Palestine appears in the book not as a neutral backdrop but as a politically charged place where migration, demographic aims, and competing claims to historical victimhood converge. The author connects it to a 1937 encounter between German officials and a Zionist representative, then turns to the Palestinians’ position within the conflict: their resistance, he argues, is vulnerable to being recast as antisemitism. He also presents Palestine as a possible site of political invention when established approaches to the conflict repeatedly fail.

The 1937 Visit and Its Aims

On September 26, 1937, Adolf Eichmann and an assistant boarded a train in Berlin to travel toward Palestine. Reinhard Heydrich had permitted Eichmann to accept an invitation from Feivel Polkes, a senior member of Haganah, to visit Tel Aviv and discuss coordination between German and Jewish organizations to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine. The proposed cooperation joined parties with sharply different purposes: the German authorities wanted Jews to leave Western Europe, while Zionist leaders sought to increase the Jewish population of Palestine relative to the Arab population.

The visit itself did not proceed as planned. Violent unrest led the British to block access to Palestine, but Eichmann and Polkes met days later in Cairo and discussed coordinating German and Zionist activity. The episode matters in the book because it makes the interaction of migration policy and demographic projects unusually visible. The author characterizes the shared interest in changing the population balance as a form of ethnic cleansing; this is his polemical interpretation of the episode, not a claim that the participants shared a single political purpose.

Demography and Political Conflict

The book returns to Palestine as a place where arguments about national identity and population are inseparable from the question of political power. The 1937 account describes Zionist interest in increasing the Jewish population in relation to Arabs, while a later discussion describes Palestinians as occupying a paradoxical position: they are, in the author’s formulation, victims of those understood as history’s ultimate victims, the Jews. This framing does not erase the differences between the parties’ histories or aims; it identifies the difficulty the author sees in making Palestinian resistance politically legible.

The author presents this difficulty as a form of ethical blackmail. If Jewish people are cast as the troubling excess of Western history, he asks, can opposition to Israeli policy be voiced without being denounced as an extension of antisemitism or as covert solidarity with Nazi persecution? His answer is that this bind must be rejected. Palestine consequently serves as a test case for distinguishing criticism of political power from hostility toward Jews as a people, while the book’s own forceful language makes clear that this distinction is central to its argument.

A Site of Possible Political Invention

Rather than describe Palestine as a problem awaiting a technical adjustment, the book treats it as a possible site of an event. The author’s stated reason is that standard pragmatic solutions to the Middle East crisis repeatedly fail. In that setting, he argues, inventing a new political space may be the only realistic course—not because he specifies a settlement or institutional design, but because the existing terms of debate have not resolved the conflict.

This account gives Palestine a double significance. It is a place shaped by concrete historical efforts to direct migration and alter demographic relations, and it is a point from which the limits of familiar political solutions become apparent. The proposed opening remains deliberately abstract: the book identifies the need for a new space of political possibility without setting out what that space would look like. Palestine’s importance, in this analysis, lies partly in the unresolved tension between the specific histories asserted there and the possibility of a politics that does not reproduce the existing impasse.