If I Am Not For Myself

February 4, 2008
Marqusee's account of his formation as an anti-Zionist most earns readers' interest when recounting the activist life of his grandfather Edward V. Morand, a progressive, and largely pro-Zionist, Jew, active in New York City politics from the 1930s through the early 1950s. Marqusee (Anyone but England
), an American-British journalist, is less successful in addressing his antipathy to Zionism. The author repeatedly invokes the shibboleths of the anti-Zionist left, such as the idea that Zionism is marked by a “settler-colonial ideology.” Marqusee addresses Zionist history and Israel's conduct as though Zionism were a monolithic movement concerned only with dispossessing Palestinians of their land. His reading seems equally one-sided: he cites works by other anti-Zionist Jews, but nothing by a major Zionist thinker or even by revisionist Israeli historians like Tom Segev. He also characterizes the PLO as “building a nation on the ground, reaching across a diaspora, reaching out to the victims of colonialism everywhere”—a “stunning achievement” that, he says, not even internal corruption could stain. In critiquing his grandfather's pro-Zionist stance, Marqusee writes that Morand's views were “rooted... in a network of unexamined assumptions.” Some would consider Marqusee's writing on Zionism and Israel guilty of the same.