The West has been sold a bill of goods. Bronzed Jewish soldiers protecting the founders of kibbutzim in a Near East backwater, terraforming the desert into farmland, steadfastly creating an outpost of the West in the center of Barbary: redemption for the West’s historical sins against European Jewry. It’s decent — if saccharine and seriously overwrought — ad-copy for Zionism, and it’s gone over well for decades in Paris, New York, Brussels, and Berlin. Like most ad-copy, it has been dishonest. Unlike most ad-copy, it is outright mendacious, something like 1940s cigarette ads advertising tobacco’s salubrious effects. And Zionist intellectuals, like tobacco salesmen, are having trouble covering up an increasingly evident truth: that Zionism should be slapped with a label reading: caution, settler-colonialism, type two: cleansing and extermination. This ideology may be harmful to the native population.

Earlier Zionists were not in the business of molly-coddling modern Western sensibilities. They were honest, unaware the archive they left behind would be trouble. Take revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky’s scorched forthrightness: “colonization must . . . proceed in defiance of the will of the native population . . . an external power has committed itself to creating such security conditions that the local population, however much it would have wanted to, would be unable to interfere, administratively or physically, with our colonization.” The ideology hasn’t changed much, but the West has. So Israeli new mandarins have to try to sell settler-colonialism to Western states with populations that more and more regard Zionism’s spiritual core and physical reality as somewhere on the spectrum between mildly embarrassing and overtly revolting. It is those mandarins that anti-Zionist Israeli poet Yitzhak Laor meticulously vivisects in The Myths of Liberal Zionism.

Laor is not much for structure. He wanders and weaves. Not a problem. The book was originally published in Hebrew and then translated to French. The myths of the book’s title are intended to muck up the minds of a European audience. As he writes, “We are not really talking to the United States, maybe because we take its love for granted.” And maybe for lack of understanding. In the introduction for the English-language translation, Laor explores differences between the United States and Israel that render this lack of understanding mostly irrelevant. The most important of these center around the Holocaust and its central role in communal binding for the bastion of ideological support for Israel — the American Jewish community. As Jewish theologian Marc Ellis observes, Diasporic Jews are encouraged to feel forever guilty for not having prevented the Holocaust. We are encouraged to see Israel as threatened with “annihilation. The message is clear: unequivocal support for Israel to prevent a second Holocaust.” The corollary is that is it necessary to cultivate a cult of victimology. Children are the best potential victims, much better than grown men armed with Merkava tanks and submarines equipped with nuclear warheads.