One of the most uneasy feelings you can experience is when someone claims to speak for a group you're a part of, and comes out with something excruciating. Someone you barely know might put an arm round you in a pub and yell "We South Londoners are the world's best at pulling chicks, aren't we Mark," and you're left muttering 'Well er oh blimey'.

As a member of the far left I would often be embarrassed by another member making a speech that included something like "Us revolutionary socialists want nothing less than to literally rip the heads off every living parasite of the bourgeousie and fling the rotting corpses to the dogs."

But nothing can compare to the experience of being a Jew who doesn't approve of the antics of Israel, or the ideology of Zionism. Because the great trick that Israel has accomplished over its sixty years has been to reach a point where it globally claims to stand for all Jews. To be against Israel is to be against Jews, so opponents of Israel's etiquette are derided as 'anti-semitic'. One snag resulting from this tactic is how to label the many Jews who vociferously oppose the antics of Israel, so the answer is they must be 'self-hating Jews'.

This is why it's such a liberation to read 'If I Am Not For Myself', the new book by Jewish socialist Mike Marqusee. It's a joyous meander through history, theory and personal memoir, that bounces from a section about the book of Amos in the Old Testament, (who turns out to be one cool multicultural prophet), to an account of his grandfather's journey from dedicated socialist to devout Zionist, then onto Mike's upbringing in New York, and his later experiences in London.

The memoir begins with a poignant account of Mike's introduction to the term 'self-hating Jew'. He was immensely proud of his father, not least because he'd travelled to Mississippi with the civil rights movement, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan were murdering white activists as well as blacks. But one day, at his Jewish Sunday school, there was a talk given by a lad who'd fought in the Israeli Army that had crushed the Egyptians in 1967. The language the soldier used to describe Arabs, referring to them as animals who used the street as their toilet and so on, reminded Mike of the drivel aimed at black people by racists. But when Mike mentioned the incident to his father, he got the reply "I think there's a bit of self-hatred in you there."

The account that follows performs the marvellous service of disentangling Jewishness from Israel. And that means countering an idea that many Jewish organisations repeat as an incontestable fact. For example, Mike quotes a new sabbath prayer added to the repertoire of the United Synagogue, that goes "Heavenly Father: Remember the Israel Defence Forces, send blessing and property upon all the work of their hands."

And yet this is an account that celebrates the Jewish traditions and mannerisms that formed his background, revelling in words like shtetl and yiddishkeit, while remaining forever inclusive. The accounts of the customs, the food, the language, and the arguments made me wish I'd been Jewish; maybe because in contrast to my own stifling semi-suburban upbringing everything in this New York Jewish environment seemed to matter.

But nothing mattered more than the fault-line of Zionism, the belief that Jewish safety was bound up with the security of a militaristic Israel, kept in place by the requirements of a militaristic America. Mike recalls how he learned about the holocaust, saying "The teacher explained in a quiet voice that the lesson of all this horror was that 'never again' should such a thing be allowed to happen. I assented with my whole being, it seemed the most undoubtedly truthful big truth I had ever heard.... Back then I thought it meant 'never again' to anyone, anywhere, not just never again to the Jews."

This is an account that aims higher than just to counter the defenders of Israel, it also seeks to explain how so many people, including many spirited opponents of injustice, somehow ended up accepting and justifying the horrors that Israel routinely carries out in the name of the world's Jews. It does however include the story of a friend's Jewish nephew who, when accused of being a self-hating Jew by a Zionist student, replied "I don't hate myself. I hate you, you fucking bastard."

A fleeting glance at recent events will illustrate that the state of Israel, and the Zionist cause that created it, have proved something of a nuisance to many Arabs. But this book displays a further consequence of the Jewish state; that by creating a notion that someone can only be properly Jewish if they align themselves to a nation that acts with such contempt for humanity, and that depends for its existence on the American establishment responsible for atrocities from Vietnam to Fallujah, Israel is also an insult to Jews.

'If I Am Not For Myself' by Mike Marqusee is published by Verso.