On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted resolution number 3379, which labeled Zionism, the national ideology of the Jewish people, as a form of racism. In response, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Chaim Herzog, tore up the document in front of the assembly. Yet, this dramatic act was futile. Over the following decades the resolution fed the struggle against the State of Israel and against Zionism.

By the 1980s, the war of words made its way into the academic arena. Prominent historians, mostly from Israel, challenged the official narratives that the State of Israel put forward and offered alternative perspectives on the evolution of the state and the policies that were shaped by the Zionist ideology. These groundbreaking studies were confronted by seasoned responses of equally distinguished scholars. The ensuing dialectical debate was invaluable. It paved the way for a new generation of scholars whose works advanced our understanding of Israel's history, society, and political system.

While the disputes regarding the histor(ies) of Israel motivated researchers to visit archives around the world in an attempt to unveil new evidence, the philosophical analysis of Zionism lagged behind and remained intangible. Critical theorists, most notably sociologists, anthropologists, and historians whose worldviews were shaped by the neo-Marxist, postmodernist, and postcolonialist paradigms that flourished in Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s had begun to apply these frameworks to the analysis of Zionism. Yet, according to Eyal Chowers, political theorists kept their distance from the issue (p. 10). With few exceptions, they preferred to remove themselves from either analyzing or contributing to the Zionist philosophy. Chowers's intriguing observation was supported by a search of academic articles on Zionism in the social sciences and humanities databases of the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge. Indeed, only 41 (10 percent) out of the 405 articles on the topic of Zionism that were published between 1990 and 2013 fell under the category of political science, compared to history (27 percent), humanities (12 percent) and area studies (11 percent). Of these 41 articles, only 16 can be associated with the field of political theory.

Thus The Political Philosophy of Zionism fills a significant void. In his book, Chowers offers a novel, broad, and profound analysis of the theoretical and historical foundations of Zionism, as well as the characteristics and impact of this ideology. By assuming a bird's eye view and placing the discussion of Zionism in a broad context, Chowers manages to avoid the worn-out and highly politicized disputes that typify many of the current debates on the topic and offers an invaluable addition to the literature on Zionism.

The book is demanding. It does not offer a straightforward argument or a chronological narrative. Rather, Chowers places the reader at the intersection of three conceptual scaffolds—time, language, and space—which provide support for the book's structure. The book connects four intellectual discourses: canonical texts in political theory, the philosophical foundations of Zionism, the historical contexts in which the Zionist ideology evolved, and its political consequences. Despite the vast and complex challenges facing such an ambitious account, Chowers should be commended for allowing readers of various backgrounds to immerse themselves in his text.

Zionism, according the Chowers, emerged as a radical reaction to the crisis of European Jewry during the last decades of the nineteenth century. This new ideology was nothing short of revolutionary. It corresponded to the European philosophy of its time, yet created an independent and distinguishable doctrine that fused elements of the Kantian metanarrative of universalism with notions of organic nationalism. Further, Zionist thinkers distanced themselves, to varying degrees, from the deterministic theology that fashioned the historical trajectory of the Jews for centuries. These ideologues offered new concepts of time and space and subsequently generated a set of secular ideas that emphasized the prerogative of individuals and communities to take charge of their destiny.

These processes were manifested in the Modern Hebrew that evolved in concurrence with the consolidation of Zionism and was shaped in accordance with the activist ideas of the ideology. References to a distant common history in the biblical land of Israel served as cornerstones of the language and facilitated the process of founding a nation state that consisted of newcomers who had little in common (Robert L. Cooper, Language Planning and Social Change, 1990). The rapid state-building process came with a high price tag. The Zionist ideology glided towards its nationalistic pillars and pushed the democratic principles to a secondary place.

While writing this review I stumbled upon an Op-Ed that Chowers published in Ha'aretz several days before Israel marked 65 years of independence (“What Is Wrong with the Wording of the Israeli Declaration of Independence?” Ha'aretz, April 10, 2013). In this personal piece Chowers consolidated several of the main arguments that he laid out in the book and offered a new reading of Israel's Declaration of Independence. Through a careful analysis of the text, Chowers demonstrated the choice that its authors made to resort to ambiguous language for the purpose of circumventing the inherent tensions between universalism and particularism. Yet the ambiguity was a short-term solution that had serious outcomes in the long run. It set the Jewish State on a course that led to the contemporary crisis of the Zionist ideology.

The Political Philosophy of Zionism is an interesting and well written book, and it offers an important perspective on the current crisis of Zionism. At the same time, I disagree with the optimism of its perspective. Chowers argues that it is not too late for the Zionist philosophy to revive its democratic foundations and prioritize them over the particularistic ones. My own view is different and more somber. I agree with Chowers that the territorial conquests of the Six Day War of 1967 were the tipping point of Zionism. The declining elite of the Hebraic Zionists tried to interpret the territorial gains through the cognitive frameworks that Chowers eloquently delineates in the book. However, the ambiguity that was so entrenched in their worldview left them without the analytical tools required for offering a clear vision for the future (Reuven Pedatzur, Triumph of Embarassment: Israel and the Territories after the Six-Day War, 1996). By the late 1960s, new political powers that did have a clear agenda were gradually ascending. Like the first Zionists, each of these forces presented its own synthesis of Zionism. Interestingly, the ideological decedents of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who assumed power in 1977, found themselves dealing with the same questions as their predecessors (Nadav Shelef, Evolving Nationalism: Homeland, Identity, and Religion in Israel, 1925–2005, 2010).

Actually, many of these right-wing Zionists, including Menachem Begin, faced a much bigger challenge. Compared to the Socialist Zionists who led the state in its formative era, the Revisionist Zionists had stronger commitments to both universalistic values and nationalistic ones. The attempts to mitigate this challenge led the revisionist ideology into a serious crisis. Meanwhile, the formerly marginal Zionist Religious stream was thriving. Its ideologues, led by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, fused the old Jewish theology with the new Hebraic activist modus operandi and formed a new strain of Zionism that sanctified the land (Gideon Aran, Kookism: The Roots of the Bloc of the Faithful, Settlers' Sub-Culture, Zionist Theology, Current Messianism, 2013; Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories, 2009; Motti Inbari, Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises, 2012). Within less than four decades, the committed adherents of this movement managed to position themselves as key veto players in the Israeli political system and to keep Israel on the romantic nationalistic highway that it is currently riding.