Israel Has Moved DIANA P INTO Harvard University Press, 2013 215 pp., £18.95, ISBN 9780674073425 Diana Pinto’ s book is an exploration of current Israeli state and society, written as a travel memoir. Provocative, lucid, and highly readable, it combines political analysis, amateur anthropology, and sociological observations, from the viewpoint of a Jewish European visitor, critical but sympathetic to the Jewish State. Starting from the border control at Ben Gurion airport, and ending in Jerusalem, the book offers a dis- illusioned reading of a state that “has moved, ” that is, transformed profoundly. And while Pinto strives to maintain a detached intellectual perspective, the book is coloured by her nostalgia for the early Israel, “modest and idealistic. ” The process described here is the demise of Israel’ s secular, socialist brand of Zionism, and its replacement by an ultra-religious, ultranationalist version. At the same time, neo-liberal reforms opened Israel to the outside world, and released it from its isolation from its Middle Eastern environment. Both the internal and global processes have made Israel much more diverse, and yet politically the country is entrenching its ethnic vision of citizenship, from which Palestinians, African asylum seekers and work migrants are excluded. Pinto’ s disillusionment is an expression of the growing ambivalence among diaspora Jewish liberal circles towards Israel. The coun- try’ s shift to the right, its increasingly Orthodox and conservative nature and the con- tinuation of Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank are causes for growing concern among “liberal Zionists” in diaspora communities. This comes, however, with an ideal- ization of Israel before the 1967 war and early Zionism. For example, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, who championed the annexation of East Jerusalem, is described here admiringly as a liberal multi-culturalist. The book makes rich use of metaphors from psychoanalysis to travel anecdotes. It is not an academic book, and as such footnotes are kept to a minimum, and these refer mostly to journalist sources. This makes it readable and impressionistic. And yet anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Israeli society would do better to look at the work of sociologists such as Baruch Kimmerling, Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled. Ultimately, Pinto’ s attachment to the Israeli old guard, the Ashkenazi elite whose parents established the state, prompts her to implicitly blame the Orthodox, settlers and recent immigrants for the unsavoury transformation of the country. The mass immi- gration from the Soviet Union is described in stereotypical and derogatory terms (Russian-speaking immigrants are repeatedly linked here with “opaque dealings”). Little discussed is the question of Israel’ s Mizrahim—Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent, who make up half of Israeli Jews, and faced severe discrimination from Israel’ s Ashkenazi establishment in the 1950s and 1960s. An analysis of Israeli society demands closer attention to its ethno-class elements, as well as a more critical approach to Israel’ s Ashkenazi elite. The emphasis on Israel’ s hi-tech success, and its outreach to emerging economies is told well but is, as is often the case, overstated, or rather taken out of context. The writer suggests that economic ties with India and China can acquire political significance, which would decrease Israel’ s reliance on the USA and the EU—but this remains to be 338 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES