https://portside.org/2026-10-07/snow-globe-palimpsest

Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
Benjamin Moser
Doubleday
ISBN: 9780385551243

 

THE SNOW GLOBE, the children’s toy that first appeared at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, only two decades before the First Zionist Congress, is a glass or plastic sphere containing a bucolic scene with flakes at the bottom, and when you shake it, the flakes scatter and the scene is suddenly transformed. That is the image that keeps coming to mind these days. First, October 7, 2023, and then the subsequent destruction of Gaza. Suddenly, the same seemed different, uncanny, unheimlich—familiar yet strange. October 7 was never supposed to happen; that is why the State of Israel was founded. And yet it happened. And Israel, always prepared to respond militarily to aggression, was never supposed to go so far as to destroy a society. Yet that happened too. And suddenly, everything seemed different—and yet the same. Of course, one can imagine the trauma of October 7 bringing Jews together, to mourn, to vent, even to question. Patriotism is a predictable consequence of national trauma.

 

Yet the destruction of Gaza produced something unpredictable among many Jews. It brought them to the conclusion that something was wrong, very wrong, systematically and structurally wrong, certainly in Israel, but maybe with Zionism itself. From its origins in late 19th-century Europe, Zionism has comprised a complex set of competing ideas about Jewish self-determination: from envisioning a socialist state to a hypernationalistic one, a state that incorporated the Palestinian population in the form of binationalism to one that excluded them, a liberal state to a reactionary one. But for many today, Zionism has come to simply mean support for the State of Israel as a Jewish state. Beyond debates about policies (occupation, detention without due process, house demolitions), justifications (security and the demand that there never be another October 7), the present government, theological dogma, or even facts on the ground (the death toll of 75,000 and the fact that starvation and disease run rampant are still denied by some), the destruction of Gaza gave birth to a new iteration of Jewish anti-Zionism.

 

Anti-Zionism is not new among Jews; in fact, it was arguably created by Jews. Over its long history, Jewish anti-Zionism has taken many forms—certainly before the establishment of the State of Israel, but even after. Many Orthodox Jews viewed Zionism as a transgressive attempt to bring the exile to an end before the arrival of the Messiah. Socialist Jews opposed it because it was a form of nationalism. Many liberal Jews in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century saw it as an obstacle to integrating into a post-emancipation society that had finally removed the barriers to Jewish equality and citizenship rights. And many, even most, American Jews, through the early decades of the 20th century, rejected Zionism for its implications of a dual allegiance, which seemed to present an impediment in the process of “Americanization.” But except among the ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionism had mostly been “put to bed” with the emergence of the Zionist consensus in the early 1970s. It has now woken up.

 

I separate here the anti-Zionism of Jews and anti-Zionism more generally because they are not identical. The non-Jewish anti-Zionism that arose in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and later in other places in Europe, was based on the denial of the Jews as a people and was mostly an appendage of antisemitism. The resistance to Zionism in the Arab world was largely founded on a view of Zionism as a form of colonialism. Jewish anti-Zionism, on the other hand, never denied the Jewish collective, even if many denied Jews as a “nation,” viewing them rather as a people, a religious collective (or edah). This was primarily an internal debate about the best path for Jewish flourishing in a post-emancipation world.

 

Just as Jewish anti-Zionism in the past faced fierce condemnation from Jewish ideological adversaries, the new Jewish anti-Zionism met with a strong and swift reaction: blasphemy, infidelity, treason, and, of course, antisemitism. The literal war in Gaza has been accompanied by a rhetorical and internecine Jewish war against anti-Zionism. All forms, for whatever reason, are illegitimate, equated with antisemitism, and so all who hold these beliefs are enemies of the “Jews.”

 

Benjamin Moser’s new book Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History is a contribution to the present war of identity, seeking a lineage in the stories of Jews in the past who rejected Zionism for a wide variety of reasons. It doesn’t break new ground, nor does it intend to, and it is not a “history” per se. Rather, it is a kind of literary resurrection, a personal search through lost Jewish choices, following paths long overgrown and figures that history thought best forgotten. In the first chapter, which is really the “why” of the book, Moser gives us a window into his Gen X childhood as a Jew in Texas: his discovery of Zionism and subsequent disillusionment with it. While not unfamiliar, his story of disenchantment frames a rediscovery of the forgotten. Instead of becoming a political activist or simply giving up, Moser decided to see what lay down those overgrown paths. Others must have felt something similar in their respective contexts. Who were they, and what happened to them?

Even more than Zionism, anti-Zionism can, and does, mean many things, and Moser presents his narrative through a series of biographical sketches. The figures he profiles came from four continents. These are people who mostly did not know of one another and did not speak the same languages. They likely disagreed about much except for their rejecting Zionism as a viable form of Jewish collective life, though each opposed the Zionist project for different reasons. Some were secular, some Orthodox (he does not treat ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionism except in the one idiosyncratic, but important, case of Aaron Samuel Tamares). They were believers, atheists, rabbis, artists, journalists, and revolutionaries. Some of the figures we know well—Hannah Arendt (Germany, United States), Maxime Rodinson (France), Avi Shlaim (Iraq, Israel, United Kingdom), and Nan Goldin (US). Some less well—Jacob Israël de Haan (Netherlands), Aaron Shmuel Tamares (Belarus, Poland), Felicia Langer (Poland, Israel, Germany), and Edwin Montagu (UK). Some hardly at all—Helena Salem (Brazil), Ronnie Kasrils (South Africa), Ahmad Sadiq Saad (Egypt), and Hyman Judah Schachtel (US). Many have been relegated to the dustbin of history, and many of Moser’s critics will say “for good reason.” But attempts at erasure often produce palimpsests—that which lies underneath never completely disappears. History closes doors, but it rarely throws away the key.

 

Aaron Samuel Tamares (1869–1931), also known as Aharon Shmuel Tamares, was an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in a small town in Belarus. He was originally sympathetic to Zionism, even attending the 1900 Zionist Congress in London as a delegate, but came to view its nationalistic fervor and secularism with great suspicion. Especially after World War I, he held the belief that Zionism would make the Jews a violent people and undermine their covenantal destiny. Edwin Montagu (1879–1924) served in the British Cabinet (only the third practicing Jew to do so) and strongly opposed the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which supported the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” He considered the government’s statement antisemitic because it suggested Jews had no place in the Diaspora. In his fight against Zionism in Britain, he found himself at odds with his cousin Herbert Samuel, the first high commissioner for Palestine during the British Mandate. Avi Shlaim (b. 1945), an Iraqi Jew whose family was brought to Israel in the early 1950s as part of the airlifts orchestrated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, has lived in England since the 1960s and has become a preeminent historian of Zionism and a vocal critic from a Mizrahi perspective. Ronnie Kasrils (b. 1938), a South African Jew, fought against apartheid and was critical of Israel’s secret trade agreements with South Africa in the 1970s, comparing the treatment of Palestinians to apartheid. Among the lesser-known figures brought to light in Moser’s book, a Brazilian Mizrahi Jew named Helena Salem (1948–99) stands out. She worked as a journalist and helped cultivate Palestinian activism in South America. Her visits to Palestinian refugee camps and prisons in Israel after the 1967 war resulted in her 1977 book, Palestinos, os novos judeus (“Palestinians, the New Jews”).

 

Yet the very diversity of these thumbnail biographies points to a major weakness at the heart of Moser’s book. The work is, above all, a poignant artifact of the painful present, expressing one Jew’s growing disdain for Zionism, which leads him to look for precedents. However, while his subjects may have rejected Zionism, they did not (except in the case of Ahmad Sadiq Saad, an Egyptian communist who converted to Islam) disaffiliate from the Jewish people. More complex—and, frankly, more interesting—than the mere repudiation of Zionism, which links this disparate group, is the question of how Jews have navigated their identities and allegiances in a post-emancipation world. If not Zionism, then what? It’s a question that Moser is largely indifferent to as he narrates the lives of his subjects.

 

Are these figures representative? That is another critique likely to be raised about this book, though it is one that is far less cogent. Representative of what, exactly? And why does that matter? Before the 1930s, arguably before 1948, Zionism itself was not representative of the Jews, and yet we know of many Zionists of that era, canonized for Americans in Arthur Hertzberg’s 1959 book The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. As historian Maxime Rodinson noted, “The Zionists freely proclaim that Zionism is the natural outcome of the whole of Jewish history, something which belongs to the very essence of Judaism and to which all the world’s Jews owe allegiance.” This is a historical narrative associated with what is sometimes called the “Jerusalem School” of Jewish history, comprising scholars mostly affiliated with the Hebrew University, such as Yitzhak Baer, Ben-Zion Dinur, Yehezkel Kaufmann, Joseph Klausner, and Benzion Netanyahu, who, beginning in the 1920s and ’30s, came to view Zionism and Jewish sovereignty as the very telos of Jewish history. As Dinur said, “All Jewish history is Zionist historiography.”

 

Other Jewish historical “schools” and narratives existed, but by the 1970s, the Jerusalem School had emerged victorious, even if few knew what it was or could name one of its members. A somewhat watered-down version of the story of the Jews told by Dinur and the rest had solidified into a key component of a conventional Jewish identity that would have been unrecognizable as normative in the early years of Zionism. The chapters in Anti-Zionism are selective, as they must be, and one can question why Moser includes this but not that person. But in some way, this misses the point. He doesn’t set out to be comprehensive, and his argument is not that the lives and ideas of these figures subvert the Zionist vision of history. Rather, they demonstrate how recent a phenomenon the Zionist consensus is. And if that consensus is now over—and it might be—it is vital to revisit those who opposed it before and while it was taking hold.

 

Beyond the colorful stories and characters and Moser’s deft writing style, the book provides a window into the Diaspora as a place where Jews suffered and flourished, trusted and doubted, loved and despised, a place many Jews were not willing to abandon. These stories can be inspiring but also horrifying. Some end with banishment, some with prison, one with conversion (Egyptian Jew Ahmad Sadiq Saad converted to Islam), and one with a bullet in the chest (De Haan). However harsh we think the current ideological war against Jewish anti-Zionism is, it is nothing compared to the reactions of the past. Arendt was not only ostracized after publishing Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963; she also faced formal institutional attempts to destroy her reputation. The Anti-Defamation League sent out a nationwide circular asking rabbis to denounce Arendt from the pulpit on the High Holidays. Israeli dissident Amos Elon, quoted by Moser, recounted that “a group of lecturers—some flown in from Israel and England—toured the country decrying Arendt as a ‘self-hating Jew,’ the ‘Rosa Luxemburg of Nothingness.’” These attempts did not succeed. Arendt was, as they say, “too big to fail.” But Felicia Langer wasn’t. A lawyer for Palestinians in Israel, representing them against government and military allegations from the conclusion of the 1967 war until 1990, she saw her family life destroyed and her well-being constantly threatened by Israelis. She had to hire a bodyguard, and things finally got so bad for her in Israel that she had to flee to Germany to feel safe as a Jew.

 

Most tragic is the case of Jacob Israël de Haan, an openly gay Dutch Jew, a member of the religious Zionist Mizrachi Party, who immigrated as a Zionist to Palestine in 1919. He became distraught after witnessing the treatment of Arabs by the Zionists there. He wasn’t the first Zionist disillusioned by the realities of Jewish settlement in Palestine. One finds similar sentiments expressed in historian Hans Kohn’s letter of resignation from the Keren Hayesod (Israel’s nationalist fundraising arm) in 1929, published as “Zionism Is Not Judaism,” or the two depressing reports by Ahad Ha’am, a journalist, essayist, and founder of cultural Zionism, published as “Truth from the Land of Israel” in 1891 and 1893. De Haan abandoned Zionism, became ultra-Orthodox, and began to serve as a spokesman for the “Old Yishuv” (the Jewish community that had existed in Palestine before the advent of Zionism, to which it was generally hostile), negotiating on their behalf with the British authorities and Arab leadership. He was warned by Zionists to desist from his activities. He refused. As he came out of a Jerusalem synagogue one morning in June 1924, having said Kaddish for his recently deceased father, a man approached De Haan asking for the time, pulled out a pistol and shot him three times in the chest. He was dead within minutes. Rumors spread that he’d been killed by an Arab, but it soon came to light that the murderer had been Avraham Tehomi, a member of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun, an offshoot of the Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary organization that had orchestrated the assassination.

 

This would not be the last time that Zionists made the calculation to sacrifice Jewish lives for the sake of the nation. Famous in its time but now almost forgotten, the Lavon affair in 1954, also known as “Operation Susannah,” was a failed clandestine Israeli program to set off explosives in markets, movie theaters, and other civilian locations in Egypt with the primary aim of blame being assigned to the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilize Egypt. But it was also meant to instigate Egyptian hatred of the Jews in order to initiate a large migration of those Jews to Israel. Similarly, as noted by historian Avi Shlaim, Zionist agents bombed Jewish venues in Iraq in 1951 to frighten them into immigrating to Palestine. The nascent state needed Jews to secure its majority.

Zionism is hardly unique in this: We know that nationalist movements (and other movements based on collective ideologies) have done—and do—horrific things in the service of their cause, even attacking and killing their own. When any cause, whatever it is, understands itself as the telos of a people’s history, we get some version of what historian of Israel and Zionism Yaacov Yadgar, in his 2024 book To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism, calls “Zionist supersessionism”: Zionism replaces Judaism, or at least makes it subservient. What Moser’s book does so effectively is excise the false exceptionalism that pervades the Zionist narrative, as if Zionism was somehow different from other nationalisms, as if all Jews in Israel/Palestine were “family.” It is not, and they are not, and like other nationalist causes, there are detractors.

Israel’s choice to destroy Gaza—and it was a choice—has produced liquid times for many Jews. That which was given is now being questioned; that which was normative is now being challenged. The stories featured in Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History tell of struggle, of deep conviction, of the desire for justice. To give voice to these stories is an act of fidelity to those who suffered at the hands of an emerging national project in a time of trauma. Perhaps today the scattered flakes in the snow globe have settled once again. But that does not mean things can return to the way they were before.