Many prominent adherents of an ideology that presents itself as the guardian of world Jewry have also, throughout Zionism’s history, “hated the Jews”, argues Joss Sheldon in a striking new book. This contempt, Sheldon argues, was the engine of the project: denigrate Jews first, then offer the “Jewish state” as the cure. It reached Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Zionist official whom Adolf Eichmann later called the “authorized representative of the Zionist movement”. Many Iraqi Jews rejected Zionism altogether; the educator Ezra Haddad insisted, “We are Arabs before we are Jews.” What makes The Zionists Who Hate Jews valuable is not its polemical tone, but its evidence: a century of documented statements demolishing the idea that protecting Jews was ever Zionism’s true purpose.