Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust
Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel

This book contains three essays that examine three forms of anti-Zionism and their use of the Holocaust to delegitimize Israel.

Elhanan Yakira (Author), Michael Swirsky (Translated by)

9780521111102, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 November 2009

356 pages
24.1 x 16.1 x 2.2 cm, 0.62 kg

'This excellent translation makes an important and controversial critique of post-Zionist arguments available for the first time to an English-speaking audience. Elhanan Yakira is an engaging writer, and readers will certainly find themselves pulled into the debate. This is a brilliant, disturbing, provocative, and engrossing book.' Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study

This book contains three independent essays, available in English for the first time, as well as a post-scriptum written for the English edition. The common theme of the three essays is the uses and abuses of the Holocaust as an ideological arm in the anti-Zionist campaigns. The first essay examines the French group of left-wing Holocaust deniers. The second essay deals with a number of Israeli academics and intellectuals, the so-called post-Zionists, and tries to follow their use of the Holocaust in their different attempts to demonize and delegitimize Israel. The third deals with Hannah Arendt and her relations with Zionism and the State of Israel as reflected in her general work and in Eichmann in Jerusalem; the views that she formulates are used systematically and extensively by anti- and post-Zionists. Yakira argues that each of these is a particular expression of an outrage: anti-Zionism and a wholesale delegitimation of Israel.

Preface
1. Holocaust denial and the left
2. The Holocaust and the good Israelis
3. On the political and the anti-political: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann, and Israel
4. Post-script: 1967 or 1948?
Appendix. Biographical notes
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1], History [HB]