Israel is presented as both a concrete nation-state and a charged symbol in arguments about antisemitism, political belonging, and universalism. The book traces how Jews have been cast, in different historical settings, as either too particular or too cosmopolitan, and argues that contemporary disputes over Israel inherit rather than resolve this contradiction. Its central insistence is that opposition to antisemitism and criticism of Israeli policy are compatible obligations, not alternatives.

A shifting figure of limitation

The book describes a sequence in which the political meaning assigned to Jews changes with the surrounding ideal of social unity. In early modern antisemitism, Jews were condemned for preserving a distinct way of life instead of dissolving into secular citizenship. Later, under chauvinist imperialism, the accusation was reversed: Jews were depicted as cosmopolitan and uprooted, supposedly threatening the boundaries of particular national communities. In the contemporary drive toward globalization beyond the nation-state, the earlier charge of excessive particularity returns. Israel, as a clearly delimited nation-state, is made to occupy the position of an obstacle to unlimited unification.

This account connects Israel’s symbolic role to a wider European difficulty with limits. The book argues that projects of openness and multicultural tolerance can still depend on designating a group or state as the barrier to a fully unified world. It therefore treats the changing image of the Jew not as a stable description of Jewish life, but as a shifting political function: the same figure can be accused of refusing assimilation in one period and of dissolving national distinctions in another. Israel becomes a focal point for that contradiction because its state form makes political particularity visible.

Statehood, Europe, and the 1937 encounter

The book advances a deliberately unsettling interpretation of Israel’s establishment. It argues that European support for a Jewish state could also serve the purpose of removing Jews from Europe, and asks whether the state’s creation should be understood, from Europe’s perspective, as a political continuation of the effort to get rid of the Jewish question. This is presented as a critical interpretation of the state’s historical meaning, not as a claim that Jewish self-determination and Nazi aims were identical.

A specific episode anchors the argument. On September 26, 1937, Adolf Eichmann and an assistant left Berlin for a visit to Palestine, with permission from Reinhard Heydrich, following an invitation from Feivel Polkes, a senior member of the Haganah. German and Zionist representatives had a shared immediate interest in increasing Jewish emigration to Palestine, although their aims differed: the Germans wanted Jews out of Western Europe, while Zionist leaders wanted the Jewish population in Palestine to grow relative to the Arab population. British restrictions during unrest prevented the planned access to Palestine; Eichmann and Polkes nevertheless met in Cairo days later and discussed coordination. The book uses the encounter to expose an instrumental convergence between radically opposed political projects, while describing the population-changing logic behind it as a form of ethnic cleansing.

Israel in the competing readings of the conflict

The book sets out two opposed readings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict circulating in European public debate. In one, Muslims remain Europe’s constitutive cultural Other, and criticism of Israeli policy is treated as a disguise for antisemitism. Advocacy of peace or solidarity with Palestinians is then suspected of repeating older hostility toward Jews by different means. In the other reading, occupation of the West Bank is regarded as a continuation of European colonialism, while invocation of the Holocaust is criticized as a means of legitimizing that expansion. From this perspective, Israel must be judged by the same political and ethical standards applied to other states.

The author rejects the idea that truth lies in a moderate midpoint between these positions. Instead, the two extremes are treated as symptoms that reveal something about each other. The book acknowledges that parts of the contemporary Left reproduce antisemitic reasoning when they equate Israeli actions in occupied territory with the Nazi genocide in a way that implies Jews have forfeited the right to protest the Holocaust. It also identifies a paradox in appeals to universal assimilation when those making them assert their own ethnic identity more insistently. These tensions, in the book’s account, make a simultaneous critique necessary: opposition to antisemitism cannot excuse Israeli policy, and criticism of that policy cannot excuse antisemitism.

Identity, alliance, and political limits

Israel also appears in an analysis of the political alliance between the United States and Israel. The book contrasts Israel’s exemplary ethnic statehood, associated with tradition and bounded identity, with the United States as an image of social life in which traditional bonds are dissolved. In that interpretation, Israel serves as a small object of reference around which the more open and unsettled American social order organizes an attachment to tradition. The alliance is thus described as a coexistence of opposed principles, not as evidence that the two societies share an identical political form.

The discussion further argues that some Zionist discourse can reproduce antisemitic patterns even while affirming Jewish statehood. It points to the reuse of familiar antisemitic visual stereotypes in representations of Yassir Arafat and to the political appeal of portraying Israel as a necessary site of national identification. Against this, the book invokes a cosmopolitan Jewish tradition, using Sigmund Freud’s mistrust of national enthusiasm and his reservations about turning a piece of the Herodian wall into a national relic as examples. The contrast is not between Jewish identity and its absence, but between a universalist and a nationalist way of articulating that identity.

A note on gender and political symbolism adds another complication: women serving in the Israeli military is cited as an argument used in some Arab public discourse to condemn Israel, while women suicide bombers have also received public praise. The book treats this juxtaposition as evidence of contradictory political uses of gender, and notes that the changing visibility of women in the Palestine Liberation Organization reflects a process of de-secularization. Together, these examples show how Israel functions in the argument as more than a territorial setting: it is a site where national identity, universalism, colonial critique, antisemitism, and political representation collide.