionism were hopelessly ignorant and naïve, or somehow dishonest. More importantly though, Linfield bemoans the shift of leftist politics, which she frames as a move a way from anti-fascism towards anti-colonial Third World revolution and anti-imperialism. I found that curious because even early communists like Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg (which she mentions) were against the idea of Zionism, and so this antagonism was not principally a matter of that shift in leftist politics. Either way, Linfield seems rather condescending towards Third World socialism, which is still a prevalent theme in a lot of leftist discourse I’ve encountered today. It’s remarkable how condescendingly and dismissively she writes about the Black Panthers, as well as the way she paints Fanon as almost having some sort of blood lust.
The way Linfield talks about Arabs was also a at times troubling to me, and she subscribed to numerous Orientalist tropes, claiming that any opinion beyond such tropes were naïve or out of touch with reality. It’s not that she’s unaware of this post-colonial discourse. She takes enormous efforts to attack Edward Said numerous times throughout the book, obviously having read his work. (As an aside, she includes a slightly amusing comment by the anti-Zionist communist Maxime Rodinson who called Said’s Orientalism “a bit Stalinist” and didn’t much care for it). Linfield does the same with Palestinian scholar Joseph Massad (especially criticizing Massad’s skewering of Halliday as a “pro-imperialist apologist”). Massad was the professor from whom I first encountered the history of early Zionists who ‘collaborated’ or engaged with Nazis. He frames Zionism as a principally Christian apocalyptic invention and ruse to remove Jewish communities from Europe. I did not know that these sorts of observations are actually found in Arendt’s anti-Zionist writings as Linfield writes about in this book, and which she denounces as ill-informed and untrue. Curiously, Arendt never identified as a ‘leftist’ and I would not consider her as such. I read a few academic reviews of this book that found the title rather curious, as Arendt’s name is in this book’s subtitle.
Likely most disappointing was Linfield’s chapter on Chomsky. I cannot recall her mentioning anything about Chomsky’s identification with Zionism or rather his alternative understanding of it. It was just scathing fury, beginning to end. She painted him as some sort of self-absorbed lunatic, presenting evidence that was either just his own prior work, or obscure mis-contexualized events that were not relevant to any ‘established’ scholarship on the Palestine-Israel question. She is continually emphasizing how the left points out the faults of Israel and the violence it enacts, but fails to equally criticize the violence of Palestinians, who believes should be held to the same standard. She makes no account for how power imbalances should factor into adjudicating how justified or understandable violence is in different contexts, and scorns those who make such distinctions as apologists for authoritarians, even ‘fascists’. And the principle people she criticizes in these passages are members of the New Left – people like Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali. These intellectuals are not cold, rigid Stalinists. If anything, they are the opposite. These are fairly moderate leftist intellectuals who I see continually criticized by younger leftists today like Vijay Prashad, for being overly critical of Third World socialist projects and being too enamoured with ‘Western Marxism’. And it’s not just these Marxists she denounces, but even a soft progressive like Judith Butler gets disproportionate scorn from Linfield for her anti-Zionist writings.
For Linfield, Arabs against Zionism are for some reason framed as Arab fascists in cahoots with British imperialism, and Zionism is the true leftist project that has been hijacked by Likud and the Israeli right. She spends a significant portion of the book, saying those advocating a one-state solution are either delusional and lack adequate suspicion of Arabs, or are basically de facto advocating what is a fantasy for the Israeli right, because that one-state will result in a complete erasure of Palestine, not Israel. She believes a two-state solution was the only correct position from the beginning, and any assertion otherwise basically amounted to justifying another Jewish genocide.
So a few of Linfield’s subjects were leftists with anti-Zionist leanings. Other than Memmi (the other pro-Zionist leftist that Linfield had great affinity for), Linfield exhorts the work of Fred Halliday. I would later read that his brother was Jon Halliday, who has written oppressively didactic anti-communist polemics with his partner Jung Chang. Their books are fairly popular in the West, especially among Conservative crowds. Fred Halliday himself wrote quite a lot for the New Left Review, and found himself in sharp disagreement with Perry Anderson – especially on the issue of Israel. Halliday himself was not Jewish, but an Irish republican socialist.
I found the chapter on Memmi fairly interesting, although I disagreed with a lot of what he had to say. I found Memmi’s association with Sartre and Fanon rather interesting. I was fascinated to read that Sartre supported Israel for a time and spoke out in defense of Memmi. I later read that Fanon’s widow denounced Sartre after he spoke out in support of Israel following the 1967 Six Day War, asking his introduction to Wretched of the Earth be removed from future publications. I believe Sartre’s views would reverse in the 1970s towards Palestine, although I think it was always an issue full of nuance for him.
The last comment I wanted to make was Linfield’s mention of Daniel Berrigan – who is still an enormous anti-war hero among the Christian left. Linfield sharply criticizes Chomsky’s defense of Berrigan when the Catholic priest criticized Israel in a rather unsavoury fashion. As a Christian, I think it’s so important to recognize the central role that Christians played in creating this mess. Unfortunately, I think anti-Semitism is still an issue among some portions of liberal Christianity. In a bible study at a United Church, which is supposedly one of the more progressive denominations in Canada, I still encountered comments basically criticizing ‘Jews’ writ large, not even making an effort to distinguish Israeli state policy with a very diverse faith tradition. I think Christians have a lot to answer for, and I’m still trying to more carefully examine if I’m inadvertently contributing to anti-Semitism.
It was the horrors of the Shoah/Holocaust and the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism that effectively displaced so many Jewish people, and provoked a need for some type of safe homeland. Today, when one ponders the Palestinians who suffer a horrible undignified existence (as Linfield does recognize on numerous occasions in this book), one of course is drawn to ponder the responsibility of the state of Israel, especially the Likud. But even more than that, it is Christian imperialism and European anti-Semitism that must account for its wrongs here. Linfield has this incredible quote at the beginning of her book, from the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish:
“Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy… Yes, the interest is in you, not me! …We are lucky that Israel is our enemy, because the Jews are the center of the world… I do not have any illusions. The international interest in the Palestinian question is only a reflection of the interest in the Jewish question.”
The hyper-militarization of Israel, its stockpile of nuclear weapons has become an undeniable arm of American intervention in the Levant, which I think Linfield would also recognize to be true. Other Zionists of the left can recognize that fact also I think.
I am far too ignorant to know how viable Linfield’s claims are that the various anti-Zionist polemicists of the left she portrays in this book are simply ill-informed, naïve, or dishonest. I did not find her arguments on that front compelling, but I still think this book was worth reading for all the fascinating intellectual history it covers. I always looked forward to getting back into this book during my breaks and found it a very engaging read.
June 2, 2020
I had the book and the audio version and began by going back and forth between the two, trying to remember. And that was just the introduction. Then my husband wanted to listen with me, which meant mostly listening-during-dinner-prep -- in other words, proceeding straight through, with occasional discussion.
In the meantime the world changed. I began pre-pandemic. Even then, I had been unhappy with our call-out culture. Subsequently, anybody who wants to call out anyone else -- or any entity, including Israel -- seems more and more like part of the problem.
Fairly recently I'd read So You've Been Publicly Shamed, whose author, although seeing the wrongs that could come from calling people out, was unable to let go of the belief that calling out was generally on the side of the angels and a way to rid the world of some of its injustice.
Now, though, it seems that anybody calling out anybody else is setting the stage for Trump. Teaching him, helping him, showing him how, preparing the way for him. They are being divisive, and being divisive works in the interests of those who would divide and conquer. They are making things worse, and making what's worse expand and spread.
Per the book flap, the author, Susie Linfield, writes about culture and politics. She teaches cultural journalism at NYU. I notice, with interest, given current protests and riots, that her previous book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, argues for the connection of photojournalism and ideals of human rights.
The Lions' Den examines the relationship of the political left to Zionism and the politics of how Zionism become a dirty word.
The book examines the work and intellectual histories of eight public intellectuals, mostly of the 20th century, four of whom I'd at least heard of. Two of them are European, four are socialists, and two are American. Six of the eight are usually perceived as anti-Zionist, or at least used that way by the left.
This book assumes a familiarity with the work of these eight, and that's part of the problem with it. If you aren't already intimately familiar with them, you would need further study of them, yet that I wasn't prepared to do at present. Therefore, lacking a structure on which to hang all their ideas, I found the material hard to retain.
Also, without already having studied these thinkers, I sometimes found it tricky to give a solid evaluation to what the author is saying. Not that the ideas aren't clearly stated; just that there a lot. And sometimes she struck me as defensive. Or polemical. Maybe it's just that she's working things out for herself as she goes.
The particular ways she gives her bona fides as a leftist Zionist can sound like virtue signalling, in the sense that she's criticizing some of these authors' anti-Zionism but tempering her doing so by being appalled by aspects of Israeli politics.
She primarily sticks to the political and gives short shrift to Jew-hatred and the role of Jews-as-other in Western civilization.
And once toward the end of the book she surprisingly uses "Talmudic" in its pejorative sense (p. 296).
In her book, she has the floor to herself. How would she do if she were in dialogue?
The best way for me to use this book, beyond what I'm already able to remember and mull over, is to keep it as a reference book. That's somewhat of a disappointment as I'd been so eager to get hold of it.
The subjects of the eight chapters are Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Maxime Rodinson, Isaac Deutscher, Albert Memmi, Fred Halliday, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky.
Linfield's contention is that leftists who purport to be using the ideas of these writers tend to be much more simplistic, dogmatic, and rigid than the writers themselves.
She contends that, after loss of idealism about communism, the left substituted anti-colonialism for socialism. And, further, that the left has blinded itself to the failures and imperfections of anti-colonial revolutions, portraying what essentially are fascist nations as socialist exemplars just because of who they are: a kind of identity politics, in other words, with the roles for the good and bad guys pre-set.
Her major critiques are centered on the substitution of ideology for facts.
I can subscribe to that. We certainly see it on the right and especially with the current administration: people who never hesitate to turn a fact upside-down lest it be an impediment to their agenda.
When friends on the left respond to facts by calling the bringers of those facts "right-wing," I've told them they're being Trumpists.
Considering that the work of these eight writers contain old confusions, I don't think the best way for me to learn about current situations is embarking on a study of them. If I were studying history in school, no doubt I would need to do that. I don't think I have the time. But if I feel the need, I have this book as a starting point.
One of Linfield's subjects in this book is someone I have read a little about: Albert Memmi, my favorite of the eight. He was a Tunisian and helped with their revolution. His book The Colonizer and the Colonized was once as well-known as Frantz Fanon's, but he violated the orthodoxy and fell from grace with the left. Still living and active when I first learned about him, he has just died this May 22 at 99 years old.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...
https://forward.com/opinion/447416/je...
In the meantime the world changed. I began pre-pandemic. Even then, I had been unhappy with our call-out culture. Subsequently, anybody who wants to call out anyone else -- or any entity, including Israel -- seems more and more like part of the problem.
Fairly recently I'd read So You've Been Publicly Shamed, whose author, although seeing the wrongs that could come from calling people out, was unable to let go of the belief that calling out was generally on the side of the angels and a way to rid the world of some of its injustice.
Now, though, it seems that anybody calling out anybody else is setting the stage for Trump. Teaching him, helping him, showing him how, preparing the way for him. They are being divisive, and being divisive works in the interests of those who would divide and conquer. They are making things worse, and making what's worse expand and spread.
Per the book flap, the author, Susie Linfield, writes about culture and politics. She teaches cultural journalism at NYU. I notice, with interest, given current protests and riots, that her previous book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, argues for the connection of photojournalism and ideals of human rights.
The Lions' Den examines the relationship of the political left to Zionism and the politics of how Zionism become a dirty word.
The book examines the work and intellectual histories of eight public intellectuals, mostly of the 20th century, four of whom I'd at least heard of. Two of them are European, four are socialists, and two are American. Six of the eight are usually perceived as anti-Zionist, or at least used that way by the left.
This book assumes a familiarity with the work of these eight, and that's part of the problem with it. If you aren't already intimately familiar with them, you would need further study of them, yet that I wasn't prepared to do at present. Therefore, lacking a structure on which to hang all their ideas, I found the material hard to retain.
Also, without already having studied these thinkers, I sometimes found it tricky to give a solid evaluation to what the author is saying. Not that the ideas aren't clearly stated; just that there a lot. And sometimes she struck me as defensive. Or polemical. Maybe it's just that she's working things out for herself as she goes.
The particular ways she gives her bona fides as a leftist Zionist can sound like virtue signalling, in the sense that she's criticizing some of these authors' anti-Zionism but tempering her doing so by being appalled by aspects of Israeli politics.
She primarily sticks to the political and gives short shrift to Jew-hatred and the role of Jews-as-other in Western civilization.
And once toward the end of the book she surprisingly uses "Talmudic" in its pejorative sense (p. 296).
In her book, she has the floor to herself. How would she do if she were in dialogue?
The best way for me to use this book, beyond what I'm already able to remember and mull over, is to keep it as a reference book. That's somewhat of a disappointment as I'd been so eager to get hold of it.
The subjects of the eight chapters are Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Maxime Rodinson, Isaac Deutscher, Albert Memmi, Fred Halliday, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky.
Linfield's contention is that leftists who purport to be using the ideas of these writers tend to be much more simplistic, dogmatic, and rigid than the writers themselves.
She contends that, after loss of idealism about communism, the left substituted anti-colonialism for socialism. And, further, that the left has blinded itself to the failures and imperfections of anti-colonial revolutions, portraying what essentially are fascist nations as socialist exemplars just because of who they are: a kind of identity politics, in other words, with the roles for the good and bad guys pre-set.
Her major critiques are centered on the substitution of ideology for facts.
I can subscribe to that. We certainly see it on the right and especially with the current administration: people who never hesitate to turn a fact upside-down lest it be an impediment to their agenda.
When friends on the left respond to facts by calling the bringers of those facts "right-wing," I've told them they're being Trumpists.
Considering that the work of these eight writers contain old confusions, I don't think the best way for me to learn about current situations is embarking on a study of them. If I were studying history in school, no doubt I would need to do that. I don't think I have the time. But if I feel the need, I have this book as a starting point.
One of Linfield's subjects in this book is someone I have read a little about: Albert Memmi, my favorite of the eight. He was a Tunisian and helped with their revolution. His book The Colonizer and the Colonized was once as well-known as Frantz Fanon's, but he violated the orthodoxy and fell from grace with the left. Still living and active when I first learned about him, he has just died this May 22 at 99 years old.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...
https://forward.com/opinion/447416/je...
February 1, 2024
Apologies in advance…this is a long one
This is not what I expected it to be when I picked it up from the library. I was expecting an objective analysis of how various leftist views of Zionism (both pro and anti) have evolved, with relevant context and historical events that molded that belief in prominent academics over time. It became clear within the introduction that is not what this is, it is instead a distinctly biased text coming from the narrow point of view of the author. I could tell that my own opinions were going to clash with the hers but I read on anyways because I do believe in exposing myself to differing points of view and confronting my beliefs when presented with evidence to the contrary. She expresses in the introduction that she would question her own beliefs as well, I proceeded with a critical eye and a healthy dose of salt.
Each chapter is based on a different historical speaker. My first real issue with the book was that she was all over the place within each chapter. She cherry picked quotes, jumping back and forth in a haphazard way through time without any noticeable rhyme or reason, rather than displaying points in a linear progression as they would have naturally evolved in the speaker over their lifetime based on new information or relevant context due to events taking place. This hodge podge made the book (particularly in the earlier chapters) confusing and disjointed. Lacking in any kind of cohesion or particular salient points being made. The result being that it comes off as the author either intentionally misleading the reader to think that the quoted figure was incoherent and hypocritical or that the author of this book is a completely disorganized writer/thinker. Considering the authors editorial background, I perceived it as likely the former rather than the latter. This gave me the first impression that the author was disingenuous.
Multiple times she criticizes a quote as being “wrong” without providing any evidence or argument as to how or why they are wrong other than it not being in line with her own personal biases.
The author is revisionist in many instances, most egregiously on page 67, she erroneously states that Jews were the “sole” targets of the genocide committed by the Nazis. While most of the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, and the trauma inflicted upon them is one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Roma, homosexuals and the disabled were all targeted in that genocide as well. So I took issue with that claim of the only victim, demonstrably false statements as fact make my brain itch.
She criticizes Rodinson for using generalized statements such as “The Arab World” even though she herself uses the same phrase throughout the book…including the very next paragraph after she makes that criticism which made me wonder why she would bother to even mention it. Her own transparent prejudice towards Arabs is painted with a particularly generalized brush. Multiple times the author uses vivid imagery of the horrors committed against Jews by the Nazis in Europe, images of still being able to taste the ashes in the air, to directly minimize and often excuse the acknowledged wrongs committed against Palestinians by Israelis even though it’s a logical fallacy to do so. It’s apples and oranges. Her contempt for Arabs is only very thinly veiled. While she doesn’t try to deny Palestine’s existence and she doesn’t hold to the mythology of “a land without a people for a people without a land” she does propagate the idea that Palestine was a barren wasteland that had been neglected by the destitute, primitives who had lived there and was made great by Jewish industriousness and ingenuity. She claims understanding for the people of Palestine in so far as she recognizes how they must feel having been wronged as they have most definitely been and denied of their rights but that seems to be the extent of her empathy. She portrays them (and all of the Arab World on the whole) as fundamentally infantile, illiterate, uneducated, underdeveloped, primitive, backward, impoverished and repressed (pick a pejorative, any pejorative) and therefore any leftists who are advocating for their basic human rights are deemed by her to be delusional, fantasists, ignorant and/or naive. Palestinians aren’t worthy of human rights? She paints them as basically less than human. All very colonialist views of indigenous people. She makes blanket statements depicting Arabs as blood thirsty and Israelis as morally superior and civilized by contrast. On page 254 she states that it is a “narcissistic fallacy” to think of Palestinians or any of its Arab allies as having any kind of aspirations for peace or believing that they are anything other than predominantly war mongering barbarians. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in a fantasyland.
I personally do not condone any terrorist action against or targeting of civilian populations (by either side), that being said the Author portrays “terrorist” and “Arab” as virtually synonymous and all but ignores the fact that Arab and Palestinian Jews exist. On page 296 she paints a caricature of the cartoonishly racist villain when she describes watching a news report of Chomsky as “schlepping around southern Lebanon with a smiling, turbaned Hezbollah commander, who looks like the proverbial cat with his captured canary” in an attempt to portray Chomsky as a fool.
She herself goes into detail about militant, violent and terrorist actions committed by Palestinians. While in contrast, Israel’s own terrorist and violent actions committed in the formation of Israel (and any time there after) are treated as often natural organic given events, they definitely aren’t treated with the same kind of comparative detail or scrutiny, rather they’re just vaguely acknowledged, which she doesn’t really do until page 288, where she briefly mentions that Israel has committed “horrific human rights abuses” and then mentions a few alternate sources for readers to go look these up for themselves, without giving any actual examples or details as to what these crimes might be. She states that most Arab terrorist actions are government-sponsored and well hidden from the public eye but fails to connect these kinds of actions as having been committed by Israel as well (which has been well documented by Amnesty International). While she does acknowledge Palestinian oppression and the occupation that has been in effect since 1967, No descriptive details are made of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing or massacres (she implies they all just got up and left of their own free will) or mass kidnappings, indefinite detentions of thousands of children in military prison held without charges, torture, rape, organ harvesting, illegal blockades, land theft, bulldozing homes (and protesters) and burning olive groves, checkpoint closures, restricting movement and basic autonomy, targeting of journalists and their families, shooting mourners at funerals, snipers executing children playing soccer on the beach, use of white phosphorous or killings of unarmed peaceful protesters. Almost all of the above isn’t even mentioned (and doesn’t even touch on the most recent atrocities committed by either side since this book was published). In fact on page 288, she does give a few details as they had been described by Chomsky (who she paints throughout as a liar) but ONLY with the express purpose of showing how sadistic Chomsky is. The explicit details that Chomsky gives about these specific crimes committed by Israeli forces, it “deadens her.” She seems more scathing about Chomsky’s description of it than she is of the crimes themselves. Yet she accuses Chomsky of lacking empathy or grief.
She very heavily weighs the Palestinian crimes of terrorist actions of bombings, hijackings and the murder of the Olympians in Munich, while having her own massive blind spot or tendency to downplay, excuse, deny or ignore when it comes to Israeli offences (a criticism that she makes in reverse against Chomsky) even though the lives lost and human cost of these crimes are disproportionate and statistically weighted much more heavily in the opposite direction which even she admits to. It’s “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” when it comes to Israel’s own crimes against humanity for almost a century. It takes her almost 300 pages (the book is only 318 pages long not including the notes) of meticulously painting Arabs as irrational, brainless, bloodthirsty, savages incapable of comprehending anything but a life of bloodshed and revenge being driven by nothing more than a deep seeded antisemitic hatred of Jews, before she even acknowledges Israel isn’t practically innocent. She also downplays the power imbalance between the two sides but she does acknowledge it exists.
At one point, she emphasizes, on page 95, any violence or bloodshed, nothing can compare to the inexcusable original sin of Palestine’s refusal of partition in 1947 (from day 1, Israel never stayed within partition plan borders since they were proposed so this is a bad faith argument that all the ensuing misery could have been avoided). Out of everything that has ever happened from 1947 to present day in Palestine on either side (and for all time to come), she states THAT is the unforgivable crime? She lays blame for EVERYTHING on Palestine because of this. Even though it is mentioned later in the book that no nation would ever realistically agree to partitioning their land in this manner and no other country in the world was opening up their borders (an undeniable blight on history in itself) allowing for the unrestricted admission of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. When they went ahead and took the land from Palestine to form the state of Israel and purged Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948, it is explained as a moral necessity rather than the act of aggression that it was. Palestinian resistance is portrayed as a barbaric, entirely unprovoked, act of aggression by people who are incapable of peace rather than an act of resistance and defence of their homes that were taken. Any crime committed by Israel against the basic human rights of Palestinians after that refusal of partition is not only deemed excusable, according to this author, but after such a “mistake of unforgivable proportions” it’s implied to be unquestioningly justified.
I find the mere suggestion that some people are not worthy of basic human rights to be abhorrent. Crimes against humanity are not to be used on anyone, it is never justified, regardless of their politics and regardless of past traumas. This holds true for everyone. You cannot hold yourself up as morally superior and “better than” your enemy while committing the same crimes and then some. I understand why the author might get side-eyed in progressive minded social settings, as she describes in her introduction, when she’s discussing these topics making the kind of statements that she does in this book. There’s an obvious disconnect present, a blindness lacking empathy for Palestinians humanity, both their rights to and capability of it, and a denial of Israel’s own culpability in anything and everything that has happened in the region to date. It’s all so inherently racist.
I do not pretend to have figured out what has baffled more gifted and educated minds than mine, but the solution can never possibly be found in the complete subjugation, oppression, expulsion and elimination of the “Other” and either sides suggestion that this could be the “right” or “moral” course of action is asinine. While the author does not explicitly say this is what she believes, and at one point she claims that Israel is far from above reproach, yet all her previous statements betray that sentiment. By downplaying and excusing the aforementioned behaviours from Israel towards Palestine as a necessary evil in the name of “safety” she is in effect saying just that and in doing so is denying Palestinians their very humanity and right to any recourse with which to defend themselves or lift themselves up from oppression. But she is really very sad about it, so that’s ok I guess?
Most surprisingly, I actually agree with a large portion of her conclusion chapter, no one could be more surprised of this than me after the vitriol that comes before it. She does an almost complete about face of her previous declarative statements and conclusions that she leaps to. Here, she opens the chapter, finally acknowledging Palestinian humanity, she calls to end the occupation and acknowledges the willful blindness of both sides to see the others POV, although she implies that Israel is more realistic and more often checked on this by leftists and forced to look at themselves in the mirror (denying the extent of Zionist editorializing of history, including her own, and refusal to accept responsibility of their own culpability) she admonishes Israel for its military actions and expansions into further Arab nations but fails to see the correlation between those actions and the actions originally taken in forming the State of Israel in the first place. She acknowledges that an “overwhelming number of Israelis” have convinced themselves that Palestinians aren’t people and that “ruling over others will not foster racism within Israel.” Predictably, She lacks any kind of introspection or self awareness here and does not include herself in these admonitions (maybe because she’s American?). In a return to the overall prejudice of the book, on pages 303-304, She mentions that partitions, dictatorships and wars of the 20th and 21st centuries have created Millions of refugees and goes on to list 28 different countries where this has happened including the forced exodus of Jews throughout Europe and other Arab nations, yet she omits Israel/Palestine (where Jews are in the role of oppressor rather than victim) from this list. Instead, here she once again implies that Palestinians chose to become refugees willingly (despite almost a century and a mountain of evidence to show this is false) and uses this list of countries to go on to minimize Palestinian mistreatment as therefore nothing special. Once again she lays blame for everything onto Palestine claiming they “started it.”
I was hoping to come away from this book with a more rounded and well informed opinion and more knowledge and understanding of the topic and the views of those well versed minds on the matter. Instead I came away with a massive headache, I considered DNFing it in frustration multiple times. It took me much longer than it normally would to read a book of this size. Overall I found it a disjointed, hypocritical, reductive, revisionist, misinterpretation and misrepresentation based on her own personal biases and feelings towards the various speakers mentioned in the book (she really despises Chomsky). I both agreed and disagreed with the various speakers’ POV but cannot say how in any real detail as her own overt prejudice, criticisms and commentary made her an unreliable narrator and it was hard to make any clear sense of exactly what those views actually were. She also used “Autistic” “Schizophrenic” “Bipolar” and “Anti-Imperialist Attention Deficit Disorder” as pejorative descriptors of speakers’ POV. She doles out a whole slew of diagnoses as insults. I argued out loud with this book throughout. Reading it was like pulling teeth. Waste of my time
This is not what I expected it to be when I picked it up from the library. I was expecting an objective analysis of how various leftist views of Zionism (both pro and anti) have evolved, with relevant context and historical events that molded that belief in prominent academics over time. It became clear within the introduction that is not what this is, it is instead a distinctly biased text coming from the narrow point of view of the author. I could tell that my own opinions were going to clash with the hers but I read on anyways because I do believe in exposing myself to differing points of view and confronting my beliefs when presented with evidence to the contrary. She expresses in the introduction that she would question her own beliefs as well, I proceeded with a critical eye and a healthy dose of salt.
Each chapter is based on a different historical speaker. My first real issue with the book was that she was all over the place within each chapter. She cherry picked quotes, jumping back and forth in a haphazard way through time without any noticeable rhyme or reason, rather than displaying points in a linear progression as they would have naturally evolved in the speaker over their lifetime based on new information or relevant context due to events taking place. This hodge podge made the book (particularly in the earlier chapters) confusing and disjointed. Lacking in any kind of cohesion or particular salient points being made. The result being that it comes off as the author either intentionally misleading the reader to think that the quoted figure was incoherent and hypocritical or that the author of this book is a completely disorganized writer/thinker. Considering the authors editorial background, I perceived it as likely the former rather than the latter. This gave me the first impression that the author was disingenuous.
Multiple times she criticizes a quote as being “wrong” without providing any evidence or argument as to how or why they are wrong other than it not being in line with her own personal biases.
The author is revisionist in many instances, most egregiously on page 67, she erroneously states that Jews were the “sole” targets of the genocide committed by the Nazis. While most of the victims of the Holocaust were Jews, and the trauma inflicted upon them is one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Roma, homosexuals and the disabled were all targeted in that genocide as well. So I took issue with that claim of the only victim, demonstrably false statements as fact make my brain itch.
She criticizes Rodinson for using generalized statements such as “The Arab World” even though she herself uses the same phrase throughout the book…including the very next paragraph after she makes that criticism which made me wonder why she would bother to even mention it. Her own transparent prejudice towards Arabs is painted with a particularly generalized brush. Multiple times the author uses vivid imagery of the horrors committed against Jews by the Nazis in Europe, images of still being able to taste the ashes in the air, to directly minimize and often excuse the acknowledged wrongs committed against Palestinians by Israelis even though it’s a logical fallacy to do so. It’s apples and oranges. Her contempt for Arabs is only very thinly veiled. While she doesn’t try to deny Palestine’s existence and she doesn’t hold to the mythology of “a land without a people for a people without a land” she does propagate the idea that Palestine was a barren wasteland that had been neglected by the destitute, primitives who had lived there and was made great by Jewish industriousness and ingenuity. She claims understanding for the people of Palestine in so far as she recognizes how they must feel having been wronged as they have most definitely been and denied of their rights but that seems to be the extent of her empathy. She portrays them (and all of the Arab World on the whole) as fundamentally infantile, illiterate, uneducated, underdeveloped, primitive, backward, impoverished and repressed (pick a pejorative, any pejorative) and therefore any leftists who are advocating for their basic human rights are deemed by her to be delusional, fantasists, ignorant and/or naive. Palestinians aren’t worthy of human rights? She paints them as basically less than human. All very colonialist views of indigenous people. She makes blanket statements depicting Arabs as blood thirsty and Israelis as morally superior and civilized by contrast. On page 254 she states that it is a “narcissistic fallacy” to think of Palestinians or any of its Arab allies as having any kind of aspirations for peace or believing that they are anything other than predominantly war mongering barbarians. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in a fantasyland.
I personally do not condone any terrorist action against or targeting of civilian populations (by either side), that being said the Author portrays “terrorist” and “Arab” as virtually synonymous and all but ignores the fact that Arab and Palestinian Jews exist. On page 296 she paints a caricature of the cartoonishly racist villain when she describes watching a news report of Chomsky as “schlepping around southern Lebanon with a smiling, turbaned Hezbollah commander, who looks like the proverbial cat with his captured canary” in an attempt to portray Chomsky as a fool.
She herself goes into detail about militant, violent and terrorist actions committed by Palestinians. While in contrast, Israel’s own terrorist and violent actions committed in the formation of Israel (and any time there after) are treated as often natural organic given events, they definitely aren’t treated with the same kind of comparative detail or scrutiny, rather they’re just vaguely acknowledged, which she doesn’t really do until page 288, where she briefly mentions that Israel has committed “horrific human rights abuses” and then mentions a few alternate sources for readers to go look these up for themselves, without giving any actual examples or details as to what these crimes might be. She states that most Arab terrorist actions are government-sponsored and well hidden from the public eye but fails to connect these kinds of actions as having been committed by Israel as well (which has been well documented by Amnesty International). While she does acknowledge Palestinian oppression and the occupation that has been in effect since 1967, No descriptive details are made of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing or massacres (she implies they all just got up and left of their own free will) or mass kidnappings, indefinite detentions of thousands of children in military prison held without charges, torture, rape, organ harvesting, illegal blockades, land theft, bulldozing homes (and protesters) and burning olive groves, checkpoint closures, restricting movement and basic autonomy, targeting of journalists and their families, shooting mourners at funerals, snipers executing children playing soccer on the beach, use of white phosphorous or killings of unarmed peaceful protesters. Almost all of the above isn’t even mentioned (and doesn’t even touch on the most recent atrocities committed by either side since this book was published). In fact on page 288, she does give a few details as they had been described by Chomsky (who she paints throughout as a liar) but ONLY with the express purpose of showing how sadistic Chomsky is. The explicit details that Chomsky gives about these specific crimes committed by Israeli forces, it “deadens her.” She seems more scathing about Chomsky’s description of it than she is of the crimes themselves. Yet she accuses Chomsky of lacking empathy or grief.
She very heavily weighs the Palestinian crimes of terrorist actions of bombings, hijackings and the murder of the Olympians in Munich, while having her own massive blind spot or tendency to downplay, excuse, deny or ignore when it comes to Israeli offences (a criticism that she makes in reverse against Chomsky) even though the lives lost and human cost of these crimes are disproportionate and statistically weighted much more heavily in the opposite direction which even she admits to. It’s “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” when it comes to Israel’s own crimes against humanity for almost a century. It takes her almost 300 pages (the book is only 318 pages long not including the notes) of meticulously painting Arabs as irrational, brainless, bloodthirsty, savages incapable of comprehending anything but a life of bloodshed and revenge being driven by nothing more than a deep seeded antisemitic hatred of Jews, before she even acknowledges Israel isn’t practically innocent. She also downplays the power imbalance between the two sides but she does acknowledge it exists.
At one point, she emphasizes, on page 95, any violence or bloodshed, nothing can compare to the inexcusable original sin of Palestine’s refusal of partition in 1947 (from day 1, Israel never stayed within partition plan borders since they were proposed so this is a bad faith argument that all the ensuing misery could have been avoided). Out of everything that has ever happened from 1947 to present day in Palestine on either side (and for all time to come), she states THAT is the unforgivable crime? She lays blame for EVERYTHING on Palestine because of this. Even though it is mentioned later in the book that no nation would ever realistically agree to partitioning their land in this manner and no other country in the world was opening up their borders (an undeniable blight on history in itself) allowing for the unrestricted admission of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. When they went ahead and took the land from Palestine to form the state of Israel and purged Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948, it is explained as a moral necessity rather than the act of aggression that it was. Palestinian resistance is portrayed as a barbaric, entirely unprovoked, act of aggression by people who are incapable of peace rather than an act of resistance and defence of their homes that were taken. Any crime committed by Israel against the basic human rights of Palestinians after that refusal of partition is not only deemed excusable, according to this author, but after such a “mistake of unforgivable proportions” it’s implied to be unquestioningly justified.
I find the mere suggestion that some people are not worthy of basic human rights to be abhorrent. Crimes against humanity are not to be used on anyone, it is never justified, regardless of their politics and regardless of past traumas. This holds true for everyone. You cannot hold yourself up as morally superior and “better than” your enemy while committing the same crimes and then some. I understand why the author might get side-eyed in progressive minded social settings, as she describes in her introduction, when she’s discussing these topics making the kind of statements that she does in this book. There’s an obvious disconnect present, a blindness lacking empathy for Palestinians humanity, both their rights to and capability of it, and a denial of Israel’s own culpability in anything and everything that has happened in the region to date. It’s all so inherently racist.
I do not pretend to have figured out what has baffled more gifted and educated minds than mine, but the solution can never possibly be found in the complete subjugation, oppression, expulsion and elimination of the “Other” and either sides suggestion that this could be the “right” or “moral” course of action is asinine. While the author does not explicitly say this is what she believes, and at one point she claims that Israel is far from above reproach, yet all her previous statements betray that sentiment. By downplaying and excusing the aforementioned behaviours from Israel towards Palestine as a necessary evil in the name of “safety” she is in effect saying just that and in doing so is denying Palestinians their very humanity and right to any recourse with which to defend themselves or lift themselves up from oppression. But she is really very sad about it, so that’s ok I guess?
Most surprisingly, I actually agree with a large portion of her conclusion chapter, no one could be more surprised of this than me after the vitriol that comes before it. She does an almost complete about face of her previous declarative statements and conclusions that she leaps to. Here, she opens the chapter, finally acknowledging Palestinian humanity, she calls to end the occupation and acknowledges the willful blindness of both sides to see the others POV, although she implies that Israel is more realistic and more often checked on this by leftists and forced to look at themselves in the mirror (denying the extent of Zionist editorializing of history, including her own, and refusal to accept responsibility of their own culpability) she admonishes Israel for its military actions and expansions into further Arab nations but fails to see the correlation between those actions and the actions originally taken in forming the State of Israel in the first place. She acknowledges that an “overwhelming number of Israelis” have convinced themselves that Palestinians aren’t people and that “ruling over others will not foster racism within Israel.” Predictably, She lacks any kind of introspection or self awareness here and does not include herself in these admonitions (maybe because she’s American?). In a return to the overall prejudice of the book, on pages 303-304, She mentions that partitions, dictatorships and wars of the 20th and 21st centuries have created Millions of refugees and goes on to list 28 different countries where this has happened including the forced exodus of Jews throughout Europe and other Arab nations, yet she omits Israel/Palestine (where Jews are in the role of oppressor rather than victim) from this list. Instead, here she once again implies that Palestinians chose to become refugees willingly (despite almost a century and a mountain of evidence to show this is false) and uses this list of countries to go on to minimize Palestinian mistreatment as therefore nothing special. Once again she lays blame for everything onto Palestine claiming they “started it.”
I was hoping to come away from this book with a more rounded and well informed opinion and more knowledge and understanding of the topic and the views of those well versed minds on the matter. Instead I came away with a massive headache, I considered DNFing it in frustration multiple times. It took me much longer than it normally would to read a book of this size. Overall I found it a disjointed, hypocritical, reductive, revisionist, misinterpretation and misrepresentation based on her own personal biases and feelings towards the various speakers mentioned in the book (she really despises Chomsky). I both agreed and disagreed with the various speakers’ POV but cannot say how in any real detail as her own overt prejudice, criticisms and commentary made her an unreliable narrator and it was hard to make any clear sense of exactly what those views actually were. She also used “Autistic” “Schizophrenic” “Bipolar” and “Anti-Imperialist Attention Deficit Disorder” as pejorative descriptors of speakers’ POV. She doles out a whole slew of diagnoses as insults. I argued out loud with this book throughout. Reading it was like pulling teeth. Waste of my time
November 11, 2019
Susie Linfield was at a pleasant, tony New York dinner party until she realized she was in the lion's den as the only Zionist present willing to speak up. The experience inspired her book, The Lions' Den: Zionism from the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (Yale University Press, 2019). The book is a brilliant, intellectual, sociological exploration of eight popular, prolific thinkers and writers. Her focus is on their ideologies regarding the modern Jewish people; our track-switch from religious faith to political and military creeds; and the great love of our life, the inamorata State of Israel.
The Lion's Den is not a roadmap to peace. It's a sagacious exposé about "the crux of this conflict" and offers tremendous insight into many of today's other contentious issues: BDS, reactions to refugees, the occupation. The reader feels that the author is sensitive to the Left, but she has a supercilious response to their downplay of what Jews see as existential threats. The intellectual Left pays short shrift to the cumulative impact on the mind of the Jews from the expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust, and how nations sealed their doors to prevent Jews from entering after escaping from Nazis. Some on the Left justify as acceptable strategies Arab wars launched against Israel, their intransigence against normalizing relations with the Jewish State, and terrorism that has morphed into pay-for-slay of Jews.
Linfield, however, is no sycophant. She upfront expresses her criticism of the State's policies and actions, including settlers in Hebron who do not represent "Zionist values," but "they have re-created the despised, endangered, and ghettoized position of the Jews that Zionism was designed to eradicate. Talk about the return of the repressed!"
She wears her sympathy for a two-state solution on her sleeve but asks the Left: what kind of state will the Palestinians create? A free, democratic state respectful of gays, women's rights, minority rights? Or will a Palestinian state be more in the fashion of repressive Hamas in Gaza, Hezb'allah in Lebanon, and the ayatollahs in Iran? She concludes with a warning to the Left, Jews, and Arabs: "The opposite of realism isn't principle; its pathology. To reject realism makes you — and your children — into slaves of the past and strangers to the future."
Read full review:: https://www.americanthinker.com/artic...
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
The Lion's Den is not a roadmap to peace. It's a sagacious exposé about "the crux of this conflict" and offers tremendous insight into many of today's other contentious issues: BDS, reactions to refugees, the occupation. The reader feels that the author is sensitive to the Left, but she has a supercilious response to their downplay of what Jews see as existential threats. The intellectual Left pays short shrift to the cumulative impact on the mind of the Jews from the expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust, and how nations sealed their doors to prevent Jews from entering after escaping from Nazis. Some on the Left justify as acceptable strategies Arab wars launched against Israel, their intransigence against normalizing relations with the Jewish State, and terrorism that has morphed into pay-for-slay of Jews.
Linfield, however, is no sycophant. She upfront expresses her criticism of the State's policies and actions, including settlers in Hebron who do not represent "Zionist values," but "they have re-created the despised, endangered, and ghettoized position of the Jews that Zionism was designed to eradicate. Talk about the return of the repressed!"
She wears her sympathy for a two-state solution on her sleeve but asks the Left: what kind of state will the Palestinians create? A free, democratic state respectful of gays, women's rights, minority rights? Or will a Palestinian state be more in the fashion of repressive Hamas in Gaza, Hezb'allah in Lebanon, and the ayatollahs in Iran? She concludes with a warning to the Left, Jews, and Arabs: "The opposite of realism isn't principle; its pathology. To reject realism makes you — and your children — into slaves of the past and strangers to the future."
Read full review:: https://www.americanthinker.com/artic...
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
August 16, 2020
I’m working on a longer review for Full Stop, but overall it is well written and argued, even though I generally disagree with the authors position on the conflict. The people covered are almost completely unknown and I wonder if there is actually an audience for this book. More than that, you learn very little about the lefts positions on Zionism, and the author spends most of the time making broad assessments of the failure of each author in ways that sometimes few obtuse an unsupported. That said, the book is an interesting walk through shifting perspectives on Judaism, Zionism, Palestine, and leftist internationalism, and the author does so pretty seamlessly. I can’t help but wonder if the book would be more compelling if it had taken the same approach but broadened out to dozens of leftist writers rather than a small handful. I should add that the attacks on Palestinian groups throughout the text also feel unplaced are time, unsupported and unnecessary. A reflection on Islamophobia is sorely missing.
March 5, 2024
If you're going to criticize Chomsky, you'd better be prepared to back up your arguments. At least stronger than Linfield has done. Chomsky vs Linfield 1:0
September 1, 2024
I wanted to get an idea of how Jewish Leftists have responded to right-wing Zionism. After all, there have been many prominent Jewish Leftists. Karl Marx was a Jew. What has been the Jewish Left's reaction to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and establishment of the exclusionary Jewish ethnocracy? Utter rejection? Convoluted intellectual gymnastics performed in the attempt to reconcile Leftist values with right-wing oppression? A wholehearted embrace of Zionism, after Hitler, for the sake of survival? I wanted to know.
So I bought this book and read it. Arthur Koestler and Noam Chomsky were the only Jewish Leftists Susie Linfield excoriates that I was already familiar with. Koestler from his "Thirteenth Tribe," which I enjoyed and Linfield dismisses as irrelevant, and Chomsky from his linguistic work and and political podcasts. All eight of these Leftist thinkers Linfield dissects, delighting to point out their inconsistencies, inaccuracies and hypocrisies. She describes herself as being a "left-wing Zionist" (an oxymoron?) but if she is such, then I wonder if she ever learned her left hand from her right. For Susie Linfield has an agenda and if there's much "Leftist" about that agenda it's pretty hard to tease out from her straight-forward Zionism and disdain for prominent Leftist Jews. (Read Chomsky's response - dismissal really - of this book for perspective).
I learned a lot from this book but found myself thinking, increasingly so as I made my way from the intellectual assassination of one Leftist thinker to the next, that if I should ever read these guys, I'd probably agree with most of them a lot more than I agree with Susie Linfield.
So I bought this book and read it. Arthur Koestler and Noam Chomsky were the only Jewish Leftists Susie Linfield excoriates that I was already familiar with. Koestler from his "Thirteenth Tribe," which I enjoyed and Linfield dismisses as irrelevant, and Chomsky from his linguistic work and and political podcasts. All eight of these Leftist thinkers Linfield dissects, delighting to point out their inconsistencies, inaccuracies and hypocrisies. She describes herself as being a "left-wing Zionist" (an oxymoron?) but if she is such, then I wonder if she ever learned her left hand from her right. For Susie Linfield has an agenda and if there's much "Leftist" about that agenda it's pretty hard to tease out from her straight-forward Zionism and disdain for prominent Leftist Jews. (Read Chomsky's response - dismissal really - of this book for perspective).
I learned a lot from this book but found myself thinking, increasingly so as I made my way from the intellectual assassination of one Leftist thinker to the next, that if I should ever read these guys, I'd probably agree with most of them a lot more than I agree with Susie Linfield.
March 19, 2025
What would happen if Israel's demographic reality shifted and its Arab population—the very people hasbarists of all sorts cite as proof that the Zionist state is indeed a democracy, despite not having full-fledged citizenship status—became the majority? What if they then decided to rename the country, remove the Star of David from its flag, and cancel its self-professed status as the "Jewish state"?
Liberal Zionists such as Linfield have no answer to these questions, except to equate a one-state solution with a second Shoah (or umpteenth, as hasbarists tend to imagine they live in a series of successive Holocausts). Even Smotrich, the messianic fascist minister who has taken on the maligned role of carrying Zionism to its logical conclusion, openly admits that the fulfillment of the Zionist project is incompatible with true democracy: after all, full Goy citizenship in a Jewish ethnostate is no less of an oxymoron than a leftist Zionist.
This is precisely why the left, with all its contradictions, should despise liberal Zionists even more than extremists like Smotrich, Kahane, and their ilk. At least the latter are honest about their goals, refusing to pontificate about universalist and democratic values in upscale cafés while upholding apartheid, genocide, and ethnosupremacy on the ground. Once liberal Zionists are out of the picture, Zionism will stand exposed in all its splendor—and finally collapse.
Liberal Zionists such as Linfield have no answer to these questions, except to equate a one-state solution with a second Shoah (or umpteenth, as hasbarists tend to imagine they live in a series of successive Holocausts). Even Smotrich, the messianic fascist minister who has taken on the maligned role of carrying Zionism to its logical conclusion, openly admits that the fulfillment of the Zionist project is incompatible with true democracy: after all, full Goy citizenship in a Jewish ethnostate is no less of an oxymoron than a leftist Zionist.
This is precisely why the left, with all its contradictions, should despise liberal Zionists even more than extremists like Smotrich, Kahane, and their ilk. At least the latter are honest about their goals, refusing to pontificate about universalist and democratic values in upscale cafés while upholding apartheid, genocide, and ethnosupremacy on the ground. Once liberal Zionists are out of the picture, Zionism will stand exposed in all its splendor—and finally collapse.
April 18, 2025
In The Lions’ Den, Susie Linfield sets out to chart the decline of the Left’s relationship with Israel, but ends up offering a selective, tendentious account that leans more toward polemic than nuanced analysis. While her historical range is admirable, Linfield’s hostility toward contemporary anti-Zionist positions often clouds her judgment. She frames criticism of Israel as moral failure, yet offers only muted critique of Israeli state violence and systemic inequality.
Her treatment of thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Maxime Rodinson borders on caricature, flattening their complex ideas into ideological straw men. The book’s central thesis — that the Left’s anti-Zionism stems largely from a pathological romanticization of the oppressed — feels both reductive and patronizing. Linfield positions herself as the arbiter of moral clarity, but refuses to grapple seriously with the lived reality of Palestinian statelessness and occupation, dismissing "one-state" arguments as little more than fantasies.
In the end, The Lions’ Den might appeal to readers already sympathetic to its conclusions, but those seeking a truly dialectical exploration of Zionism and the Left will find it lacking in generosity, balance, and intellectual risk.
Her treatment of thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Maxime Rodinson borders on caricature, flattening their complex ideas into ideological straw men. The book’s central thesis — that the Left’s anti-Zionism stems largely from a pathological romanticization of the oppressed — feels both reductive and patronizing. Linfield positions herself as the arbiter of moral clarity, but refuses to grapple seriously with the lived reality of Palestinian statelessness and occupation, dismissing "one-state" arguments as little more than fantasies.
In the end, The Lions’ Den might appeal to readers already sympathetic to its conclusions, but those seeking a truly dialectical exploration of Zionism and the Left will find it lacking in generosity, balance, and intellectual risk.
January 25, 2024
****.5
A careful but targeted analysis of the approach of how several prominent leftist luminaries approached Israel, and the implications of their thoughts on the current radically anti-Zionist attitude of the left.
My biggest issue with the book is that she assumes that the reader is already familiar with the people she's talking about and their work. But for an ignorant slob such as myself, I'd only heard of a few of them, and not studied them in depth. A bit of an introduction to each before launching into the evisceration of their ideas would have provided much needed context and lower the barrier to entry. I certainly could have looked them up on my own, but since the book was otherwise written to be clear and accessible to the unwashed masses, this seems like an arrogant imposition.
Audiobook: narrator mangles most Hebrew words and names to the extent that it's borderline antisemitic.
A careful but targeted analysis of the approach of how several prominent leftist luminaries approached Israel, and the implications of their thoughts on the current radically anti-Zionist attitude of the left.
My biggest issue with the book is that she assumes that the reader is already familiar with the people she's talking about and their work. But for an ignorant slob such as myself, I'd only heard of a few of them, and not studied them in depth. A bit of an introduction to each before launching into the evisceration of their ideas would have provided much needed context and lower the barrier to entry. I certainly could have looked them up on my own, but since the book was otherwise written to be clear and accessible to the unwashed masses, this seems like an arrogant imposition.
Audiobook: narrator mangles most Hebrew words and names to the extent that it's borderline antisemitic.
October 17, 2023
“The Left had betrayed the Jewish people time and again.” These words seared themselves in my mind as I read The Lions’ Den, an unapologetic study of the Left’s obsession with Zionism. They echo what we saw after the 10/7 attacks on Israel: The most twisted readings of the left political tradition used to justify violence so abhorrent that even its planners, confronted by near-universal repulsion, subsequently tried to deny that it occurred. Linfield is smart to focus on Jewish thinkers—people tied to Jews and conflicted about and critical of the Left’s Israel-fixation. Had she done otherwise, you’d throw the book down in disgust before you learned anything.
August 16, 2024
Zionist propaganda written by a second-wave feminist.
Stereotypical approach: emphasizes the Holocaust and Jewish victimhood but neglects to mention the extreme apartheid behaviors of Israel. Does not seem to want to acknowledge that when oppressed people become oppressors, they are now oppressors -- NOT victims.
Typical snooze-fest of American hasbara from the typical source: a privileged white US feminist. No surprises here: always deluding 'victimhood,' even in the presence of actual victims.
Stereotypical approach: emphasizes the Holocaust and Jewish victimhood but neglects to mention the extreme apartheid behaviors of Israel. Does not seem to want to acknowledge that when oppressed people become oppressors, they are now oppressors -- NOT victims.
Typical snooze-fest of American hasbara from the typical source: a privileged white US feminist. No surprises here: always deluding 'victimhood,' even in the presence of actual victims.
August 24, 2024
It was a really interesting read, but some chapters are much stronger then others. Linfield relies too heavily on intimate familiarity with the writings of the figures she analyzes (which given the scope covered is unrealistic), but the analysis is interesting enough to sustain itself.
Overall, I think the book is most useful as a jumping-off point to examine how and why people treat the idea of Zionism and Israel/Palestine discourse with completely different values, strategies, acceptable outcomes and historical analysis then they apply to everything else.
Overall, I think the book is most useful as a jumping-off point to examine how and why people treat the idea of Zionism and Israel/Palestine discourse with completely different values, strategies, acceptable outcomes and historical analysis then they apply to everything else.
October 15, 2019
Cultural theorist and leftist Susie Linfield couldn’t have done a better job of analyzing the depths of the contemporary global left and its opinion of Israel. She does a great job recognizing the virtues and fallacies regarding the contemporary discourse about Zionism from that side of the political spectrum. A voice like her’s — and a book like this — are huge to challenge a narrative dominated by one-dimensional views and identity politics.
She does a great job of treating each philosopher/writer he addresses on the basis of its context than on their opinions alone, challenging the Momoesque academic postmodernity. Her chapters on Ardent and Chomsky are particularly interesting as she highlights the contradictions and fallacies in their discourse. Similarly, she introduces us to anti-Zionists like Rodinson and debunks their arguments one-by-one, but not from the empty Hasbara perspective as opposes to one from the left (often relying on Amos Oz, which I loved). Finally, she introduces us to writers like Albert Memmi or Halliday, whose ideas need to be read and re-read in a political landscape that doesn’t accept a deviation from its narrative.
She does a great job of treating each philosopher/writer he addresses on the basis of its context than on their opinions alone, challenging the Momoesque academic postmodernity. Her chapters on Ardent and Chomsky are particularly interesting as she highlights the contradictions and fallacies in their discourse. Similarly, she introduces us to anti-Zionists like Rodinson and debunks their arguments one-by-one, but not from the empty Hasbara perspective as opposes to one from the left (often relying on Amos Oz, which I loved). Finally, she introduces us to writers like Albert Memmi or Halliday, whose ideas need to be read and re-read in a political landscape that doesn’t accept a deviation from its narrative.
dnf
January 25, 2020I thought the introduction was excellent - clearly written on a complicated topic - but over I got into the book, I felt like I showed up to class, but hadn’t done the reading. If I was familiar with the writers discussed, I would feel differently, but not knowing their work made this really tough.
December 7, 2023
This deeply informed and well-argued book showed me how much I hadn't known about the creation of Israel. It is not a history of events, but rather an analysis of how the Left has struggled (and mostly failed) to situate Israel consistently within its ideology. Timely and highly insightful.
November 13, 2022
Have only read these chapters: Introduction, Albert Zemmi, Fred Halliday, Noam Chomsky, and Conclusion.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews