Israel—Palestinians: Conflict and Political Relations

Israel—Palestinians: Conflict and Political Relations is presented as a conflict whose political meaning cannot be settled by choosing between opposing accounts. The book examines a historical convergence of interests, competing European interpretations of Israel and the occupation, and the position of Palestinians within arguments about antisemitism and resistance. Its central claim is that these tensions must be confronted together rather than resolved by retreating to a supposedly neutral middle ground.

The 1937 encounter

On September 26, 1937, Adolf Eichmann and an assistant set out from Berlin to visit Palestine after Eichmann received permission to accept an invitation from Feivel Polkes, a senior member of Haganah. The proposed discussions concerned coordination between German and Jewish organizations to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine. The book stresses that their aims were distinct: the Germans wanted Jews to leave Western Europe, while Zionist leaders wanted the Jewish population in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible.

The planned visit did not take place. Amid violent unrest, the British blocked access to Palestine; Eichmann and Polkes met days later in Cairo and discussed coordination between German and Zionist activities. The book interprets the episode as a striking convergence around demographic transformation: parties with sharply different purposes could share an interest in changing the population’s ethnic balance. That comparison is the author’s political reading of the encounter, not a claim that the parties’ motives or histories were identical.

Competing interpretations

The book describes two sharply opposed ways the conflict is framed in European public debate. In one, Muslims are cast as Europe’s constitutive cultural Other, and criticism of Israeli politics—or advocacy for peace and solidarity with Palestinians—is dismissed as antisemitism in another form. In the opposing account, the occupation of the West Bank is treated as a continuation of European colonialism, while appeals to the Holocaust are understood as being used to legitimize expansion. Each framework exposes a danger, but neither can simply cancel the other.

The author’s proposed response is to recognize both the persistence of antisemitism and the possibility that Zionist politics can reproduce exclusionary national logic. The book objects, for example, to Left arguments that directly equate Israel’s actions in the occupied territories with the Nazi Holocaust, since that comparison can imply that Jews thereby lose the right to complain about the Holocaust. It also identifies a tendency among some Zionists to turn the Shoah into a sacrificial guarantee of Jewish exceptional status. Its argument is not that the two criticisms are interchangeable, but that criticism of antisemitism and criticism of Zionist politics should not be made mutually exclusive.

The Palestinian position

The book characterizes Palestinians as occupying a particularly difficult position in this dispute: they are, in its formulation, victims of the ultimate victims, the Jews. It uses the Lacanian notion of objet petit a to describe Palestinians as an intersection in the Israeli-Arab conflict and as an obstacle around which opposing identities and demands take shape. This is a theoretical interpretation of their place in the conflict, not a neutral description of Palestinian identity.

That position produces what the author calls an ethical blackmail. Palestinian resistance can be denounced as a continuation of antisemitism or as secret solidarity with the Nazi Final Solution; yet treating such denunciations as sufficient to settle the political question makes resistance almost impossible to defend. The book argues that this trap must be rejected rather than accepted as the price of discussing Palestinian claims.

Political impasse and significance

The book presents Palestine as a potential site of political change because standard pragmatic solutions to the Middle East crisis repeatedly fail. In that circumstance, it argues, inventing a new political space—an apparently utopian proposal—may be the only realistic alternative to reproducing the impasse. The claim shifts attention from choosing between existing explanatory camps to asking what forms of political possibility those camps leave unavailable.

Across its account, the conflict functions as a test of whether opposing truths can be acknowledged without collapsing into equivalence or being arranged into a safe compromise. The historical episode of 1937, the clashing European accounts, and the constrained position assigned to Palestinian resistance all serve that larger argument: political judgment must hold together questions that public debate often forces apart.