ABSTRACT
"Ruth Wisse is worth a battalion." Wisse's book seeks to explain why the Arabs have, since 1967, succeeded in turning upside down the world's view of the "conflict" between themselves and the Jews in the Middle East. She argues that the master stroke of the Arabs' strategy was to expand their war from the battlefield, where they had failed to live up to their own traditions of military prowess, to the realm of ideas, in which Jews were alleged to be adept. The fundamental premise of Wisse's argument is that this appeal has succeeded because when liberals are forced to choose between abandoning their faith in the progressive improvement and increasing enlightenment of the human race, they will abandon the Jews. Wisse indicts those Israelis who, under the political pressure generated by the attack on their country's legitimacy, have acquired the habit of differentiating between two Zionism, the pure and good Zionism of ingathering versus the evil Zionism of expansionism.
