In Beyond the Nation-State, the Israeli historian Dmitri Shumsky argues that a number of Zionist thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw as their goal something other than the creation of a Jewish nation-state in the Land of Israel. The American rabbi Judah Magnes and the German theologian Martin Buber—both of whom favored a binational Jewish-Arab state—are the most famous examples. But Shumsky also calls attention to figures in the Zionist mainstream, including Theodor Herzl, his Russian-Jewish precursor Leon Pinsker, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and even David Ben-Gurion. Allan Arkush credits Shumsky for his “eye-opening” approach to some of these figures, but ultimately finds the book a failure because of what its author “chooses to overlook”:

Although Shumsky has written op-ed columns in [the left-wing Israeli newspaper] Haaretz denouncing one or another aspect of Israeli policy toward the West Bank, supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), and calling for an end to Jewish sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem, he doesn’t reject the idea of a Jewish state. All he wants to see is a better sort of Jewish state.

The aspiration to transform Israel clearly lies behind the publication of Beyond the Nation-State, but it does not suffuse the book, which is focused—until the very end—exclusively on the past. Nonetheless, some of the evidence presented by Shumsky the historian seems to be tailored to substantiating the thinking of Shumsky the polemicist.

[Thus,] Beyond the Nation-State is marked by many forced and unsatisfying readings of both original sources and other scholars’ work, some of which make his argument seem stronger than it really is, while others make the work of his colleagues seem weaker. . . .

By brandishing the authentic Zionist pedigree of currently unpopular political ideas in Beyond the Nation-State, Shumsky seeks to strengthen them in a future where Israel will be reduced, he hopes, to what he sees as its proper dimensions.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.