loading . . . The forgotten history of Jewish anti-Zionism _Jewish anti-Zionists, representing Judies por una Palestina Libre, protesting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Mexico City, November 29, 2024. One protestor carries a sign that reads, “Not in our name,” another sign reads, “Expel Israel from the UN.” Photo Credit: Zachary Foster._
Zionism was unpopular among most Jews for the first six decades of its Jewish existence, from the 1870s-1930s. It went mainstream in the 1940s with the annihilation of Europe’s Jews and the conversion of American and Arab Jews from non-Zionist to Zionist. For the next six decades, Zionism flourished, transforming the religious affiliation of Jewish institutions around the world from Judaism to Israelism. Over the past two decades, though, and especially the past two years, world Jewry has bifurcated: while Zionism has entrenched itself among Jews in Israel, it has retreated among Jews in the US, where 70% of Jews outside of Israel reside, and where support for Zionism is collapsing at its fastest rate in history. This is the story of the rise, fall and rise again of Jewish anti-Zionism.
## Jewish Anti-Zionism before 1948
#### The US & Western Europe
Most American Jews, who numbered some 4-5 million in the 1930s, opposed Zionism from its origins until World War II. The Reform movement made clear its institutional rejection of Zionism in its 1885 Pittsburgh Platform and in an 1898 declaration, since “the mission of Judaism is spiritual, not political.” After World War I, 299 prominent US Jews wrote an open letter protesting “the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State.” It was, in their words, “utterly opposed to the principles of democracy.” They believed a Jewish state in a land of 90% non-Jews was anti-democratic. Go figure. To quote the Jewish American historian Morris Jastrow Jr. in 1919, “the presence of so many nationalities in Palestine” is why there should be “a Palestinian State — not a Jewish State any more than a Mohammedan or a Christian State…”. The problem of Zionism was obvious to most US American Jews.
Even by the mid-1930s, Zionism attracted only a minority of US Jewry. The major American Zionist Organizations counted some 1.5% of American Jews as members, or 65,000 out of 4,400,000. Most Jews stayed away from Zionism because they believed advocating for a Jewish State in Palestine would cast doubt on their allegiance to the US and thus confirm antisemitic accusations of dual loyalties. Even Jewish intellectuals who supported Jewish cultural revitalization, such Samuel Untermyer and Felix M. Warburg, held this view. Many others, though, gravitated towards communism, deriding Zionists as nationalists and imperialists (1, 2). As one scholar put it, the Zionists were “a small and often-mocked minority within the Jewish socialist Left.”
In Western Europe, the predominant attitude among Jewish leaders and intellectuals before the Great War was also avowed anti-Zionism. Most Jews in Western Europe, just like the US, sought to integrate into their societies and saw the Zionist movement as a threat to that. After all, Europe’s Zionist fringe built alliances with the enemies of the Jews, the antisemites, agreeing with them that Jews did not belong in Europe (1, 2). This is why the only British Cabinet member to oppose the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which called for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, was a Jew, Edwin Samuel Montagu, who thought Zionism would lead the British public to question the loyalty of British Jews. Jewish socialists in Britain also attacked Zionism in the 1930s as “a tool of British imperialism…dispossessing the Arab peasants and conducting a colonization by conquest with the aide of the British bayonets.”
The more than 500,000 German Jews were also overwhelmingly non- or anti-Zionist until 1937. As a Zionist officer of the Jewish Agency in Germany put it in 1932, "we in Germany have to reckon not only with the indifference of extensive Jewish circles but also with their hostility.” Zionism was unpopular among German Jews because the Zionists shared with the fascists and Nazis a belief in unscientific racial theories, mystical generalizations about "national character” (_Volkstum_) and were inclined towards "racial exclusiveness.” This antagonism was exacerbated by support received by the Zionist movement in Germany from the Nazis.
By the 1930s, though, Zionism had made certain inroads. One scholar has described a shift in the gestalt among Jews in the US, Germany, France and the UK from avowedly anti-Zionism before World War I to a more “mellow” non-Zionism by the 1930s. By the end of World War II, these communities fell victim to the Nazi genocide and constituted a mere shadow of their former selves by 1948.
#### Eastern Europe
In Eastern Europe, the most popular Jewish political party was the anti-Zionist Bund, founded in 1897. It was established in the Russian Empire, but split into Russian and Polish organizations in 1917, and had chapters in Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and elsewhere. “For every young Jew who joined the… Zionist movement,” wrote one historian, “many more entered the ranks of the Bund.” The Bund regarded Zionism as a diversion from class struggle and “the most evil enemy of the organised Jewish proletariat.” The Bundists had bitter memories of Herzl’s attempt to partner with the Russian Empire’s most notorious antisemites, such as Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, and the Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte. The latter even told Herzl that he advised Tsar Alexander III he would have had no objection to “drowning our six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea.” The Bundists were very popular and they despised the Zionists.
In 1925, the Zionist organization in Poland counted some 110,000 paying members out of Poland’s 2.8 million Jews, or some 4%. But that number fell by a whopping 90% a year later in 1926 to 10,670 as thousands of Polish Jews returning from a failed stint at life in Palestine aired their disillusionment to much fanfare in Poland. The right-wing Zionists also backed “virulently antisemitic” Polish nationalists, whose members would “sing the Polish national anthem while they beat up Jewish socialists.” No surprise that support for Zionism, which peaked at 25-30% among Polish Jews before World War II, paled in comparison to support for the Bund, which received some 55% of the votes cast for all Jewish parties in municipal elections across dozens of Polish cities and towns in 1938.
Needless to say, Eastern European Jews faced the worst fate of all and were annihilated by the Nazis during World War II.
#### Europe’s Orthodox Jews
Our discussion of American and European Jewry above is only part of the story, though, since many Jews identified as Orthodox, and Orthodox Jews were largely hostile to Zionism. While some embraced the Zionist movement during the interwar period, most major _halakhic_ (Jewish law) authorities wanted to have nothing to do with it. The first objection was theological: rabbinic authorities believed divine redemption meant _divine_ redemption, not human redemption. The second objection was more visceral: the Zionists were secularists, led secular lifestyles and advocated for secular, “gentile” ideologies, as one scholar put it. After all, the Zionists told their followers not to wrap tefillin or study Torah, but move to Palestine. The third objection was existential, as they saw the Zionists trying to change the essence of Judaism itself, of the definition of a Jew, that would render the traditional religious authorities irrelevant. [Eventually, a compromise was struck: the Zionists defined a “Jew” for immigration and naturalization purposes, the rabbis defined a “Jew” for marriage and divorce purposes in the State of Israel].
But long before that, Europe’s prominent rabbis mostly detested Zionism. The spiritual leader of 19th century Germany's Orthodox Jews, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, said promoting Jewish emigration to Palestine was a sin, since any action taken by humans to bring about the Messiah was deemed heretical according to Jewish law. The Rebbe of the Chabad Hasidic community in Beregszász, then part of Czechoslovakia, Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich, was also a vocal opponent of Zionism because it was a secular ideology that contradicted the core tenets of the Jewish faith, in addition to its deviation from the _halakhic_ understanding of exile and redemption.
Some of the harshest Jewish critics of Zionism included the hasidic leaders of Transylvania (Romania) and Transcarpathia (Ukraine). The most hostile was the Hasidic Rabbi of Munkacz (Hungary), Hayyim Elazar Shapira. At the heart of the Zionist enterprise, in Shapira's view, was “a renunciation of faith in the absolute divine governance of the world, and particularly in God's thorough control of Jewish destiny. Zionism represented to him the Jews' abandonment of the messianic promise, and the abdication of their status as God's chosen people.”
The organized Orthodox Jewish establishment was led by Agudath Yisrael, representing half a million Jews in Eastern Europe at its peak before World War II, and they were anti-Zionist until 1948 if not beyond that. In the 1920s and 1930s, they elected representatives to parliaments in Poland, Latvia, and Romania, to city councils, education boards, and to youth and workers’ movements with the goal of fighting against Zionism and Reform Judaism.
Their opposition started with a theological objection to the ingathering of the Jews in Palestine. As noted, most religious authorities agreed that this would be part of the end-of-times scenario that could only be initiated by divine intervention. But they also regarded Zionism as a competitive threat, since Zionist institutions often sought to replace traditional _halakhic_ ones as the organizing principle of Jewish life, which would put Agudath Israel out of business. “Zionism constitutes a danger, spiritual and physical, to the existence of our people,” claimed the delegates of the Agudath Israel’s youth movement in 1948.
#### The Middle East
The Middle Eastern Jews, or _Mizrahim_ , concentrated in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Egypt, Turkey and Syria, numbered some 900,000 in the 1930s and 1940s, and were mostly uninterested in or hostile to Zionism from its origins until the 1940s. These Jews lived in Muslim or Arab majority societies and believed the transformation of another Muslim and Arab majority society into a Jewish state could lead to blowback. Tragically, they were correct about that.
In Ottoman Palestine, the Jewish community was split. Many elites supported the Zionist movement, such as Nissim Malul, Shimon Moyal, Gad Frumkin, Avraham Elmalih and Bechor Shalom Shitrit (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Both Moyal and Malul dedicated themselves to rebutting anti-Zionist articles in the Arabic press, and Malul even worked for the Zionist Office in Jaffa in that capacity.
But most Ashkenazi Jews in Palestine, half of the Jewish population there on the eve of Zionist immigration, were hostile to it. These were mostly pious Jews who had moved to Palestine in the preceding decades and centuries for spiritual, not political reasons, believing the land was holy, but considering a Jewish polity in the country a total heresy. This included Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, who established a branch of the aforementioned Agudath Yisrael in 1913 to oppose Zionism because the Zionists had "asserted their view that the whole difference and distinction between Israel and the nations lies in nationalism, blood and race, and that the faith and the religion are superfluous.”
The pre-Zionist Jewish community of Palestine also realized they had new competition for philanthropic donations. Both communities — the old _yishuv_ and the new _yishuv_ , as Zionists call them — relied on charitable contributions from Jewish communities abroad to survive. The newcomers thus represented a direct threat to the oldcomers’ means of livelihood.
After World War I, the British established a Mandate for Palestine, promising to turn the country into a home for the Jews. Thus the Zionists came to dominate the native Jews of Palestine, but not without resistance from two factions. First, a small contingent of Jews advocated for various bi-national or Jewish-Arab Unions, including Arthur Ruppin, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Pinhas Rutenberg and Mordechai Avi Shaul. However, these movements attracted few followers, and lost steam in the 1930s and 1940s after the violence of 1929 and 1936-9. Second, **the religious Ashkenazi Jews sought to convince the British to recognize the pacifist and anti-Zionist rabbinical authorities in Palestine. But their political power was substantially weakened when Zionist operatives****murdered****their spokesperson, Jacob Israel de Haan.** “There was no one to replace him,” as one scholar put it, and the Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews of Palestine were sidelined.
Returning to the late Ottoman world, though, Ottoman Jews were not happy about Theodor Herzl’s plan for a Jewish State. In 1909, the Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, Haim Nahum spoke out against Zionism because he believed Zionist settlement in Palestine would enrage the Turkish and Arab populations. David Fresko, the editor of El Tiempo, a Ladino newspaper in Istanbul, frequently attacked Zionists as a separatist movement that undermined Ottomanist principles which were based on shared values like constitutionalism, a free press and a civic identity that eschewed Zionism’s ethno-religious chauvinism. Many Ottoman Jews supported Jewish cultural revitalization, but almost all rejected the goal of the Zionist movement, namely, a Jewish State in the heart of the Ottoman State.
This trend continued into the post-World War I era. Zionism appealed to a small percentage of Egyptian Jews in the 1920s and 1930s (1, 2). The Chief Rabbi of Egypt Chaim Nahum also spoke out publicly against Zionist immigration to Palestine in the 1930s. In 1946, Jewish members of the underground communist movement, known as _Iskra_ and led by Ezra Harari, founded the Jewish Anti-Zionist League in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt.
In fact, Zionism was still a minority view among Egyptian Jews into the 1950s, as the Jewish Egyptian middle classes, especially the Marxists and other leftists among them, saw themselves as part of Egypt, as Egyptian, disavowing Zionism.
The situation was similar across North Africa. In Morocco, Zionism was marginal throughout the inter-war period. Many, if not most, Jews were associated with the French-Jewish philanthropic association known as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, whose educational curriculum was assimilationist, not Zionist. As the Jewish Moroccan leader Yomtov D. Semach put it in the 1920s, “Zionism is like a voice in the desert without an echo.” The Zionist movement did not gain traction until the 1940s, especially after anti-Jewish violence in 1948, driving some 90,000 Moroccan Jews to Israel from 1948-1956.
In Tunisia, Zionism was also unpopular. Several Zionist envoys arrived in 1931 to strengthen ties with the Jewish community and encourage them to immigrate. But the handful of young Tunisian Jews who accepted the offer and moved to Palestine returned to Tunisia frustrated and disillusioned with the Zionist project. They even said Zionism was “promoting colonization” and “depriving the Bedouin and Arab population of their land and livelihood.”
In Algeria, the French colonizers granted Algerian Jews French citizenship. Thus, they enjoyed most of the rights of French and European settlers in Algeria and thus could resettle in France if they so desired, regarded as a much more desirable destination than Palestine. In the 1920s, the Zionists counted some 300 dues-paying members out of a population of more than 100,000 and were often attacked by members of the Jewish community. And despite the Nazi propaganda that permeated Algeria prior to its liberation in 1942, the Zionist movement floundered there throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Of the 130,000 or so Algerian Jews who left Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, more than 90% left for France while less than 10% migrated to Israel.
Iraq was among the largest Jewish communities in the region, among the best integrated, and also one of the most hostile to Zionism. As late as 1942, a Zionist operative in Iraq commented, “there was no Zionist political consciousness, even among young people who had organized for Jewish defence… they have no Zionist thinking, or even a Zionist instinct.” In 1948, less than 10% of the 400 Jewish teachers in Baghdad were members or supporters of the Zionist movement.
The Iraqi Jewish community even organized against Zionism. In 1945, Jewish Iraqi communists founded an anti-Zionist League to confront the hatred directed towards Iraqi Jews as a result of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. They called for the establishment of an independent, democratic Arab government to be elected in Palestine and a prohibition of Zionist immigration to and land sales in Palestine.
**For Eastern Jews, Zionism promised not liberation but annihilation.** The movement’s tremendous success, especially its mass expulsion of the Palestinian people in 1948, triggered anti-Jewish pogroms in Egypt, Iraq, Yemen and Libya and accelerated the adoption of anti-Jewish laws. The Zionist movement sought to compel the world that Jews belonged in Israel, and lo and behold, they succeeded. By the mid-late 1950s, some 350,000 Eastern Jews now called Israel home. Many tens if not hundreds of thousands more trickled in over the subsequent decades. They would become Israel’s most chauvinistic Zionists.
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## Jewish anti-Zionism: From the mainstream to fringe, 1950s-2000s
The annihilation of Europe’s Jews led American Jews to flip on the idea of a Jewish State in Palestine, while the mass migration of Jews from Arab and Muslim majority countries into Israel after 1948 led them to flip as well. In the span of a decade, world Jewry shed their non- and anti-Zionist roots and embraced Zionism.
Although Zionism blossomed in the decades after Israel’s establishment, a minority of Jews learned not a chauvinist, but a universalist lesson from the Holocaust. They said “never again” meant never again for _anyone_. They believed that the genocide of the Jews of Europe was not ahistorical or inimical, but rather than genocides happen all the time, and stem from ideologies that demonize or dehumanize a people, mark them as an inherent danger to the nation and a threat to its ethnic, religious or racial purity.
This view existed in 1942 at the peak of the annihilation of European Jewry, when Reform Jews in the United States including Morris Lazaron founded the anti-Zionist organization, the American Council for Judaism. They called for the transformation of Palestine into neither Arab nor Jewish state, but a democratic state wherein Jews and Arabs would be equal citizens. They believed a free and democratic society would provide the best guarantee for the well-being of Jews wherever they lived. Incidentally, this is the most popular belief among Jews in every country in the world today — save for Israel.
Prominent British Jews also founded the Jewish Fellowship in Britain in 1942 to “revive the Jewish religious spirit among Jews and to place the Torah, the Synagogue and the ethics of Judaism at the heart of Jewish life,” spurning Zionism altogether. Many British Jews also continued to support the non-Zionist Anglo-Jewish Association into the 1950s.
No doubt, anti-Zionism persisted at the margins after 1948. In Israel, the Young Hebrew or “Canaanite” movement sprung up in the 1950s calling for “full political, civil, and social rights and obligations to all citizens of the state, regardless of religion, faith-community, or origin.” Matzpen, a socialist anti-Zionist party founded in 1962 in Israel attracting 100 followers, also advocated for “De-Zionization of Israel and its integration into a socialist Middle Eastern union.”
Although they were a rare breed, it was possible to find anti-Zionist Israeli Jews. In 1975, the Jewish Israeli anti-Zionist Vitold Yadlitzky, a former Nazi prisoner of Polish descent, said antisemites believed “‘the Jew understands only the language of money,’ or ‘the Jew understands only the language of force,’ or ‘the Jew is the fellow you cannot trust.’ All these things I hear again and again in this country [Israel], with the exception that this is not in Polish, but in Hebrew and instead of the word "Jew," the word "Arab" appears.”
Dr. Israel Shahak, also a Holocaust survivor, also believed that racism was wrong whether or not it benefited Jews. In 1975, he said:
> You can define Israeli society as a society in which there are no Israelis, but only Jews and non-Jews. You have separate tables for dying Jewish infants and dying non-Jewish infants and so on. This is Nazification of Jewish society and this can well bring the same calamity it brought in Europe, only a calamity to Arabs. If one can learn anything from the Nazi experience, it is that one should be against Nazism. And I am against Nazism, whether German, Jewish or Arab.
It’s often forgotten that multiple US Jewish institutions kept Israel at arm’s length until 1967. In 1949, the Reconstructionist movement objected to Israel’s blue and white flag with a Star of David because that would clearly discriminate against Palestinian Arab. “The Israeli flag is to represent the common national aspiration of all the citizens of Israel,” the movement stated. The American Jewish Committee, which represented many mainstream, elite and secular US Jews, was non-Zionist for assimilationist reasons until 1967.
A number of US Jewish intellectuals also spoke out against Zionism. Alfred M. Lilienthal attacked Israel shortly after its establishment, arguing that “a Palestine which guarded ‘the rights and interests of Moslems, Jews and Christians alike,” to quote the Committee [the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine], was never acceptable to Zionists.” He also warned against charges of dual loyalty that American Jews might receive as a result of Zionism. The writer Moshe Menuhin, the journalists William Zukerman, Henry Hurwitz, and Morris Schappes, the scholar Noam Chomsky, Rabbi Elmer Berger and the businessman Lessing Rosenwald also called for equal rights for all in Israel/Palestine, citing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as their main objection to Zionism. Many of Israel’s Jewish critics in the US in the 1960s and 1970s were inspired by the liberationist, civil rights and anti-war movements of the time, seeing the Palestinian struggle in a similar light.
By the mid-late 1970s, the seeds of a new generation of Jewish anti-Zionists were planted in Australia, the US and the UK. Small anti-Zionist groups emerged, such as the Australian Jews Against Zionism and Anti-Semitism (JAZA), formed by a small group of Jewish Marxists in 1979 who saw Zionism as an attempt to turn Jews into a race or a nation, similar to what Nazism tried to do to the Germans; or the British Anti-Zionist Organization (BAZO), formed by George Mitchell in 1975, or the Jewish Alliance Against Zionism (JAAZ), formed by anti-Zionist Jewish activists in the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
The State of Israel squashed some of these movements, silencing Zionism’s critics at home and abroad through smear campaigns, censorship and police brutality (1, 2). Zionists now had a state, a diplomatic core and an army, which they used to crush anti-Zionist Jews wherever they sprung up.
Meanwhile, **Jewish institutions outside of Israel abandoned Judaism in favor of Israelism, a philosophy that singles out Israel’s Jewish character as sacred above all other Jewish laws** , **principles and practices**. By the 1970s, American Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee redefined their missions from a struggle to fight antisemitism to defending the State of Israel. Israel became more sacred than God, the Torah, the Talmud or Jewish principles like monotheism, ‘saving a life’ or ‘fixing the world.’ Israel replaced Judaism as the essential, defining or unifying principle of the community.
Today, the Board of Deputies of British Jews would not dream of ejecting a member of their Board for professing atheism, for example, but they did just eject two members for signing an open letter criticizing Israel's conduct in Gaza. Imagine if they ejected a member for having professed their atheism? If that were to happen, they might have to eject their own President, Philip Rosenberg, who has confessed his atheism to me personally on countless occasions.
Of course, there were Jews who took the foundational texts of the religion more seriously than The Board of Deputies of British Jews. The majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel continued to veer more towards non-Zionism than Zionism long after 1948, while the overwhelming majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews more generally reject the authority of Israeli state institutions to this day, according to a 2020 poll.
The Satmar Hasidim, the K'hal Adath Jeshurun (Breuer Community), the Neturei Karta and others continued to oppose Zionism on religious grounds. The founder of the Satmar sect, Joel Teitelbaum, was adamant that the first oath of the Three Oaths in Jewish theology, that Jews were sworn not to "ascend as a wall" to reclaim Land of Israel, was an explicit refutation of Zionism. This oath calls for divine, not human, prerogative, to trigger the return to the Land of Israel. Rabbi Amram Blau, the Neturei Karta founder, was also a virulent anti-Zionist activist who refused to recognize Israel, pay taxes or even handle Israeli currency. This made and still makes Zionism a _grave sin_ for at least 120,000 religious Jews today.
## The Revival of Jewish Anti-Zionism
#### Secular Jewish Anti-Zionism Re-born
While Jewish institutions in the UK, the US and elsewhere embraced Israelism, Jewish individuals began to drift away from it. If the Nazi annihilation of the Jews strengthened support for Zionism, Israel’s deteriorating treatment of the Palestinians weakened it.
And, to make a long story short, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has been deteriorating for decades, especially since the 1980s. Uri Davis, for example, identified Israel's policies towards Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, as comparable to South Africa's apartheid policies in the 1980s; Gayle Markow was triggered by Israel’s 1978 invasion of Lebanon to start the anti-Zionist group, JAAZ; Ilan Pappe attributes the invasion of Lebanon to his awakening; Norman Finklestein references the First Intifada in his development. As the anti-Zionist scholar Daniel Boyarin put it, **“when I heard Yitzhaq Rabin say that the breaking of the arms and legs of children throwing stones was necessary to preserve the state, I repented of my erstwhile Zionism completely.”**
In other words, Israel’s belligerent military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, its invasion of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, the massacres it facilitated in Sabra and Shatila, and its violent crackdown during the First Intifada (1987-1993) gave rise to a new generation of Jews hostile to Zionism.
The 1980s and 1990s also saw the rise of “post-Zionism.” People like Tom Segev, Gershon Shafir, Baruch Kimmerling and Hillel Cohen made foundational criticisms of Zionism even though they embraced the label Zionist. [Incidentally, at least one of them, Segev, recently said Zionism was probably “a mistake.”]
Then came the Oslo Process. To many Jews, it appeared to promise a resolution to the Israel-Palestine question. These hopes dimmed in the late 1990s as the right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu rose to power. These hopes were shattered in 2000 with the failure of Camp David and the outbreak of the Second Intifada, during which time 1,038 Israelis were killed and 3,189 Palestinians were killed from 2000-2005.
#### The Great Divergence
Reality continued to drive perception, at least among US Jews. Israel’s image floundered as the occupation continued to rear its ugly head. Israel tightened the noose around Gaza in 2005, 2006, and 2007, imposing a cruel and murderous blockade on 1.8 million Palestinians. After the 2008-9 War in which Israel’s primary goal was to "punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population" in Gaza, as the UN fact-finding mission known as the Goldstone Report concluded, the plan for the Palestinians of Gaza became increasingly clear: lock them up, put them on a diet, throw away the key and punish them every few years in campaigns of terror and mass murder, or “mowing the lawn,” as Israeli officials say, likening Palestinians to overgrown weeds.
But most US Jews identify as liberal or progressive, values inconsistent with medieval blockades, collective punishment, the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of innocent people with the goal of terrorizing millions more, the genocidal rhetoric coming from Israeli political and religious leaders or the growing consensus by the early 2020s that Israel was an apartheid state. The result was that US Jews began to abandon Zionism in larger numbers. The Jewish establishment asked Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, as Peter Beinart said in 2010, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”
While US Jews turned away from Zionism, Israeli Jews doubled down on it. By the mid-late 2000s and 2010s, Israeli Jewish society became more and more chauvinist: 68% of Israeli Jews refused to live in the same building as an Arab; 46% of Jews would refuse to allow an Arab to visit their home; 50% of Israeli teens don’t want Arabs in their class; 63% of Israeli Jews said Arabs are security and demographic threat to the state; 50% of Israeli Jews believed Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate.
Chauvinistic Zionism flourished among Jews nearly everywhere from the River to the Sea. Israeli Jews continued to colonize the West Bank, moving on to destinations inside Israel as well, seeking to replace Arabs with Jews in the Negev, the Galilee, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Acre and Lydd. They continued to march through the streets of Jerusalem every year on apartheid day — aka Jerusalem Day — chanting death to the Arabs. The Zionist right dominated Israeli politics while the Zionist left disintegrated. Most Israeli leaders from the 2010s onwards advocated for a Greater Israel, or Jewish domination from the River to the Sea.
Anti-Zionist Israeli Jews became a rare breed. Many left Israel, like Atalia Omer, Ilan Pappe and others. The founder of _Zochrot_ , which calls for the recognition of the Nakba and the Palestinian refugees' right of return by Israeli Jewish society, found refuge in Europe. Those who stayed and spoke out faced dire consequences and were shunned by the state, military, media and professional classes. Those who took action, like Jonathan Pollak, Jeff Halper, Ofer Cassif or Andrey X, faced suspension, intimidation, physical violence or imprisonment. Nevermind calling into question the core tenets of Zionism, since October 7, 2023, those who so much as shared innocuous social media posts in solidarity with Gaza’s limbless children have been dismissed from their jobs, detained and imprisoned.
## The Rise of Anti-Zionism in the United States
Israel may have silenced most of its critics at home, but it failed to squash its critics abroad, particularly in the United States, where Zionism has been in decline over the past two decades.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) represents the largest block of anti-Zionist Jews today. They did not take a stand on Zionism when founded in 1996, but officially declared their rejection of Zionism in 2015. By that time, JVP activists had ignited a public debate over Israel, that, as measured by its intensity and visibility, “is a conflict unlike any other the American Jewish community has ever had,” as one prominent historian put it in 2016.
JVP has been the fastest growing Jewish organization for over a decade, claiming some 500 dues-paying members in 2011, 9,000 in 2015 and more than 32,000 by August 2024. **From October 2023 to February 2024, JVP****increased****its email subscriber count from 43,000 to 343,000** and seems to be the largest anti-Zionist political organization in the US, as measured by the number of full-time staff. American Jewish anti-Zionism is experiencing hockey-stick like growth. Jewish anti-Zionism is going mainstream.
The polling data tells a similar story. In 2021, a poll found that 25% of US Jews believe Israel is an apartheid state, a figure that rose to 38% among Jews under 40. This was the first in a series of polls that came out in the 2020s highlighting Zionism’s fragility among US Jews, especially among millennials and Gen Z.
Then, in 2022, the political scientist Mira Sucharov conducted a survey of American Jewish views on Zionism, indicating that 58% of American Jews identify as Zionist, while 22% identified as either anti-Zionist (10%) or non-Zionist (12%), and another 12% said “it’s complicated,” with 7% answering “unsure.” Said differently, well before October 7, 2023, 42% of American Jews chose _not_ to identify as “Zionist.”
But Sucharov revealed a deeper discomfort with Zionism. She presented respondents with a definition of Zionism, and then asked if they supported it. Expectedly, when presented with innocuous or aspirational definitions of Zionism, support for Zionism rose. But when presented with the lived experience of Zionism for its victims, Jews were repulsed by the ideology. When respondents were told that Zionism “means the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” Sucharov reported “respondents’ support for "Zionism" plummeted: only 10 percent of respondents said they were “definitely” (3 percent) or “probably” (7 percent) Zionist. A full 69 percent said they were “probably not” or “definitely not” a Zionist according to this definition.”
Alarmed by the polling data, the Israel Lobby is now trying to manufacture and obfuscate polling data to mask Zionism’s collapse. The Jewish Majority, founded in 2024 by the longtime AIPAC staffer Jonathan Schulman, just released a poll, selling the media not the results of the poll but a distortion of it. In their summary of the data, the Jewish Majority points out that “70% of American Jews believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic by definition,” yet fail to mention another data point of the survey, that “50% of respondents said anti-Zionist movements are not antisemitic by definition.” They intentionally obscured their own results to inflate support for Zionism.
The numbers don’t tell the full story, though. Jewish non- or anti-Zionism conferences have popped up at Brown University and in Vienna, Austria. Non- or anti-Zionist _minyans_ have sprung up in New York and New Jersey (1, 2). At least two new anti-Zionist Jews groups formed in Mexico City as a result of the genocide, AMJI and JPL. In the US, Making Mensches facilitates radical Jewish educational experiences and connects and supports anti-Zionist Jewish communal development. Jewish actors and playwrights are now putting on anti-Zionist plays. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism hosted its first workshop in October 2023. anti-Zionist Jews in the US have also launched Undoing Zionism, an 8-session series focused on Jewish politics beyond Zionism that centers the safety, liberation, and wellness for Palestinians and Jews alike.
We are also witnessing a Cambrian explosion of Jewish anti-Zionist content creation. More and more Jewish anti-Zionists are speaking out about their anti-Zionism on podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, Substack and elsewhere, including Katie Halper, Max Blumenthal, Katherine Wela Bogen, Raven Schwam-Curtis, Hadar Cohen, Alon Mizrahi, Jasper Diamond Nathaniel, Daniel Maté, Aaron Maté, Mira Sern, Simone Zimmerman, Jacob Berger, Jessie Sander, Elana Lipkin, Nora Barrows-Friedman, David Sheen, Rabbi Andrue Kahn, Rafael Shimunov, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Michael Schirtzer, Miko Peled, Matt Lieb, Jen Perelman, Lily Greenberg Call, Peter Beinart, Alice Rothchild, Marjorie N. Feld, Alissa Wise, Benjamin Moser, Rebecca Alpert, Max Weiss, Maura Finklestein, Eli Valley, Tony Greenstein, Antony Loewenstein, Sim Kern, Michael Schirtzer, Yaakov Shapiro, Brant Rosen, Anna Baltzer, Norman Solomon, Liz Rose Shulman, Jamie Stern-Weiner, Medea Benjamin, Naomi Klein, Jesse James Rose, Brace Belden, Hilton Obenzinger, Ofer Neiman, Rotem Levin, Noam Shuster-Eliassi, Alon Nissan-Cohen, Avi Shlaim, Molly Crabapple, Shir Hever, Elik Harpaz, Yahav Erez, Becca Strober, as well the handles kvetcher, noneisntoff, jewpinolove, tumblemaiadryer, realitywithali, clios_world, judeshimer, imthebalaban and mikaelaswildlife, to name just a few. All of this content will inspire a new generation of Jews who believe all people should be treated equally, in every country, including Israel. It’s likely a matter of years, not decades, when a majority of US Jews will once again become hostile to Zionism.
And that’s because Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza has ripped the mask off the underlying logic of Zionism. As Patrick Wolfe famously put it in his classic essay on the topic, settler-colonial movements, “without exception,” lead to a logic of the “elimination of the native.” And in the case of Palestine, the logic of the elimination of the native does not need to be theorized by an academic, it has been available on live-stream every day for the past 583 days, and counting.
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