Micah Goodman is a well-known public intellectual in Israel, and his book Catch-67 is a contribution to the obsessive Israeli debate about the future of the West Bank. The underlying question is the place in history of Zionism, the ideology that led to the creation of the Jewish state and has sustained it ever since. No Zionism, no Israel. Here was a national liberation movement like any other, except that Jews had lost their national territory in the distant past and therefore were bound to have to fight longer and harder than other nationalists to recover it. Today Kurds, Kosovars, and even Ukrainians are similarly unable to fix their national identity to a homeland with agreed-upon borders. If Israel hands all or most of the West Bank to the Palestinians, Zionism will have reached its limit and be in retreat. Other Israelis take the view that after the First World War the British cut up Palestine in their own interest and the Jewish national home has no legal or moral obligation to renounce the claim to the West Bank, or to the East Bank, come to that. Zionists and post-Zionists form two factions, each accusing the other of folly, deliberate endangerment of the state, treason, and a wish to commit political and national suicide.

For reasons that go deep into their past and their culture, Arabs have not seen Israelis as a people willing and able to fight for survival in their own historic country, but rather