I began editing this book a year ago, in a state of despair over the situation in Israel-Palestine. There was open talk of "transfer," Israeli code for expelling Palestinians from their land, in Sharon's cabinet, one of whose members, Housing Minister Effi Eitam--a racist, right-wing zealot who heads the National Religious Party--was describing Palestinians as a "cancer." The Bush administration, backed by the Israel lobby and Christian evangelicals, was giving its full support to Sharon, with a few minor quibbles. The Jewish establishment, meanwhile, was practicing a form of McCarthyism against critics of Israeli policy. Roger Cukierman, the leader of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France and a prominent Likudnik, remarked that when Sharon visited France shortly after September 11, "I told him it was essential to get a Minister of Propaganda, like Goebbels." To express sympathy for "the other side" in this climate was to court accusations of "being with the terrorists," even if you were Deputy of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who was booed at a pro-Israel rally for expressing a few kind words about the suffering of ordinary Palestinians.

You might wonder why I have chosen to speak out on the subject of Israel. I am an American Jew, not an Israeli. Some readers are probably grumbling, Who are you to judge Israel? You don't live there. Point taken. But I find it more than a bit curious that Israel's supporters welcome the solidarity of American Jews who don't live there either. And so the question can be thrown back at them: Who are you to praise Israel? The fact is, as a Jew and as an American, you are involved in the debate over Israel-Palestine whether you like it or not. The American Jewish establishment and the Israel lobby both claim to speak in your name. Israel, for its part, defines itself not just as a Jewish state, but as the state of the Jewish people, whose demographic majority must be maintained by whatever means necessary, including transfer, which nearly half of Israeli Jews have said they would support. And each year, over $3 billion in American tax dollars flow to Israel, which provides such useful services to our government as training in counter-insurgency and "interrogation" methods to the troops in Iraq. If you don't want to be a party to all this-if you believe that it is rotten for everyone involved, Israelis, Palestinians and Americans-you have no choice but to speak out.

Like most American Jews, I had a Zionist education. In the Sunday school I attended at a Reform Synagogue in Massachusetts, we read about the "birth" of Israel, but not about the expulsion of Palestinians; Zion, after all, had been a barren country, waiting to be rediscovered by hardy Jewish pioneers, "a land without people for a people without land." We were told of the glories of Israeli democracy--but not of its peculiar limitations: for instance, the ways in which it denies equal rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel (the "Israeli Arabs"), in effect turning them into internal exiles. We were told of Arab terrorism, which was real enough, but never of what provoked it. We were told that not only the Arabs but the goyim could never be trusted, and that the only conceivable reason someone would have for faulting Israel was animosity toward the Jews. We were taught to think of ourselves as eternal victims, despite the obvious affluence of our suburban surroundings.

I never quite came to think of myself in these terms, being the son of liberal, assimilated Jews who'd marched in civil rights protests, opposed the Vietnam War, and detested ethnic tribalism, no matter who practiced it. My own brand of Zionism, insofar as I had one, was based on the worship not of Herzl and Ben-Gurion, but of Woody Allen, Franz Kafka and Bob Dylan. As a teenage leftist and reader of The Nation, I didn't think "their country, right or wrong" was much of an improvement over "my country, right or wrong." In any event, my causes were putting a stop to American intervention in Central America and ending Reagan's "constructive engagement" with South Africa. The mystical romance of "the land of Israel" and singing Ha Tikva never did much for me. Still, the indoctrination had its effects. When the first intifada erupted in December 1987, my first impulse, as a nice Jewish boy, was to defend Israel. The Arabs, after all, were "terrorists," I mindlessly told my high school history teacher, a left-wing Vietnam veteran who'd become my mentor. Yet I felt ill at ease in my views--or rather, in my half-digested prejudices. The televised images of Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian children for throwing stones and harassing old women at checkpoints reminded me of pictures I'd seen of the Soweto uprising. And what did I know of "the Arabs"? The only real Arab I knew was my Lebanese friend Jackie, whom our classmates taunted as a "Puerto Rican Jew"--a Semite, like me. My history teacher gently admonished me to read up on the subject.

I followed his advice--and discovered, with a mounting sense of outrage, followed soon thereafter by sorrow--that I had been fed a series of nationalist myths. To my delight, however, I discovered that some of the most eloquent critics of Israel were Jews like Isaac Deutscher, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, IF Stone, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Amira Hass and Gidon Levy. Their work corroborated the findings of Palestinian writers and historians like Edward Said, Rashid and Walid Khalidi and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, whom I also came to admire. Yet these Jewish critics were not romantic fellow-travelers, cheerleaders of another people's movement. They wrote as Jewish humanists, with an anguished understanding of how the question of Palestine fit into the narrative of Jewish history. While insisting on the essentially colonial nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a struggle between a settler-nationalism and an indigenous one, they also recognized that this was no run-of-the-mill colonial war. They had, in other words, a sense of the tragic. Deutscher, a Polish-Jewish Marxist, captured it best, in a brilliant parable:

A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person's legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune.... A rational relationship between Israelis and Arabs might have been possible if Israel had at least attempted to establish it, if the man who threw himself down from the burning house had tried to make friends with the innocent victim of his jump and to compensate him. This did not happen. Israel never even recognized the Arab grievance. From the outset Zionism worked toward the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants.

Unlike Israel's champions, Jews like Deutscher seemed to share my view of the world. They were secular, cosmopolitan, tolerant of diversity and appalled by social injustice. Most were on the left, and many were socialists.

Around the time that I discovered Deutscher's book The Non-Jewish Jew in my father's library, my liberal parents were finding their sympathies for Israel sorely tested by the growth of settlements, the repression of the intifada, and by the rise of the radical religious parties in Israel, with their power to define who (and what) is and is not Jewish. A year into the first intifada, they stopped giving money to the local Jewish Federation, concerned that their donations were going to support the creation of more settlements. The federation wouldn't let them off without a fight. First there were the calls to the home, then there were visits from "representatives." Finally a man from the federation showed up at my father's office, accompanied by an Israeli general on an American tour. They proceeded to tell my father he had no right to criticize Israel, no right to ask how his money was being used-and no right to stop giving. My father showed them to the door.

"Who have you been talking to?" they asked him on their way out.

He had been talking to his son.

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