Around seven million Jewish people live in Israel and the West Bank. Roughly the same number live in the United States. It is not surprising, then, that there have been close and friendly ties between the two nations going back to 1948, when US support played the crucial role in Israel's emergence as a modern state. However, Jerome Slater argues that the United States has often failed to be a true friend to Israel – not because it has failed to support the young nation's growth and security, but because it has consistently failed to effectively discourage it from pursuing policies that possessed neither moral justification nor a clear view of Israel's long-term interests.

Slater, one of those seven million Jewish Americans mentioned above, has been a student of Zionism and modern Israel for over sixty years. He admits that during his youth he was an ardent believer in the romantic Zionist dream. In fact, he still considers Zionism to have been a valid project. But now, as Israel's seventy-fifth anniversary approaches, he uses this new book to argue that the dream of a secure Jewish state in the wake of pogroms and eventual Holocaust has been steadily corrupted by Israel's tightening embrace of a set of mythical narratives concerning its major wars, its continued oppression of the Palestinian people, and its primary role in blocking just and lasting solutions to the ongoing conflict.

Many critics of the United States’ support of Israel have pointed to the power of the “Israel lobby” as the main factor barring any real American opposition to Israel's most controversial actions, such as its military domination of Gaza, multiple invasions of Lebanon, duplicity towards Syria, and continuing expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Slater contends that it is too simple, though, to pin all the responsibility on the Israel lobby. Rather, he claims that a more complex combination of factors has restrained American Presidents from holding Israel fully accountable for its actions. The most important of these factors has been the consistently overwhelming domestic and Congressional support for Israel. Slater argues that this support would exist even without the lobby, but he shows that its foundations – the desire to maintain a dependable democratic ally in the Middle East and the sense of a shared religious heritage – are shot through with multiple false assumptions.

Much of Slater's analysis is indebted to those Israeli “New Historians” like Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Avi Shlaim who took advantage of troves of newly declassified documents in the 1980s to write books that began to poke holes in many prominent Israeli myths about its own history, especially with regard to the “Nakba” of 1947–48, in which 700,000 Palestinians were brutally driven from the country. One important result of these historians’ research has been to undercut Israel's denial of the key Palestinian demand of a “right of return,” since the official Israeli stance has always been based on the claim that the Palestinians left voluntarily, or on the orders of surrounding Arab states.

The influence of the New Historians within Israel's education system has weakened considerably during the Netanyahu years, however, as younger Israelis have drifted steadily toward the right of the political spectrum. Accordingly, the Zionist myths that the New Historians demolished have gained a new foothold, especially among members of the growing settler movement. For Slater this means that younger Israelis are rapidly losing the ability to soberly assess their country's history, political options, and relationships with the Palestinians and the larger Arab world. Of course, US policy toward Israel during the Trump administration has only accelerated these tendencies.

Slater largely succeeds in reviving and extending the New Historians’ critique, perhaps not for an Israeli audience but certainly for a growing percentage of Jewish Americans who are ready to consider such criticisms. The book also succeeds in showing how and why successive US administrations repeatedly failed to hold Israel accountable for their most egregious acts and often uncritically accepted Israel's myth-based justifications along the way. Yet it must be said that Slater sometimes seems a bit optimistic about what America might have done, and he admits that Presidents like Obama were caught in almost impossible dilemmas.

The other possible weaknesses of the book are slight. For example, Slater's arguments are based entirely on secondary sources and left-leaning periodicals. However, much of this is not his fault, since Israel has yet to declassify the bulk of the documentation that would help historians make new and more accurate judgments. The organization of the book is also too recursive and repetitive. However, repetition might not be a bad thing when one is trying to puncture some powerful and enduring myths.