Stephen Crittenden: Can we come back here to the question of Zionist history? Isn't it true that there were two versions of Zionism , one that was, I guess, happy to live side-by-side with the Arabs, no matter how difficult or illusionary that project may have been. But then a revisionist Zionism, the Zionism of (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky the spiritual father of the Likud, who many would say was frankly a Fascist, and that that revisionist Zionism perhaps poisoned the entire Israeli project, and that it did in fact involve a kind of a demographic warfare from the very beginning.

Alvin Rosenfeld: I would not accept the term that Jabotinsky was a Fascist, I think that's an extreme mischaracterisation of Jabotinsky. I'm not a Jabotinskyite myself I should add, but I wouldn't place him in fact next to Mussolini. There are many versions of Zionism -

Stephen Crittenden: But we're talking in fact about what's sometimes referred to as revisionist Zionism or blood and soil Zionism. I don't think there's any doubt that it treated the territory of Palestine pretty much from the beginning, as terra nullius.

Alvin Rosenfeld: Yes. Our conversation Stephen, will soon come to an end if you continue to use terms like 'blood and soil', that's a Nazi term. 'Blut und Boden' in German. And it accuses the State of Israel in fact of racism, and I don't regard the State of Israel as a racist State in the least, and to say it is, is to really I think defame the State. It deserves better than that.

Stephen Crittenden: That's a term that's actually used by Jewish critics of Zionism.

Alvin Rosenfeld: No, they're not critics of Zionism, that's my point, they're beyond criticism and to excoriation of the worst kind, likening the State of Israel to Nazi Germany. To me, that's an obscenity.

Stephen Crittenden: Well you say your essay is aimed against so-called 'progressive Jewish thought'. You call it the new anti-Semitism, you in fact spend some time looking at the work of some of the British Jews who signed the open letter last week, for example. What's driving it? Is it a sense of despair perhaps? Something to do with the failure of the intervention in Lebanon last year perhaps?

Alvin Rosenfeld: It's difficult to understand exactly what's driving it, but I wouldn't make too much fuss in fact about it. The people in England amount to about 150 people, British Jewry of course is a lot bigger than that. I think we're looking at a tiny splinter group of far Left Jews, who have problems with their own Jewish identity, and somehow feel that by dissenting radically from the State of Israel, they affirm something precious about themselves. But I'm not a psychoanalyst, I can't really deal fully with any authority with the pathologies involved here. I don't think that they represent a significant current of British Jewish thinking.

Stephen Crittenden: Alvin, in mentioning British Jewry there, you look in particular at a recent book by Jacqueline Rose, who attempts to psychoanalyse Zionism. Now even if you disagree with the details of what she's saying, is there some sense in which there is a tragic origin to Zionism?

Alvin Rosenfeld: Well she claims that there is. She claims that Zionism is itself neurotic at its core, and that the State was destined to failure. Actually the State in so many ways is a brilliant success. The Israelis are very accomplished people and by any measure they look really quite good, it seems to me.

Stephen Crittenden: Fourteenth largest economy in the world, I think.

Alvin Rosenfeld: Yes, is that really a great deal. But she's an example in fact of the kind of mendaciousness that I see in these people. At one point in her book, and I point this out in my essay, she talks about Hitler and Herzl attending an opera by Wagner at a Paris Opera House. . . . . Hitler and Herzl could never have come together, Hitler never entered Paris until 1940 and by that time Herzl was elsewhere as you know. What she's doing is linking the Father of Zionism with the Father of Nazism. . . . . The entire story is apocryphal, and how a press as distinguished this Princeton University Press, allowed that to go forward, I simply don't understand. There's no credibility to it, there's no basis in fact. However, the polemical point that she wanted to make is driven home. If you want to understand Zionism, look at Nazism. And as you could hear from my objection to your own use of 'Blut and Boden' language, to me that's simply irresponsible. . . .

Stephen Crittenden: Is there any doubt, in fact, that Diaspora Jews living in Australia, living in Canada, living in the United States, experience spikes of anti-Semitic attacks, in direct correlation to the behaviour of the Israeli State and the Israeli Army? I think there certainly appears to be no doubt about that in Australia. Is there some sense in which Diaspora Jews are, in a sense, reacting to an experience of anti-Semitism that they associate with the behaviour of the State of Israel.

Alvin Rosenfeld: Since the year 2000, there has certainly been a resurgence of anti-Semitism on the global scale. I myself would not attribute it however to the State of Israel, I would attribute it to the anti-Semites of whom there are too many, who take advantage of tensions in the Middle East to become very hostile to Jews and Jewish institutions in the Diaspora. But no, I reject your premise.

After getting off the phone with Rosenfeld, Crittenden says:

On the touchy issue of 'blood and soil' Zionism, the earliest use of the term I can find is by leading German Zionist, Kurt Blumenfeld speaking in the fateful year, 1933.

I would call that cherry-picking.

Crittenden then interviews a gushily apologetic and despondent Jerusalem correspondent, who plays right into his leading questions about the increasing malaise in the Israeli body politic and his questioning of the "Israeli Project" (at least he didn't call it the "Zionist entity"), for example:

I don't want to drag you somewhere you don't want to go, Irris, but what's your view about Zionism? Is there a sense in which Israel was founded on a kind of original sin, the demographic warfare against the Palestinians that went on really from 1948, even earlier?

Iris, to say the least, doesn't push back the way Alvin does.