Discontents’, traces the intellectual debates within China between the ‘New Left’, the ‘China that can say No’ conservatives, and establishment intellectuals in terms of rising nationalism and WTO accession. And Chapter four’s ‘What Kind of Status Quo Power’, which many will consider to be the most important and relevant part of the book, details the ways in which the range within which nationalist discourse plays out influences a large range of foreign policy issues from reunification policy toward Taiwan to notions of China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’, to the contradictions between Deng Xiaoping theory and Chinese nationalism in China’s relationship with Japan and the former’s insistence on ever more heartfelt apologies from the latter. In sum, this is a thorough and thoughtful piece of work by one of the better known of Britain’s contemporary China scholars; useful to lecturers and students for the way in which it lays out key trends in the evolution of China’s official discourse, and thought-provoking for anyone concerned with how policy-makers and political elites in other corners of the globe hydbridise and modify notions of globalisation, what it is, and where it is heading. JULIA C. STRAUSS School of Oriental and African Studies Joseph Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. London/New York: Routledge, 2006. 232 pp. d70 (hbk), d19.99 (pbk). This book presents a collection of essays published between 1993 and 2005 and includes a debate between Joseph Massad and the noted Israeli historian Benny Morris. The book is divided into two parts with eleven interconnected chapters. The first discusses the ideology of Zionism and its faithful encounter with Palestinian nationalism. The second evaluates what is conventionally called the ‘peace process’ and its impact in the transformation of the Palestinian political debate. This book makes fascinating reading for two interrelated reasons: It demonstrates with erudition the interconnectedness between the destinies of Israelis and Palestinians, not only in the obvious fact they share the same land, but also because many aspects of their identities and contemporary outlooks have been shaped in this faithful encounter. Massad shows sensitivity and empathetic understanding for the tragedy of European Jewry, sympathy that he skilfully deploys to show the parallels between Jewish and Palestinian suffering at the hands of ethnocentric forms of nationalism. It is out of this sympathy and solidarity with the European Jewish predicament that Massad finds inspiration to eloquently explain the predicament of contemporary Palestinians. From here, Massad resorts to a resolute denunciation of Zionism because he suggests that it replicates ideas of ethnic superiority and ethnic contamination that resulted in the persecution and destruction of a large part European Jewry. After an attentive reading of leading Israeli scholars, Massad shows in a number of examples how he considers that Israeli colloquial language has been contaminated by the discourse of anti- Semitism. Following the seminal work of Benjamin Bet-Hallahmi, he characterises the new Jew, the ‘sabra’, as the ‘anti Jew’ (p.37) and shows how the use of term ‘sabon’ (soap) in colloquial Israeli Hebrew to signify lack of courage and respect for morality r The authors 2008. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008 420 Book Reviews