Right to Exist

Yaacov Lozowick is the director of archives at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem and former Israeli peace activist who has been sobered by the unrelenting war of extermination being conducted against Israel. Lozowick’s sister Leah Kabaker is a Power Line reader who has brought Lozowick’s new book — Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars — to our attention. Ms. Kabaker has forwarded an excerpt from Milton Viorst’s recent review of the book in the Los Angeles Times. Viorst compares the book favorably to Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel.
The outstanding American writer Cynthia Ozick provides the following endorsement of the book: “Right To Exist, Yaacov Lozowick’s j’accuse, is one of the most important political histories of our generation. A modernday Zola, Lozowick meticulously unravels the Big Lie that demonizes Israel and Zionism and contaminates the viler estuaries of what is nowadays dubbed ‘the international community’. The title alone–the scandal of calling into question a living nation’s existence–ought to shame the prevaricators and defamers, whether they are professors in universities, media distorters, ‘peace activists’ who justify terror, morally deformed intellectuals, self-deceiving unconfessed haters, or merely the herd of the easily led. Honorably and irrefutably, Lozowick reintroduces plain fact and clear truth into a world of malice and mendacity.”
The Amazon entry on the book (linked above) includes a good summary of the book from Booklist: “Lozowick is a historian and director of archives at Israel’s Holocaust Museum. Like the proverbial liberal who is mugged into conservatism, he is a former peace activist who voted for Ariel Sharon in response to the collapse of the Oslo process and the ongoing violence directed at Israeli civilians. Lozowick convincingly asserts that Israel is now, as before, struggling against opponents whose goal is the eventual destruction of the Jewish state. In examining the entire history of the Zionist enterprise, he illustrates both the moral justification of that enterprise and of the wars Israelis have been compelled to fight to preserve their independence. He refutes the oft-repeated screeds that Israel is a ‘racist’ state, and he reserves special contempt for those European ‘peace activists,’ who are, in effect, apologists for those who deliberately blow up themselves and children. Those who demand that the U.S. pursue a more ‘balanced’ approach to the conflict will not like this book, but it is an eloquent and necessary justification of Israel’s right to defend itself.”
UPDATE: The October 13 issue of National Review carries a joint review by David Harsanyi of both Right to Exist and The Case for Israel. According to Harsanyi, both books are “essential” in refuting “many of the harsh — and historically inaccurate — charges against Israel.”

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