One problem for anyone trying to offer a defence of Israel in the face of the determined intellectual assault on the country in recent years is that while the assault is simple and easily understood – conducted in an adolescent emoji language of epithets and images – the defence is harder to explain. To defame the country one merely needs to say ‘colonialism’ or ‘apartheid’, and add a photo of a soldier manhandling a child. To defend Israel requires an understanding of at least 100 years of history in both Europe and the Middle East, of how we reached this moment, and of what Israel’s choices really are right now. Anyone trying to explain Israel’s case needs to be worldly enough to make sense to people outside the bubble of those who are reflexively sympathetic to Israel anyway, and it helps not to be ideologically rigid or so angry you can’t speak calmly.

Not many people can do this well. The confrontational and clumsy government currently in power in Israel, for example, doesn’t have much luck. One of the most skilful Israeli advocates right now is Einat Wilf, the scholar, Cambridge and Harvard graduate and former Knesset member who has become something of an unofficial roving ambassador for Israel in recent years. (Originally a Labour Party lawmaker, she joined a group of MKs who left the party along with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak for a brief stint in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, after which she left politics in 2013.)

In the collection Winning the War of Words, Wilf presents essays and articles that look at Israel, at the political offensive against Israel, and at the country’s place in the growing violence that surrounds it in the Middle East. Together, the pieces offer a thoughtful take on Israel’s current trials, and a spirited defence of the country’s basic rights in the face of the bizarre, fashionable, and growing international hostility to the state on 0.01 per cent of the world’s surface whose activities and very existence seems to be an affront to so many.

Read the article in full at Fathom.