If history is written by the victors, the case of Israel poses a conundrum. While the founders of the state were decidedly rooted in the Labor Zionist tradition and the rivalry with the Zionist right was bitter and fierce, contemporary Israeli policy represents a decided shift to the right. Colin Shindler's The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron traces the intellectual and political path of the Zionist right's early ideologues to the politicians they became.

One of the tasks of the intellectual historian is to enliven the thought of their subjects with more complexity than might otherwise be appreciated by both the followers and the critics of those individuals. In laying out the ideas that shaped Revisionist Zionism's founder Vladimir Jabotinsky in particular, and in describing the political and ideational rivalries that defined Jabotinsky's early activities and the movement as a whole, Shindler succeeds. (He also lets the reader know, by way of a succinct introduction to the book, that this was one of his express aims.)

Some of this nuance indeed exposes contradictions. While towards the Palestinians Jabotinsky was what we'd now term bigoted—he referred to the “Arabs of Palestine” as “primitive”—he was also more clear eyed than was the main founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, who, in his book Altneuland (Old New Land), penned an idyllic and naive view of coexistence. Instead, Jabotinsky wrote: “To imagine. . . that they [the Palestinian Arabs] will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people” (p. 134).

The book goes beyond intellectual history to examine the competition between Jabotinsky and Zionist Maximalist Abba Ahimeier in Revisionist Zionism's early period, the dynamics between the right-wing paramilitary organizations Lehi and Etsel, the degree to which Jabotinsky actually might have preferred violence to the alternatives (in Shindler's words, Jabotinsky was “ambivalent and often conflicted” [p. 3]), and his rivalry with Ben-Gurion. Shindler takes us through the period of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir taking their places as the initial parliamentary representatives of the movement, through the rise of religious Zionism—fueled by the capture of the West Bank in the 1967 War—and bookends the narrative with descriptions of the complicated dynamics of coalition politics played out by figures such as Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Naftali Bennett. As when Begin's right flank castigated him for negotiating the Camp David Accords with Egypt, which entailed a withdrawal from Sinai, Shindler reminds us of the importance of actual political waters in smoothing the edges of ideology.

Readers looking for a readable and concise yet thorough accounting of the major figures, parties, elections, and events in which the right-wing Zionists were major players—the Altalena affair, the Kastner affair, Camp David, the Oslo Accords, and the Gaza withdrawal—will be largely satisfied. Those looking for a stronger analytical narrative, however, might yearn for more. Because of the absence of an overarching argument about either the emergence or the significance of the Zionist right, one might think that the book could have been better written as an overall history of Israeli politics. After all, Israel's right-wing and left-wing, with a fleeting parliamentary middle increasingly jockeying for position in the Israeli Knesset, arguably constitute each other.

With the exception of some discussion of economic preferences and class issues, neither was Israeli society written into the story as prominently as it could have been. Most significantly, one wonders to what degree the elites on either political wing were responding to existing popular attitudes, or helping to shaping them. As Israel contemplates a two state solution which might necessitate West Bank settler evacuation, the relaying of episodes like the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza would have been enriched by describing the widespread societal rift that emerged that summer, compounded by some settlers’ perception that they were abandoned by their government as many lacked permanent housing years later.

Finally, my own curiosity about the contemporary era in Israeli politics—an era that some consider to represent a crisis in Zionism—leads me to wonder how one might assess the question of which was the truest manifestation of Zionism, if there even is one: that of the Labor Zionist founders, or that of their right-wing rivals? And absent a direct correspondence with popular opinion of the time, is there even a way to address this question? Similarly, in this contemporary age of intense global criticism of Zionism, we might do well to ask whether the most serious policy ills of contemporary Israel are a perversion of Zionist thought or its natural extension. And finally, is there a place for Zionism at all in modern Israel whose national liberation roots have given way to statehood? More analysis of the relationship between these different philosophical and ideological subsets in light of democracy and the Israeli state-building project would help fill out what is overall a sound and illuminating history of the Zionist right.