In the months before the invasion of Iraq, one of the most visible groups of protestors called itself “Not in Our Name.” The slogan was a perfect expression of the unacknowledged narcissism at the heart of so much political activism. “Not in our name” does not say anything about the justice or wisdom or necessity of the Iraq war; it simply expresses the desire to dissociate oneself from it, to remain personally untainted by its moral ambiguities. For many protestors, in other words, it was more important to see oneself as the kind of person who opposed war than to actually prevent it. The slogan makes a tacit admission of its own futility.

The desire to be, and to seem to be, a certain kind of person – patriot or freethinker, good soldier or humanitarian – is a large element in everyone’s politics. But certain political conflicts put our visions of ourselves under especially severe strain, and it is exactly these conflicts that are most difficult to solve. For Jews, in particular, the heartbreaking problem of Israel and Palestine resists thought and encourages projection. It is one of those debates in which psychology has usurped politics, and a concrete problem has become a metaphor.

It might seem promising, therefore, to apply to Zionism the tools of psychoanalysis, as Jacqueline Rose attempts to do in “The Question of Zion”(Princeton University Press, 202 pages, $19.95).The promise of Freud, after all, is that “where id was, there ego shall be,” and surely the definition of mature politics is to replace fantasies and wishes with realities.

Unfortunately, as Ms. Rose’s sincere but confused book proves, the question of Zion is so monstrously overdetermined that even the psychoanalyst cannot assume her usual posture of Olympian neutrality. For to adopt a Freudian approach to Zionism is already to invoke a whole series of assumptions about Jews and Judaism, as well as about Europe, assimilation, modernity, and rationality. Ms. Rose is correct to write that Zionism is bound up with Jews’ “passionately held conviction of who they are and always must be.” But she does not seem to realize that her own dissent from Zionism is no less passionately self-interested – that her posture of superior rationality is not an answer to the “question,” but another one of its symptoms.

It could hardly be otherwise, given Ms. Rose’s particular background and vantage point on Israel. Ms. Rose, a British Jew, is an eminent literary critic of a psychoanalytic bent, the author of a fine book on Sylvia Plath. Until now, she has not been known for her interest in the Middle East, and on the evidence of “The Question of Zion” she brings to the subject neither scholarly expertise nor personal experience. From her bibliography, it appears that she does not read Hebrew or German, the indispensable languages for a study of Zionism; she also seems to have spent little time in Israel, except when making a documentary in 2002 for British television.

Her book, based on lectures delivered at Princeton University, can therefore only exist at one remove from its subject. Inevitably, it is less about Zionism than it is about her own vision of Israel and what it means to be Jewish. In fact, Ms. Rose is writing not political or historical analysis, but a kind of Freudian literary criticism, with the writings of the major early Zionists as her text. Zionism, she argues, is best understood as a complex of the Jewish people, a classic example of the neurotic’s refusal to face reality squarely.

In her first chapter, she aligns Zionism with the apocalyptic messianism of Shabtai Zvi, whose 17th-century heretical movement ended in catastrophe. By highly selective quotation from Zionist writers, Ms. Rose believes she can read this antique heresy into the modern, secular idea of Zionism – an argument roughly equivalent, in chronological terms, to arguing that Winston Churchill’s politics were the same as Oliver Cromwell’s. Using the infinitely malleable psychoanalytic notion of repression, Ms. Rose is able to assert that it is precisely the marginality of messianism in Israeli politics that proves its centrality: If religious fanatics “seem marginal,” it is only because they “bear the weight of the ugliest secrets of the whole group.”

Ms. Rose portrays Zionism as a religious throwback by focusing on one strand of its history to the exclusion of others that are much more significant: socialism, secularism, and European nationalism. Yet she does not argue, as did so many of the early Zionists themselves, that the proper response to religious delusions is a secularization of Jewish history, so that the Jews might become “a nation like any other.” Rather, echoing early Jewish critics of Israel like Hannah Arendt, she voices the old European-intellectual idea that the calling of the Jews is to suffer redemptively. Ms. Rose concurs with Martin Buber’s belief that, as she puts it, “The nation should not be normal.” Instead, she writes, Zionism ought to have been an experiment in moral tentativeness, built on a refusal of force and violence. By creating an actual state, complete with borders, flag, and army, the founders of Israel betrayed this humanitarian ideal.

It is remarkable that, in making this familiar argument, Ms. Rose should pay practically no attention to the two forces that long ago made it unattractive, and even contemptible, in the eyes of most Zionists themselves. These are the Holocaust, which demonstrated the ultimate consequences of Jewish statelessness, and the persistent hostility to Israel of the Arabs, who long threatened to repeat the demonstration. In other words, Ms. Rose writes as though Israel and the Jews were not threatened, but simply paranoid. She goes so far as to write that “the Palestinians have become the inadvertent objects of a struggle that, while grounded in the possession of the land, at another level has nothing to do with them at all.”

This is the price of Ms. Rose’s psychoanalytic approach: an insistence that the only conflicts that matter are internal conflicts. But this notion, dubious enough when it comes to individual patients, is positively delusional when applied to a whole people, especially one with a history like the Jews’. In making this error, Ms. Rose seems to be a victim of biases bred by her profession – academic literary criticism, in which the signifier is always more important than the signified – and by her situation in Europe, where the only thing more obsolete than the idea of nationhood is the idea of Jewish nationhood.

If there were any doubt of this, it vanishes in the book’s preface, where Ms. Rose declares that she is “appalled at what the Israeli nation perpetrated in my name.” It is her own self-image, not the actual problems of Israel and Palestine, that ultimately determines the shape of Ms. Rose’s argument. In this she is hardly alone, either on the left or on the right. But as she proves in spite of herself, the last thing the “question of Zion” needs is more psychology.