In May 2022 Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), spoke at the organization’s leadership summit, telling attendees, “To those who still cling to the idea that anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism — let me clarify this for you as clearly as I can — anti-Zionism is anti-semitism.” Greenblatt directed his remarks at three organizations. One of them was CAIR, the Council for Islamic American Relations, which fights discrimination against Muslims.
Another was Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), with half a million mainly Jewish members and 70 chapters throughout the country. JVP rejects Zionism as strongly as it condemns Christian Nationalism, Zionism’s equally evil twin. But JVP is not an anomaly. For decades if not longer there has been strong anti-Zionist sentiment within the Jewish world.
Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet “Der Judenstaat” outraged Orthodox Jews. Zionists arriving in Palestine were informed upon by Palestinian Jews to the Ottoman authorities. Before it eventually embraced Zionism, Reform Judaism rejected Zionism at its 1885 convention in Pittsburgh:
“We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
Jewish communities in Lithuania, Britain, Germany, the United States, and Russia objected to Zionism for a number of reasons: Jews were already at home in their own countries; creating a temporal state contradicts the messianic promise of Judaism; it would jeopardize relations between Jews and Muslims in Palestine (!!); it would destroy acceptance of Jews in countries in which they live; Judaism is a religion, not a political theory; Zionism would exacerbate suspicions of dual loyalty and foster anti-semitism (!!); and a Jewish state is inherently undemocratic (!!).
In 1919 Jewish Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to Woodrow Wilson signed by 300 prominent American Jews including Henry Morgenthau, Sr.:
“We protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World’s Peace Conference to establish. Whether the Jews be regarded as a ‘race’ or as a ‘religion’, it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.”
In 1944 Hannah Arendt published Zionism Reconsidered, in which she points out the obvious:
“Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours […] If the Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future […] it will be due to the political assistance of American Jews […] if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country, who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East.”
And in fact, Zionists have depended on colonial powers for Israel’s existence as well as its continued existence. The dependency has persisted for over 75 years.
According to Zionists like the ADL’s Greenblatt, anti-Zionism is “anti-semitic” because it rejects the “peoplehood” of Jews. “Peoplehood” in the political sense is a Zionist innovation, not a necessity of Judaism. Even between the destruction of the Second Temple in the 2nd Century and the establishment of Israel in 1948, Jews managed to remain a “people” in cultural, religious, and linguistic terms. With the founding of Israel, however, Zionists expected Jews everywhere to embrace, if not immigrate to, the temporal state of Israel without questioning its policies, legal structure, or its human rights practices. This expectation was doomed from the start because of the long Jewish antipathy to Zionism.
American Jews, particularly younger generations, recognize the many obvious defects of American democracy but revere the ideal of a secular republic which privileges no one and offers justice to everyone. Some of America’s most democratic jurists have defended this kind of America, from Louis Brandeis to Ruth Bader Ginzburg. But Zionism, in order to express itself in a Jewish state, must privilege Jews and Jewish rights at the expense of “others” it must subjugate. When anti-Zionists hear the words “Jewish and democratic” in relation to Israel they hear the same contradictions in terms that anti-Zionists a century earlier noticed.
Peter Beinart may be one of the best-known ex-Zionists in the United States. In 2019 Beinart penned an article for the Guardian, concerned with the rise of anti-semitism but also cautioning to distinguish between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.
Beinart systematically debunked the Zionist argument that anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism by pointing out that (1) statehood for any group is neither guaranteed nor always desirable; that (2) there is nothing inherently discriminatory in dismantling a state itself built on discrimination (the example he gives is South Africa); and that (3) the conflation of the two terms is contradicted by the existence of anti-semites who are full-throated supporters of Zionism (examples provided are Christian Zionists and Christian Nationalists).
In a 2020 podcast Beinart advocated a One-State solution in Palestine. Rejecting the hollow phrase “the Two-State solution,” now impossible because not enough contiguous land remains for a Palestinian state, Beinart explained his reasons for writing another essay, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.”
“If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fulfills his pledge to impose Israeli sovereignty in parts of the West Bank, he will just formalize a decades-old reality: In practice, Israel annexed the West Bank long ago. Israel has all but made its decision: one country that includes millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights. Now liberal Zionists must make our decision, too. It’s time to abandon the traditional two-state solution and embrace the goal of equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. It’s time to imagine a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”
In an article in Jewish Currents Beinart explained that, just as Judaism thrived when it transitioned from temple-based practice to rabbinic study, it will likewise be the better for abandonment of Zionism:
“For roughly a thousand years, Jewish worship meant bringing sacrifices to the Temple in Jerusalem. Then, in 70 CE, with the Temple about to fall, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai imagined an alternative. He famously asked the Roman Emperor to “Give me Yavne and its Sages.” From the academies of Yavne came a new form of worship, based on prayer and study. Animal sacrifice, it turned out, was not essential to being a Jew. Neither is supporting a Jewish state. Our task in this moment is to imagine a new Jewish identity, one that no longer equates Palestinian equality with Jewish genocide. One that sees Palestinian liberation as integral to our own. That’s what Yavne means today.”
Beinart went on to explain why the Two-State solution is dead and what might replace it. He warned that “Averting a future in which oppression degenerates into ethnic cleansing requires a vision that can inspire not just Palestinians, but the world. Equality offers it.”
With the carpet bombing of “human animals” in Gaza we just saw how prescient Beinart’s words were.
Nobody in Palestine is going anywhere. Millions of Jews, millions of Palestinians will remain attached to the land. The only thing prolonging the conflict is the massive financial and military aid to Israel by the United States, used mainly for the repression and carpet-bombing required to maintain Jewish supremacy.
But would the fabled “massed Arab armies” actually attack a democratic Jewish-Arab state that offered the same rights to everyone? Would a unified state be any more dangerous to live in than two states, each building walls and stockpiling weapons against each other?
This is why many anti-Zionists share Beinart’s vision of a single state in Palestine. But to get there Israel’s Apartheid state must be dismantled and in its place something equitable for both people must be built.
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