The Zionist movement has been described in many different ways, often as the “national liberation movement” of the Jewish people. The narrative which has emerged holds that Jewish immigration to Palestine was benign, having no ill will toward the indigenous Arab population, and that the difficulties which have emerged since the establishment of the sovereign state of Israel in 1948 are largely the result of Arab intransigence and hostility.  
 
The real history is, of course, far more complicated, as the “New Historians” who have emerged in Israel in recent years have made clear. Zionism, we now know, had a darker side, details of which are still emerging. Slowly, a narrative quite different from that presented to the world by organized Zionism, and by official Israeli success, is emerging.  
In this thoughtful book, Dr. Baylis Thomas, who has taught at the Yeshiva University/Albert Ein-stein College of Medicine and Montefiore Hospital in New York and has devoted his career to examining the sources of individual and group conflict, psychological and political, carefully examines what he labels “The Dark Side of Zionism.”