cover image RIGHT TO EXIST: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars

RIGHT TO EXIST: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars

Yaacov Lozowick, . . Doubleday, $26 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-385-50905-3

For Lozowick, author of Hitler's Bureaucrats and director of the archives at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, "[i]t is astonishing how deep-seated the fear of covert Jewish power really is." This book is his attempt at "a moral evaluation of the facts" of the various wars and current struggles among Israel, Palestine and other Arab states. Lozowick is deeply critical of the "confusion, ineptitude, bad faith, waste, poor taste, callousness and stupidity" that he finds within Zionism (as in "any other large-scale human project"), but he nevertheless concludes that "the will to murder Jews was never the result of oppression and can never be resolved by removing it." (On sale Oct. 21)