Jacqueline Rose, a professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London, has spent her career studying psychoanalysis and Marcel Proust – all the while penning criticisms of Israel. Rose’s latest book, Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East, uses Proust’s great work In Search of Lost Time to launch a self-indulgent condemnation of Israel.
Proust Among the Nations, which the University of Chicago Press published in 2012, has received more attention from British media outlets than American ones. Most of these have been favorable, alarmingly so. The London Review of Books gave the book its stamp of approval. The Guardian called Rose “brilliant.” Of course, The Guardian also reviewed her 2005 book, The Question of Zion, with deference for her comparison of Nazis and Zionists. These reviews lauded Rose for her ability to incorporate so many writers into her brief 256 page mischaracterization of Zionism, and did not challenge the problematic conclusions Rose draws from Proust, Sigmund Freud, Samuel Beckett, and others.
Rose begins Proust Among the Nations by using the French writer as a lens to study the Dreyfus Affair, a high profile 1894 French military trial driven by anti-Semitism that divided Parisian public opinion. She transitions into a survey of Jewish history through the present day with focus on the 1948 founding of Israel.
Her thesis is Jewish nationalism can be traced from Dreyfus to Israel “through the lens of Marcel Proust and in dialogue with Freud.” If this sounds senseless, it is, which is why she then abandons substantive discussion of Proust’s work by the midpoint of the book, turning instead to a discussion of Palestinian poets and writers such as Mahmoud Darwish, whom she pairs with Freudian principles to launch a polemic against Israel.
Rose argues that Zionists in Israel were as guilty of racism toward Palestinians as the French were toward Jews. She employs Freud’s psychoanalytic theories to liken the Jewish minority to a “pathogenic idea” in the subconscious of an ethnically pure France. According to Rose, the relationship also applies to the Palestinian minority in Israel.
This mea culpa to Palestinians is the culmination of Rose’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of Israel. She argues Zionism’s objective was only realized at the expense of Palestinian suffering, but does not provide equal coverage of Palestinian and Arab terrorism against innocent Jews.
In the end, Rose is just using literature to promote her own political ideology. She closes by amassing a string of writers, from Proust to Jean Genet, to form a contrived petition against the sins of partitions. Like the book’s title, this device is meant to distort her true motivations – to show that Zionism is racism. Rose tries to soften this claim with a literary pretext, yet it remains the foundation of her work.
No amount of quotes from famous writers can ever make that contention true, or even reasonable.