Hephzibah has her doubts about the whole enterprise:

You could divide the world into those who wanted to kill Jews and those who wanted to be Jews. The bad times were simply those in which the former outnumbered the latter.

The harder Treslove tries, the further away the finishing line appears, until disillusionment starts to set in. 

Meanwhile, the opposite (again) is happening to Finkler: he is becoming disillusioned with disillusionment. It starts with a gradual feeling of disgust at his fellow members of ASHamed, who  continue to blame Israel for everything that's going wrong in the Middle East while overlooking or even applauding its enemies' every deed. Signs of anti-Semitism abound: Hephzibah finds strips of bacon on her museum's door handles and anti-Jewish slogans on the walls. This, by the way, is not the novelist exaggerating for effect: many Jews have been stunned by, for example, openly anti-Semitic remarks at smart London dinner parties which would have been impossible to imagine ten, or even five, years ago. Lebanon and Gaza have changed all that. It's hard not to believe that Finkler's journey mirrors Jacobson's own, judging by the novelist's frank and outspoken defences of Israel in recent years.  

His three principal male characters embody three different attitudes towards, well, the Finkler question.  Tired, melancholy and ultimately despairing, Sevcik represents the defeatist pre-war Jews who thought nothing could be done in the face of extinction. Treslove is the non-Jew who sympathises but in the end does nothing. Finkler turns out to be the central figure, the Jew who learns the hard way that no one will save the Jews but themselves.

This is a deeply political novel, spiced with Jacobson's matchless wit and style, and a serious and thought-provoking contribution to one of the gravest issues of our time. The fact that it was for some time on the best-seller list of that nest of anti-Israel bigotry, the Guardian website, is a welcome if unexpected development.