Finkelstein demolishes Shavit’s book without difficulty. Where pundits perceive insight and depth, Old Wine, Broken Bottle points out a naked emperor spouting torrents of high-flown, perfectly meaningless rhetoric. At times its critique can appear ungenerous: Shavit notes in passing Israel’s oft-suppressed missed opportunity for peace in 1971, for instance, and rightly deems the 1982 Lebanon campaign ‘deceitful and outrageous’; but Finkelstein is unmoved by either cursory admission, and even offers a wry dig at the aged ‘Disco Ari’’s’ nights out in Tel Aviv.

Read the full review at New Left Project.