The Holocaust, and the “illegal” immigration of refugees, galvanised the Jewish resistance in Palestine in the aftermath of the Second World War. It fiercely fed the polemic of the new state from 1948.The ethos of a rebirth from the ashes was paramount, as I can personally attest from primary and secondary schools in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, the Eichman trial gripped Israel in a frenzy of relived agony.There is no mention of this in Rose’s book. She is fixated on the Word, eschewing lived experience, condemning herself to the closed circle of the neo-Marxist neverland, obsessed with finding a Freudian, Lacanian or Hegelian term to fit the decline of the “non-violent” Zionist dream.

“I approached two distinguished Hegelian philosophers,” for the solution, she writes. She should have approached Abd el-Jawad X, on any street corner in Ramallah or Gaza, or Mrs Frieda Y, n?of Dachau. They, like countless victims of the 20th century’s ideological certainties, can bear witness to the result when force is deployed to achieve the ideas of polemicists and thinkers.In the end, despite the undoubted influence of ideologies and nationalist delusions, the thinkers could not make the state of Israel out of pure desire or will. That creation was left to the 20th century’s cataclysmic historical dynamics, which set the lovers of Zion, Jewish and Arab, so fatefully at each other’s throats.Simon Louvish’s ‘Mae West’ will be published by Faber Buy any book reviewed on this site at Independent Books Direct – postage and packing are free in the UK. Except for a brief period in the mid-20th century, the Terror has always been the central problem of the French Revolution. For three decades from the 1950s, during the Indian summer of Marxism, historians turned aside from confronting bloodshed to debate whether the true importance of the Revolution lay in the triumph of a capitalist bourgeoisie.By the time of the Revolution’s bicentenary in 1989, these exchanges were largely played out. The publishing sensation of that year was Simon Schama’s Citizens, which proclaimed violence as the Revolution’s essence.

The vision made familiar to an older English-speaking world by Carlyle and Dickens – a sustained and mindless outburst of popular savagery – was burned afresh into the minds of readers eager to congratulate themselves on having avoided such excesses in their own history.
“But this”, says David Andress, “is simply not good enough.” He begins by reminding Americans that their own revolution was far more than a relatively painless rejection of George III’s authority. It was arguably more destructive, in proportion to the numbers, than the French. He might have added that the British stumbled into their own Terror in Ireland in 1798.What made both so bloody was that they were civil wars, and Andress offers this as one of the keys to the more notorious French Terror. It was a fracturing along the fault-lines of society, brought about by attempting contentious reforms at a time of national peril. But there was far more to the Revolution than Terror, “and the Terror proper was the outcome of a process, not its preordained goal”.This approach has a long history.

It has often been used by admirers of the Revolution to excuse its excesses. To them, the Revolution was blown off a more benevolent course by its enemies.Andress willingly echoes elements of the interpretation. His narrative starts with the royal family trying to flee in June 1791, and he carefully chronicles their relentless attempts to drag the country into a war that might rescue them. He emphasises the legitimacy of popular grievances and fears, and the ordinariness of most of the people caught up in polarising circumstances.Yet none of this is invoked to excuse what happened Everyone faced “impossible dilemmas” Brave people fought on both sides Honest men made bad choices. Less savoury characters also snatched opportunities.Unlike historians of both left and right, Andress reminds us that the Terror went on for years afterwards in certain regions. We have not heard much of the Counter-Terror launched by victims who survived since the human micro-histories of Richard Cobb. But if Terror was civil war, revenge and reprisals are a legitimate part of its story, and in this account it peters messily out.”Pity is not revolutionary”, declared General Westermann as he reported cutting down surrendering rebels from the Vend? More notoriously Saint-Just declared that humanity consists in the extermination of enemies.It is this fateful tendency to dehumanise opponents Andress sees as the true motor of Terror and Counter-Terror.