Critiques of Zionism by Jews

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Jan 17, 2024

Armed with unique first-hand knowledge of the history of Zionism, Palestine, Israeli politics, Gaza, Hamas, the Israeli lobby, and congressional cravenness, Max Blumenthal and Miko Peled will explore the ongoing post-October 7th war in Gaza: Hamas, genocide, war crimes, the probable end game, the successes or failures of the IDF, the fate of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a one-state solution, a two-state solution, or indeterminate upheaval, the role and co-belligerency of the United States in the Israeli government’s freely confessed eagerness to exterminate Palestinians, the responsibility of American citizens for Israel’s war crimes, and the likely spread of the war to the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran risking nuclear exchanges. Max and Miko will unveil the massive de facto censorship that has rendered Palestinian viewpoints virtually inaudible in the establishment media amidst the daily thunder of Israeli propaganda.

The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel, The Fifty-One-Day War, and The Management of Savagery.

A third-generation Israeli and an American citizen, Miko Peled is an author, writer, speaker, and human rights activist living in the United States. He is considered by many to be one of the clearest voices calling for justice in Palestine, support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and the creation of a single democracy with equal rights in all of historic Palestine. In his memoir, The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, Miko writes powerfully about how his human rights activism led him to reject Zionism.

Oct 19, 2023

The son of an Israeli general raised inculcated with the value of Zionism, Miko Peled's perspective shifted after the tragic loss of his niece to a terrorist attack. Driven by that tragedy to figure out what why a Palestinian suicide bomber would take his own life, along with the life of innocents, he began questioning Zionism. On today's episode, the author and activist engages important and provocative questions like does Israel have a right to exist, and should we refer to Hamas as a terrorist group? -- questions that someone with his life experiences is most qualified to answer. A truly fascinating episode.

In December, amid catastrophic bloodshed in Gaza, the House of Representatives resolved that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” The vote was 311 to 14, with 92 members voting present, reflecting a consensus among American political elites that opposition to Zionism is equivalent to the conspiratorial hatred of Jews.

When learning of this vote, many people familiar with Jewish history might have suppressed a sardonic laugh. Anti-Zionism, after all, was a creation of Jews, not their enemies.

Before World War II, Zionism was the most divisive and heatedly debated issue in the Jewish world. Anti-Zionism had left-wing variants and right-wing variants — religious variants and secular variants — as well as variants in every country where Jews resided. For anyone who knows this history, it is astonishing that, as the resolution would have it, opposition to Zionism has been equated with opposition to Judaism — and not only to Judaism, but to hatred of Jews themselves. But this conflation has nothing to do with history. Instead, it is political, and its purpose has been to discredit Israel’s opponents as racists.

Race has always been at the heart of the debate. Many anti-Zionists believed the Jews were, in their parlance, “a church.” This meant that, although they shared certain beliefs, traditions and affinities with coreligionists in other nations, they nonetheless belonged as fully to their own national communities as anyone else. For them, an American Jew was a Jewish American, just as an Episcopalian American or a Catholic American was an American first of all. They were unwilling to subscribe to any idea suggesting that the Jews were a race, separate and, as the antisemites would have it, unassimilable. These people did not consider themselves to be in exile, as the Zionists would have it. They considered themselves to be at home. They feared that the insistence on ethnicity or race could open them to the old accusations of double loyalty, undermining attempts to achieve equality.

Rather than awaiting a personal messiah — one who would bring about the bodily resurrection of the dead — they hoped instead for a messianic age of peace and brotherhood. This was not conditioned on the mystical hope of a return to Zion. Instead, Jews should work in the here and now of the real world. Along with this idea came the precept that the Jews are, in the words of one rabbi, “citizens and faithful sons of the lands of their birth or adoption. They are a religious community, not a nation.” Though considered radical at first, this precept would eventually be embraced by the majority of Western Jews.

This view would ultimately find its most enthusiastic adherence in the United States. “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple,” said Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski of Charleston, S.C., in 1841. A century later, during the Holocaust and World War II, Rabbi Samuel Schulman of Temple Emanu-El in New York stated that “the essence of Reform Judaism for me is the rejection of Jewish Nationalism, not necessarily the eating of ham.” Many Jews noted that talk of a “diaspora,” even of a “Jewish people,” resembled the calumnies of antisemites, which held that the Jews were an unassimilable foreign imperium in imperio. They noticed, as they could hardly have failed to notice, that many antisemites were fervently pro-Zionist: the better to get rid of the Jews. After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a Jewish homeland to the tiny minority of Jews then living in Palestine, Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet, observed: “The policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.”

On Thursday afternoon, hundreds of marchers gathered on New York’s East Side, waving signs reading “Dump AIPAC” and carrying posters with the names and faces of lawmakers who had accepted donations from the pro-Israel lobbying group.

The protest, which passed the Manhattan offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was organized by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, which says AIPAC is obstructing an Israel-Hamas ceasefire resolution in Congress.

“On top of buying our senators’ and congressmen’s silence, AIPAC has also been silencing the only brave politicians who have been standing up for Gaza and have been standing and calling for a ceasefire,” declared one of the speakers, a young woman wearing a “Not in My Name” sweatshirt.

Since the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas and the deadly war in Gaza that followed, JVP has led protests against the war at Grand Central Terminal, the Statue of Liberty, the U.S. Capitol and the Manhattan Bridge, earning the group headlines and follwers. But none of those protests captured the generational and ideological divisions within the Jewish community quite like Thursday’s rally. It was a clash between the premier representative of the mainstream pro-Israel consensus among Jews and an upstart group representing Jews who have lost, or never had, faith not just in Israel’s government but in the very idea of a Jewish nation-state.

It’s not exactly an even split: While JVP’s visibility and membership have grown since Oct. 7, surveys, philanthropy and anecdotal evidence suggest most American Jews remain supportive of Israel and the war on an enemy sworn to its destruction.

But according to a spate of new books that were in the works before the war, JVP and other anti-Zionist and non-Zionist groups reflect trends that have been building for several years among the Jewish majority that considers itself liberal: discontent among younger Jews who have no memories of Israel’s founding, no hope for a resolution to the conflict and no faith in an Israeli government that has only shifted further to the right in recent years. The Oct. 7 debacle and the grinding war in Gaza, following a year of protests over the course of the country’s’ democracy, have added oxygen to their criticism.

“Today, progressive American Jews increasingly find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights,” writes Noah Feldman, the Harvard University law professor and first amendment scholar, in his new book, “To Be a Jew Today.”

A guide to Judaism in the tradition of Herman Wouk’s “This Is My God” and Anita Diament’s “Living a Jewish Life,” Feldman’s book convincingly explains why anti-Zionists get under the skin of of the Zionist majority, for whom “three-quarters of a century after the state’s creation, Israel has become a defining component of Jewishness itself.” (The italics are his.)

That explains, he writes, why anti-Zionism feels like antisemitism to many Jews. “If you feel that Jewishness is or should be fundamentally linked to Israel, then when someone says Israel should not exist, the criticism impugns the core of your Jewish identity and belief. It rejects who you are as a Jew. It rejects the content of your Jewish commitment and identity you have based on it,” he writes.

These emotional components of Zionism are often overlooked in the never-ending debate about Israel’s founding and perceived sins, writes Derek Penslar, a professor of Jewish history at Harvard, in his book “Zionism: An Emotional State.”

Penslar’s book came out last year but got back in the news after he was appointed co-chair of a Harvard task force on antisemitism. Critics cherry-picked a passage from the book to suggest that he thinks Zionism draws on a hateful strain within Judaism.

In fact, the book is about all of the emotions that animate Zionism, which he defines as “the belief that Jews constitute a nation that has a right and need to pursue collective self-determination within historic Palestine.” Those emotions include pride, solidarity, religious piety, fear, self-preservation and, yes, occasional hatred for the “other” who made Jews miserable for centuries.

Like Feldman, Penslar describes why American Jews became so emotionally attached to Israel, even if they had no intention of moving there: “It was a place where Jews need never apologize for their identity, where Hebrew was literally shouted in the street, where a Jew would almost inevitably marry another Jew, and where assimilation in the Western sense was impossible. In these respects, the love of Israel was an aspiration of self-preservation.”

It follows, then, that “if in your view the only legitimate expression of Zionism is Jewish sovereignty and hegemony within the Land of Israel, then someone who opposes Israel as a Jewish state is ipso facto an antisemite.”

The new Jewish anti-Zionists deny this, with many saying they want an alternative state in Israel-Palestine that preserves the security and dignity of both Jews and Palestinians. (The word “safety” comes up a lot in their writing.)

Shaul Magid, a professor of modern Jewish studies at Dartmouth College who this year is a visiting professor at Harvard, has given up on the idea that Israel as a Jewish nation-state can be a true liberal democracy. “In my view the Zionist narrative, even in its more liberal forms, cultivates an exclusivity and proprietary ethos that too easily slides into ethnonational chauvinism,“ he writes in his book of essays, “The Necessity of Exile.”

He is not against a State of Israel, but writes, “I am not in favor of it functioning as an exclusively ‘Jewish’ state.” He imagines an “alternative scenario” in which Jews and Palestinians, including those currently living in Gaza and the West Bank, have equal rights in a bi-national homeland.

For many Zionists, this sounds a bit like the Woody Allen joke: “And the lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.” Magid acknowledges his vision is utopian and leaves the details to others, but says his project is the opposite of antisemitism: He wants to recover the idea that Diaspora, or exile, has been good for the Jews and may in fact be their truest, most humanistic expression, while assuring that Israel will be “a more liberal and more democratic place for the next phase of its existence.”

Magid, 65, came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, and he describes an evolution from Conservative Jewish suburban kid to countercultural seeker who for a time embraced haredi Orthodox Judaism before becoming a scholar of religion and Judaism. The books that crossed my desk tend to be written by Jews 40 and older. (Geoffrey Levin, the author of the new book “Our Palestine Question,” is 32, but his book is about American Jewish criticism of Israel from the 1940s through the 1970s, not the experience of today’s activists.)

In his forthcoming book “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine,” Oren Kroll-Zeldin, 43, interviews younger activists from four main pro-Palestinian Jewish groups — IfNotNow, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, All That’s Left and JVP.

Describing himself as “an embedded participant in the movement,” he calls his own process of disillusionment with Israel “unlearning Zionism.” Raised in a Reform Jewish family in Los Angeles — his grandfather, Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, founded L.A.’s Stephen S. Wise Temple; his mother, Rabbi Leah Kroll, was among the first group of women rabbis ordained by the Reform movement — Kroll-Zeldin attended Jewish day school and summer camps and visited Israel as both a participant and staff on free Birthright trips. As a young adult he came to the conclusion that “Jewish liberation in Israel was predicated on the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

“Jews who unlearn Zionism not only contest widely held narratives about the ‘righteous’ nature of Israel’s national project but also reject a monolithic pro-Israel identity,” writes Kroll-Zeldin, assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco.

He also challenges criticism from some mainstream groups that the young non- and anti-Zionists lack a sense of Jewish “peoplehood” or solidarity. “This new generation of Israel engagement through Palestinian solidarity activism is based on a love for and a commitment to the Jewish people,” he writes.

“Critics of anti-Zionism dismiss them as naive, as misguided, as self-hating Jews, perhaps as antisemitic themselves. And that couldn’t be more divorced from reality,” Kroll-Zeldin told me in an interview. He said groups like JVP and IfNotNow are “creating Jewish organizations and Jewish spaces” and using Jewish language and ritual in their activism.

The activists he studied, he continued, approach their activism from a standpoint of Jewish “safety,” telling him that “our safety cannot happen on the backs of other people. If other people are being oppressed, that does not guarantee our safety. Quite the opposite.”

Kroll-Zeldin also rejects what he calls a “Zionist consensus” among American Jews that says Jewish safety is guaranteed by a “supremacist state with a strong military.”

“What we actually see is that that has not protected Jews,” he said. “In fact, the worst calamity to happen to the Jewish people [since the Holocaust] happened [on Oct. 7], ironically, in the very place that was created to prevent that type of catastrophic attack on Jewish life.”

Jewish anti-Zionists regularly remind critics that there have always been Jews opposed to Zionism, including haredi Orthodox Jews who opposed a secular Jewish state in the Holy Land on religious grounds, and Bundist Jews — East European revolutionaries influenced by Marxism — who wanted to be part of a global socialist society. Before 1948, establishment groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Reform movement worried that a Jewish state would raise the specter of “dual loyalty,” and resented the claim by many Zionists that a Jewish state represented the “negation of the Diaspora” (in Hebrew, “shlilat hagalut”) and that authentic Jewishness could only be lived in Israel.

Much of that opposition faded or was sidelined after the Holocaust and Israel’s founding in 1948, when even Jews with a universalist bent saw the dire need for a country that would take in the remnants of Europe’s decimated Jewish community and, shortly thereafter, the Mizrahi Jews tossed out of Muslim countries. Following the Six-Day War of 1967 especially, American Jews tended to fully embrace Israel, variously as an expression of religious fulfillment, a source of cultural possibility, a just-in-case haven or as an embattled sibling demanding their protection and support.

In his forthcoming book “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine,” Oren Kroll-Zeldin, 43, interviews younger activists from four main pro-Palestinian Jewish groups — IfNotNow, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, All That’s Left and JVP.

Describing himself as “an embedded participant in the movement,” he calls his own process of disillusionment with Israel “unlearning Zionism.” Raised in a Reform Jewish family in Los Angeles — his grandfather, Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, founded L.A.’s Stephen S. Wise Temple; his mother, Rabbi Leah Kroll, was among the first group of women rabbis ordained by the Reform movement — Kroll-Zeldin attended Jewish day school and summer camps and visited Israel as both a participant and staff on free Birthright trips. As a young adult he came to the conclusion that “Jewish liberation in Israel was predicated on the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

“Jews who unlearn Zionism not only contest widely held narratives about the ‘righteous’ nature of Israel’s national project but also reject a monolithic pro-Israel identity,” writes Kroll-Zeldin, assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco.

He also challenges criticism from some mainstream groups that the young non- and anti-Zionists lack a sense of Jewish “peoplehood” or solidarity. “This new generation of Israel engagement through Palestinian solidarity activism is based on a love for and a commitment to the Jewish people,” he writes.

“Critics of anti-Zionism dismiss them as naive, as misguided, as self-hating Jews, perhaps as antisemitic themselves. And that couldn’t be more divorced from reality,” Kroll-Zeldin told me in an interview. He said groups like JVP and IfNotNow are “creating Jewish organizations and Jewish spaces” and using Jewish language and ritual in their activism.

The activists he studied, he continued, approach their activism from a standpoint of Jewish “safety,” telling him that “our safety cannot happen on the backs of other people. If other people are being oppressed, that does not guarantee our safety. Quite the opposite.”

Kroll-Zeldin also rejects what he calls a “Zionist consensus” among American Jews that says Jewish safety is guaranteed by a “supremacist state with a strong military.”

“What we actually see is that that has not protected Jews,” he said. “In fact, the worst calamity to happen to the Jewish people [since the Holocaust] happened [on Oct. 7], ironically, in the very place that was created to prevent that type of catastrophic attack on Jewish life.”

Jewish anti-Zionists regularly remind critics that there have always been Jews opposed to Zionism, including haredi Orthodox Jews who opposed a secular Jewish state in the Holy Land on religious grounds, and Bundist Jews — East European revolutionaries influenced by Marxism — who wanted to be part of a global socialist society. Before 1948, establishment groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Reform movement worried that a Jewish state would raise the specter of “dual loyalty,” and resented the claim by many Zionists that a Jewish state represented the “negation of the Diaspora” (in Hebrew, “shlilat hagalut”) and that authentic Jewishness could only be lived in Israel.

Much of that opposition faded or was sidelined after the Holocaust and Israel’s founding in 1948, when even Jews with a universalist bent saw the dire need for a country that would take in the remnants of Europe’s decimated Jewish community and, shortly thereafter, the Mizrahi Jews tossed out of Muslim countries. Following the Six-Day War of 1967 especially, American Jews tended to fully embrace Israel, variously as an expression of religious fulfillment, a source of cultural possibility, a just-in-case haven or as an embattled sibling demanding their protection and support.

Hunter College’s Hillel condemned the targeting of Jewish students, and the school has conducted an investigation, after demonstrators demanded Jews “pick a side” at a protest on campus.

The Hillel at Hunter, which is part of the City University of New York, said that protesters at a Wednesday rally at an entrance to campus chanted a series of “deeply hateful slogans,” charging the Jewish campus group with complicity in war crimes. The Hillel statement added that the charge “plays on age-old antisemitic tropes.”

“These protests reached a new level of aggression by targeting Hillel as a Jewish on campus organization,” Hillel said in a statement posted on Instagram on Thursday.

A group calling itself Not In Our Name CUNY Jewish Antizionist Collective had invited Jewish activists to a protest at the location. A social media post advertising the protest called on “NYC Jewish students, alumni, staff, and faculty” to “raise your voices.”

The flier also said, “Zionist donors and financiers out of Jewish campus life,” echoing previous protests that have charged that pro-Israel donors wield power over educational institutions. Critics of those claims say they echo age-old antisemitic stereotypes about money and control.

The post advertising the protest targeted Hillel, saying the Jewish campus group “has played a critical role in indoctrinating Jewish youths into Zionism and distorting values of Jewish community.” Without citing evidence, it said Hillel recruited students to “act as surveillance agents.”

A video circulating on social media of a demonstration at Hunter on Wednesday shows a protest leader chanting, “We say no to genocide, Jews on campus pick a side.” The protest appeared to be the one advertised on social media.

Hunter College condemned the protest and the video of it on social media.
Hunter College is committed to a campus environment that encourages dialogue that is grounded in civility,” the college said in a statement to the New York Jewish Week. “This week, a student group exercising their right to protest engaged in speech that was neither constructive nor civil and directly targeted members of Hunter’s Jewish community. Hunter condemns this type of language, which has no place in an educational setting. We investigated the incident immediately and will take appropriate action promptly.”

The rally was co-sponsored by other anti-Zionist groups from other New York City universities, including Columbia University’s Jewish Voice for Peace, which is banned from organizing on its own campus, and the CUNY Law Jewish Law Students Association, which endorsed Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel days after the incursion.

The rally’s organizers did not respond to a request for comment, but in the advertisement for the event, said they targeted Hillel due to a trip led by the Hillel of another CUNY college to Israel last month. In posts earlier this month, Hillel at Baruch said on social media that students had packed food for Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza. It wasn’t clear if Hunter College’s Hillel had participated in the program. The two Hillel branches did not respond to requests for comment.

The protest’s organizers mocked Hillel for calling the protest antisemitic, claiming that the protesters themselves were Jewish and posting a pro-Zionist statement from Hillel International alongside clown emojis.

Baruch and Hunter are both part of the massive CUNY public university system that has been mired in accusations of antisemitism in recent years. Last year, Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed a former chief judge of New York, Jonathan Lippman, to conduct an independent review of antisemitism at CUNY.

In response to the alleged antisemitism, last year CUNY set up an Advisory Council on Jewish Life that includes Jewish community leaders and CUNY administrators. Two members have told the New York Jewish Week that the council has been holding meetings every four to five weeks since Oct. 7, including a discussion on Monday, and that the administration was attentive to community concerns.

A CUNY spokesperson told the New York Jewish Week earlier this month that CUNY has distributed $1.3 million in funding from the state and City Council to colleges for training, events and activities to combat bigotry.