Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by US writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser is a useful contribution to uncover the history of opposition to Zionism within modern Judaism. It traces the history of anti-Zionism from the late 19th Century through the lives of several anti-Zionist Jews across the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Europe and the US.
Moser begins in the late 19th Century in the Russian Empire, where the deep oppression that the Jewish population faced led to a cultural Zionism that, among other things, sought to revive Hebrew. One of its leaders was Aaron Samuel Tamares. But around the same time, there was also a territorial, national, and racial Zionism being developed by figures like Theodor Herzl. Published in 1896, Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) gave a racial definition to Jewish people, as opposed to the then-dominant idea of Jews being a religious community. It also argued that European anti-semitism could never be eradicated and an independent Jewish state was therefore necessary.
In response to Herzl, the cultural Zionism of Tamares and many other rabbis quickly became an explicit anti-Zionism. They were among the first to criticise how Herzl’s Zionism reinforced the existing anti-semitism of the time by defining the Jewish population as a “race” and “foreign elements” in their own countries.
Tamares did not reject Jewish communities in Palestine despite being an anti-Zionist. But he ferociously opposed the establishment of a Jewish state. To him, such a project was inextricably linked to Western imperialism. He asked why the European powers “should make recompense for their wrongdoings by handing over foreign property, Ottomanland”?’
When the British began that process with the establishment of the British Mandate after World War One, the Zionist movement remained on the fringes within the Jewish population as it had when Herzl published Der Judenstaat. In 1917, for example, Zionist groups in England had no more than four thousand members between them.
Moser describes the early days of the British Mandate through Jacob Israel de Haan. When de Haan emigrated from the Netherlands to Palestine in 1919, he was among the most prominent Dutch Zionists. But after seeing the violence of the Zionist groups against the indigenous population of both the Palestinian Muslims and Orthodox Jews, he quickly became a leading figure of the Agudah, an anti-Zionist, Orthodox Jewish organisation.
De Haan’s articles were some of the first to document the growing Zionist domination of Palestine in the early 1920s. He explained “that no Arab is allowed to live in Tel Aviv. That no Arab is received in a Jewish hotel. That companies in their statutes decide that they can only employ Jews.”
De Haan quickly reached such prominence that Ha’aretz labelled him and other Agudah members “traitors” and “scum.” Such words helped fuel the violent attacks of Jewish settler groups against Agudah members to the point where, in 1924, a member of the Haganah, the main Zionist militia, assassinated him. The order was given by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, later to become the second president of Israel.
Moser then jumps to Egypt, focusing on Sadiq Saad, an Egyptian, anti-Zionist, Jewish leftist. One of Saad’s most important works was Palestine in the Claws of Colonialism, published in 1947 and detailing the apartheid-style system then already established. One of the book’s contributions was its coverage of the unique experience of the Palestinian peasantry. Unlike almost all other peasantries, when the Palestinians were expelled from their land, they were denied employment by the new owners of the land or in the cities. This came directly from the policies of the Palestine Foundation Fund, the World Zionist Organisation’s fundraising arm, which specifically stated in its loan contracts that the borrower “pledges to hire Jewish workers only.”
The book covers numerous other examples of prominent anti-Zionist Jewish individuals and groups. The chapters on the immediate post-World War Two period are particularly useful in understanding the rapid transformation of both Zionism and those opposed to it. The French New Left, for example, during the 1950s and 1960s suffered through a period of deep confusion that led many prominent figures to support a form of Zionism. Similarly, the chapter on Reform Judaism in the United States, which had opposed Zionism since the late 19th Century, shows how rapidly the political context changed from the late 1940s, as Moser writes:
“For Americans and other Westerners, the question of Israel’s legitimacy was, for the most part, no longer debated. The feeling that Israel was compensation for the Holocaust became so widespread that the anti-Zionists were mainly forgotten.”
In barely half a century after Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, support for a Jewish state in Palestine had grown from a fringe movement to a majority view within Western Judaism. And its key practical conclusion of turning Israel into an outpost of Western imperialism in the Middle East had won firm support among the Western ruling classes.
Moser’s book is one of several in recent years from prominent anti-Zionist and Israel-critical Jewish writers that challenge mainstream narratives on Israel. Avi Shlaim’s 2023 memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, tells the story of his family’s expulsion from Iraq in the early 1950s. For generations his family had lived in Baghdad, a city where one-third of the population was Jewish during World War One, and Zionism was almost non-existent.
Shlaim documents how, after 1948, Israeli terrorists bombed several Jewish-owned businesses and a synagogue to foment racial tensions and force the Iraqi Jewish community to emigrate to Israel. At the time, “there had been no other attack on the Jewish community (in Iraq) in recent centuries,” according to Shlaim. From Israel’s founding in 1948 to the first bomb in 1950, only 126 Iraqi Jews had registered to emigrate. But once the attacks began thousands began to register. It took only a few years to put an end to two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in Mesopotamia.
When Shlaim’s family arrived in Israel in 1951, they faced extreme anti-semitism, this time from Israelis who denied them their right to be both Jewish and Arab. As Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said “We do not want the Israelis to turn into Arabs.”
Two other recent examples that focus on Jewish left-wing organisations are Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story Of The Jewish Bund and Benjamin Balthaser’s Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the cultures of the American Jewish left.
Whilst reading Moser’s book, one cannot help but consider the changes in the Palestine movement over recent years. When Moser arrived at Brown University in the 1990s there was not “any real organized Palestinian presence.” Yet over recent years Ivy League universities have been some of the leading sites of pro-Palestinian resistance. Moser notes that one of the biggest barriers to the Palestine and anti-Zionist movement growing even bigger is the “lack of a tradition to fall back on.” His work, along with the others mentioned above, is an important contribution to re-building such a tradition.
