The last chapter in Lawrence Davidson's book is titled “Colonizing the American Mind,” with a purpose to reverse the interpretation of Peter Grose's famous book Israel in the American Mind (1983). Actually, the whole of Davidson's book aims to revise the traditional historiographical approach, which has highlighted the strong bond between American values and those of the Jewish state. Davidson has been criticizing this approach since the beginning, focusing his argument on the concept of imperialism, which has produced, according to him, a serious alteration in the West's attitude toward the East. However, as will be shown, the concept of imperialism—based on the traditional separation between a civilized, advanced, and efficient West and an East in need of protection and leadership, which Davidson uses as a basic negative criterion for all his interpretation—is weak, outdated, and, above all, too ideological.

First of all, the idea of West and East is too indefinite to formulate a correct critical approach; moreover, it is anachronistic to include Palestine (and all of the Arab Middle East) in the general concept of the East. In this way, Davidson's theses paradoxically end up in the patterns of the Oriental school—which is not, I suppose, Davidson's purpose. So the whole of Davidson's book is marred by this opening ideological mark, gradually leading him to make a lot of errors of judgment.

Davidson makes a false start when he says that, according to American popular perception, as the land that gave birth to Judaism, and then to Christianity, Palestine is alien to the primitive and pagan East. The truth is very different. American public opinion knows very well that what is now called Palestine was Eretz Israel, the land of the Jews, long before the appearance of the Arabs, and that Judaism is the source of Western civilization. Therefore, the return of the Jews to Palestine is regarded as a natural and legitimate recapturing of national sovereignty that for many centuries was denied.

Consequently, Davidson considers Zionism the product of Western racism toward the Arab world and condemns the non-implementation of the concept of peoples' self-determination, first at the time of the Balfour Declaration, and then in Wilson's policy (hastily regarded as the Zionists' longa manus, according to the anti–Zionist cliché), by the racist West. Davidson's interpretation is ideological, lacking true historical verification. It is true that, at the end of World War I, the Arab Middle East was partitioned between France and Britain, but this has nothing to do with racism. As Efraim and Inari Karsh brilliantly show in Empires of the Sand (still waiting for any historiographically based reply), the Middle East at the end of World War I, was not a victim of Western racism. Rather, it fell victim to its own internecine splits when the Ottoman central power collapsed and many local rais expressed their hunger for power (which, according to traditional colonial arguments, the two European powers took advantage of). To interpret the intricate Middle Eastern questions of those times through the criterion of the naughty West's racism is nothing but an ideological operation.

Davidson analyzes the newspapers of that time, concluding that the West's negative attitude toward the Arabs must be included in “the bipolar worldview that structured American and European relations with the non-Western world. It had helped rationalize imperialism before the world and, despite Wilson's talk of self-determination, continued to do so, in the form of mandates, after the war” (p. 22). In short, Western racism was also the mainstay of mandates—a simplistic (ideological) interpretation of a much more complex historical process, at least. Davidson thinks that the American press of 1917 portrayed Palestine as a biblical land occupied by an alien civilization. That is true, but there is nothing amazing or shameful in it. Is it not understandable that American public opinion at that time would feel a more than legitimate bond with the land that held the seeds of Western civilization? Are we racist in doing this?

Moreover, Davidson stigmatizes the fact that American public opinion did not realize the socialist essence of Zionism in Palestine and continued to nourish the stereotype of the Jew. But for many Americans, Zionism as a national liberation movement ahead of its time was comparable to the North American colonies' war for independence. The elements of socialism within Ben-Gurion's Zionism were traced to this target, not to the foundation of a socialist state, which the Americans correctly regarded as incompatible with Judaism. In short, Davidson thinks the American perception of Zionism as an “altruistic imperialism” and “a civilizing agent in the redemption of Palestine” (p. 64) was biased, because Zionism in fact was only partly traditional and full of racism and Western imperialism.

Regarding this perception as biased points to a methodological question in which Davidson does seen interested. A study of public opinion and its perception of facts can only observe this perception and explain it; it cannot moralistically condemn it just because the author does not like it. Unfortunately, the book continues along the same ideological lines. Davidson repeats ad nauseam that this kind of perception, which can be found in a large part of the American press, was caused by a “bipolar worldview and its pro-imperialist corollaries” and by the spread “of the popular romance of the vast colonizing venture that was Zionism” (p. 87). This is a rather petty explanation of the great political movement that was Zionism and of the complex historical process that led to the foundation of Israel.

Finally, Davidson's big effort to examine the attitude of the American press toward the “Zionist question” does not pay dividends in the long term for a simple reason: Davidson has not studied his research material with a balanced approach and the necessary objectivity. His pet subject—Western imperialism with a racist background—plagues him in all of his book, whose results can be nothing but disappointing.