Anti-Zionism

Formal anti-Zionism, though its roots can be traced to certain positions in the work of Moses Mendelssohn which appear to sever the links of Jews to Palestine,[lower-alpha 2] arose in the late 19th century as a response to the proposal by Theodor Herzl in his The Jewish State (1896) to create an independent country in Palestine for Jews subject to persecution in the 'civilized nations' of Europe. For Herzl and those persuaded by his proposal, the creation of such a state was the only rational response to pervasive anti-Semitism in Europe, one which, through dialogue, anti-Semites themselves would support and organize.[5][lower-alpha 3] Earlier proposals for the idea of a return of Jews to Palestine had aroused little hostility or focused curiosity among anti-Semites,[7][lower-alpha 4] notable exceptions in the latter regard being Édouard Drumont and Győző Istóczy. The latter, a lifelong anti-Semite, fervently embraced the idea of Jewish expatriation,[9] also as a means of reinvigorating the 'enfeebled' Middle East. The former's newspaper, La Libre Parole, responded exuberantly to the First Zionist Congress in 1897 by offering to raise a subscription to finance Jewish colonies abroad.[10]

Prior to the Second World War, many regarded Zionism as a fanciful and unrealistic movement,[11][lower-alpha 5] or, according to some anti-Semites, a 'Jewish trick'.[lower-alpha 6] Many assimilationist Jewish liberals, heirs of the Enlightenment, had argued that Jews should enjoy full equality in exchange for a pledge of loyalty to their respective nation-states.[13] Those liberal Jews who accepted integration and assimilationist principles saw Zionism as a threat to efforts to facilitate Jewish citizenship and equality within the European nation-state context.[14] Many in the intellectual elite of the Anglo-Jewish community, for example, opposed Zionism because they felt most at home in England, where in their view, anti-Semitism was neither a social or cultural norm.[lower-alpha 7][lower-alpha 8] The Jewish establishment in Germany, France and in America strongly self-identified with their respective states, a sentiment which made them regard Zionism negatively.[lower-alpha 9] Reform rabbis in both German-speaking lands and Hungary advocated indeed the erasure of all mentions of Zion in their prayer books.[16] The early Zionist Max Nordau lambasted Reform Judaism for emptying ancient Jewish prayers of their literal meaning in claiming that the Jewish diaspora was a fact of destiny.[lower-alpha 10]

Herzl's proposal initially met with vigorous opposition broadly within Jewish intellectual, social and political movements.[lower-alpha 11] Among left-wing currents within diaspora Jewish communities, strong opposition emerged in such formations as the Bundism, Autonomism, Folkism, Jewish Communists, Territorialism, Jewish-language anarchist movements. Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, targeted the Zionist movement and managed to close down their offices and place Zionist literature under a ban. However, Soviet officials themselves often disapproved of their anti-Zionist zeal.[19][20][21]

The vignette in the Falastin newspaper suggests Zionist insincerity is protected by British complicity, with Zionism as a crocodile under the protection of a British officer telling Palestinian Arabs: "don't be afraid!!! I will swallow you peacefully...".[22]

Arabs began paying attention to Zionism in the late Ottoman period.[23] As early as 1905 the Maronite Christian Naguib Azoury, in his The Awakening of the Arab Nation, warned that the "Jewish people" were engaged in a concerted drive to establish a country in the area they believed was their homeland.[23] Subsequently, the Palestinian Christian-owned and highly influential newspaper Falastin was founded in 1911 in the then Arab-majority city of Jaffa and soon became the area's fiercest and most consistent critic of the Zionist movement. It helped shape Palestinian identity and nationalism.[24]

In a retrospective analysis of Arab anti-Zionism in 1978, Yehoshafat Harkabi argued, in a view reflected in the works of the anti-Zionist Russian-Jewish orientalist Maxime Rodinson,[lower-alpha 12] that Arab hostility to Zionism arose as a rational response in historical context to a genuine threat, and, with the establishment of Israel, their anti-Zionism was shaped as much by Israeli policies and actions as by traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes, and only later degenerated into an irrational attitude.[lower-alpha 13] Anne de Jong asserts that direct resistance to Zionism from inhabitants of historical Palestine "focused less on religious arguments and was instead centered on countering the experience of colonial dispossession and opposing the Zionist enforcement of ethnic division of the indigenous population."[26]

One Zionist complaint was that among the higher functionaries of the British Mandatory administration, there were several officials who countenanced polcies that were anti-Zionist and even antisemitic.[lower-alpha 14][28] The British press during the Mandate period followed suit. Editorials frequently decried the heavy burden it was to govern the land with competing national interests and claimed that Zionism's promise of a homeland for the Jewish people with civil rights for its Arab citizens was impossible to realize. Much of this sentiment was flavored with the anti-Bolshevism and antisemitism of the time.[lower-alpha 15]

The British anti-Zionist[30] John Hope Simpson believed that the Arabs were "economically powerless against such a strong movement" and thus needed protection. Charles Anderson writes that Hope Simpson was also "wary of the gulf between Zionist rhetoric and practice, observing that 'The most lofty sentiments are ventilated in public meetings and Zionist propaganda' but that the Jewish National Fund and other organs of the movement did not uphold or embody a vision of cooperation or mutual benefit with the Arabs."[31]

In May 1942, before the full revelation of the Holocaust, the Biltmore Program proclaimed a radical departure from traditional Zionist policy by adopting a maximalist position in calling for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth in an unpartitioned Palestine to resolve the issue of Jewish homelessness.[lower-alpha 16] At the American Jewish Conference in late August-early September the following year, Zionists received 85% as opposed to 5% for the anti-Zionists.[33] Opposition to official Zionism's firm, unequivocal stand caused some prominent Zionists to establish their own party, Ichud (Unification), which advocated an Arab–Jewish Federation in Palestine. Opposition to the Biltmore Program also led to the founding of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism.[34]

Individual Jews have changed their position on the spectrum broaching pro- and anti-Zionist views. Isaac Deutscher was decidedly opposed to Zionism, then altered his judgment, in the wake of the Holocaust, to support the foundation of Israel,- the creation of a nation-state precisely when they were becoming anachronistic[35] - even if it was at the expense of Palestinians,[lower-alpha 17] and then waver at the end between contempt for the anti-Semitic demagoguery of Arab states, and odium for the fanatical triumphalism of Israelis, 'Prussians of the Middle East' at the end of the Six-Day War, prophesying that the outcome of victory would prove to be a disaster for Israel.[37]

The creation of a Jewish state prior to the appearance of the messiah was widely interpreted in Jewish religious circles as contradicting divine will, [lower-alpha 18] one, furthermore, which was visibly driven by Jewish secularists. Prior to World War 1, across Central Europe, Jewish religious leaders perceived the Zionist movement's aspirations for Jewish nationhood in a distant "New Judea" as a threat, in that it might encourage paradoxically the very anti-Semites, with their treatment of Jews in their midst as "aliens", whose fundamental rationale Zionism itself sought to undermine.[38]

Orthodox Judaism, which grounds civic responsibilities and patriotic feelings in religion, was strongly opposed to Zionism because, though the two shared the same values, Zionism espoused nationalism in a secular fashion, and used "Zion", "Jerusalem", "Land of Israel", "redemption" and "ingathering of exiles" as literal rather than sacred terms, endeavouring to achieve them in this world.[39] According to Menachem Keren-Kratz, the situation in the United States differed, with most Reform rabbis and laypeople endorsing Zionism.[lower-alpha 19] Dina Porat holds the opposite view of Jewish orthodox opinion generally.[lower-alpha 20]

Many Hasidic rabbis oppose the creation of a Jewish state. The leader of the Satmar Hasidic group, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum's book, VaYoel Moshe, published in 1958, expounds one Orthodox position on Zionism, based on a literal form of midrash (biblical interpretation). Citing to Tractate Kesubos 111a[40] of the Talmud Teitelbaum states that God and the Jewish people exchanged three oaths at the time of the Jews' exile from ancient Israel, forbidding the Jewish people from massively immigrating to the Land of Israel, and from rebelling against the nations of the world.

During the last years of Stalin's rule, official support for the creation of Israel in 1948 was replaced by strong anti-Zionism. According to Kennan Institute researcher Izabella Tabarovsky:

"[T]he Soviets ... [claimed] that their ideology was anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. ... Soviet ideologues relied for inspiration on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, on the ideas of classic religious antisemitism, and even Mein Kampf, but adopted them to the Marxist framework by substituting the idea of a global anti-Soviet Zionist conspiracy for a specifically Jewish one. Jewish power became Zionist power. The rich and conniving Jewish bankers controlling money, politicians, and the media became the rich and conniving Zionists. The Jew as the anti-Christ became the Jew as the anti-Soviet. Instead of the Jew as the devil, they presented the Zionist as a Nazi."[41]

Indeed, comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany became a popular staple of anti-Zionist rhetoric due to the influence of Soviet propaganda in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[42][43]

Criticism of Israel by the Soviet Union, particularly after 1967, manifestly conflated anti-Zionist arguments with what were anti-Semitic sentiments, despite the conceptual distinction between the two. [lower-alpha 21] A 1972 publication of the Soviet Information Office of Paris argued that Zionism's "racism" and "atrocities" are rooted in the Hebrew Bible.[44] In 1989, according to Julius, "Soviet anti-Zionism was credibly considered the greatest threat to Israel and Jews generally. ... This 'anti-Zionism' survived the collapse of the Soviet system."[45]

Until 1948, according to Derek Penslar, antisemitism in Palestine "grew directly out of the conflict with the Zionist movement and its gradual yet purposeful settlement of the country," rather than the European model vision of Jews as the cause of all the ills of mankind.[46] According to Anthony Julius, anti-Zionism, a highly heterogeneous phenomenon, and Palestinian nationalism, are separate ideologies; one need not have an opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be an anti-Zionist.[47]

In January 2015, the Lausanne movement, published an article in its official journal made comparisons between Christian Zionism, the crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and described Zionism as "apartheid on steroids".[48][49][50] The Simon Wiesenthal Center described this last claim as "the big lie", and rebutted the "dismissal of the validity of Israel's right to exist as the Jewish State".[51]

Anti-Zionist sentiments were also manifested in organizations such as the Organization for African Unity and the Non-Aligned Movement, which passed resolutions condemning Zionism and equating it with racism and apartheid during the early 1970s. This culminated in the passing by the United Nations General Assembly of Resolution 3379 in November 1975, which declared "Zionism is a form of racism."[52]

The decision was revoked on 16 December 1991, when the General Assembly passed Resolution 4686, repealing resolution 3379, by a vote of 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions and 17 delegations absent. Thirteen out of the 19 Arab countries, including those engaged in negotiations with Israel, voted against the repeal, and another six were absent. All of the ex-communist countries and most of the African countries who had supported Resolution 3379 voted to repeal it.[53]

In 1993, philosopher Cornel West wrote: "Jews will not comprehend what the symbolic predicament and literal plight of Palestinians in Israel means to blacks.... Blacks often perceive the Jewish defense of the state of Israel as a second instance of naked group interest, and, again, an abandonment of substantive moral deliberation."[54] African-American support of Palestinians is frequently due to the consideration of Palestinians as people of color – political scientist Andrew Hacker writes: "The presence of Israel in the Middle East is perceived as thwarting the rightful status of people of color. Some blacks view Israel as essentially a white and European power, supported from the outside, and occupying space that rightfully belongs to the original inhabitants of Palestine."[55]

Quds Day demonstration in Qom, Iran

Anti-Zionist Muslims consider the State of Israel as an intrusion into what Shari'a law defines as Dar al-islam, the Islamic counterpart to the Land of Israel in rabbinical law, and a domain they believe to be rightfully, and permanently, ruled only by Muslims as it was historically conquered in the name of Islam.[56][57]

Palestinian and other Muslim groups, as well as the government of Iran (since the 1979 Islamic Revolution), insist that the State of Israel is illegitimate and refuse to refer to it as "Israel", instead using the locution "the Zionist entity" (see Iran–Israel relations). In an interview with Time magazine in December 2006, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "Everyone knows that the Zionist regime is a tool in the hands of the United States and British governments."[58] The anti-Zionism of Hamas is indistinguishable from the group's antipathy for Judaism.[59]

Anti-Zionism has a long history of being supported by various individuals and groups associated with Third Position, right-wing and fascist (or "neo-fascist") political views.[60][61][62][63] A number of militantly racist groups and their leaders are anti-Zionist, David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan for example,[64] and various other Aryan / White-supremacist groups.[65] In these particular instances, anti-Zionism is usually also deeply antisemitic, and often revolves around conspiracy theories discussed below. The opposite phenomenon, of anti-Semites being pro-Zionist/Israel has also been documented,[66][67] the latter often associated with American Christian evangelical support for Israel.[68][69]

Noam Chomsky has reported a change in the boundaries of what are considered Zionist and anti-Zionist views.[70] In 1947, in his youth, Chomsky's support for a socialist binational state, in conjunction with his opposition to any semblance of a theocratic system of governance in Israel, was at the time considered well within the mainstream of secular Zionism; by 1987, it lands him solidly in the anti-Zionist camp.[71]

Alvin H. Rosenfeld in his much discussed essay, Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,[72] wrote that a "number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent antisemitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist".[73] Rosenfeld's general claims are:

1. "At a time when the de-legitimization and, ultimately, the eradication of Israel is a goal being voiced with mounting fervor by the enemies of the Jewish state, it is more than disheartening to see Jews themselves adding to the vilification. That some do so in the name of Judaism itself makes the nature of their assault all the more grotesque."
2. "They're helping to make [antisemitic] views about the Jewish state respectable – for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel."

Some Jewish organizations oppose Zionism as an integral part of their anti-imperialism.[74][75][76][77] Today, some secular Jews, particularly socialists and Marxists, continue to oppose the State of Israel on anti-imperialist and human rights grounds. Many oppose it as a form of nationalism, which they argue to be a product of capitalist societies. One secular anti-Zionist group today is the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a socialist, anti-war, and anti-imperialist organization that calls for "the dismantling of Israeli apartheid return of Palestinian refugees, and the ending of the Israeli colonization of historic Palestine."[78]

An internal debate is occurring within the far left over how much cooperation with Islamism ought to be pursued. In the 2000s, leaders from the Respect Party and the Socialist Workers Party of the United Kingdom met with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah at the Cairo Anti-war Conference.[79][lower-alpha 22] The result of the 2003 conference was a call to oppose "normalization with the Zionist entity".[81]

After publishing "Zionism unsettled", which it initially commended as "a valuable opportunity to explore the political ideology of Zionism",[82] the Presbyterian Church promptly withdrew the publication from sale on its website[83] following criticism that it was Anti-Zionist, one critic claimed it posits that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fueled by a 'pathology inherent in Zionism.'[84] In February 2016, the General Assembly was lobbied by its Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) to lay aside a two state solution and support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.[85][86] Presbyterians for Middle East Peace described this proposal as a "one-sided, zero-sum solution".[87]

Despite its strong historic support for Restorationism, famously by Robert Murray M'Chyene and by both Horatius and Andrew Bonar, in April 2013 the Church of Scotland published "The Inheritance of Abraham: A Report on the Promised Land", which rejected the idea of a special right of Jewish people to the Holy Land through analysis of scripture and Jewish theological claims. The report further denied the "belief among some Jewish people that they have a right to the land of Israel as a compensation for the suffering of the Holocaust" and argued "it is a misuse of the Bible to use it as a topographic guide to settle contemporary conflicts over land." The report was criticised by Jewish leaders in Scotland as "biased, weak on sources, and contradictory."[88][89] Subsequently, the Church issued a statement saying that the Church had not changed its "long-held position of the rights of Israel to exist".[90] It also revised the report.[91]

Neturei Karta call for dismantling of the state of Israel at AIPAC conference in Washington, DC, May 2005

Most Orthodox religious groups have accepted and actively support the State of Israel, even if they have not adopted the "Zionist" ideology. The World Agudath Israel party (founded in Poland) has, at times, participated in Israeli government coalitions. Most religious Zionists hold pro-Israel views from a right-wing viewpoint. The main exceptions are Hasidic groups such as Satmar Hasidim, which have about 100,000 adherents worldwide and numerous different, smaller Hasidic groups, unified in America in the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada and Israel in the Edah HaChareidis.[92][93]

According to Jonathan Judaken, 'numerous Jewish traditions have insisted that preservation of what is most precious about Judaism and Jewishness "demands" a principled anti-Zionism or post-Zionism.' This tradition dwindled in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel, but is still alive in religious groups such as Neturei Karta and among many intellectuals of Jewish background in Israel and the diaspora, such as George Steiner, Tony Judt and Baruch Kimmerling.[94]

As early as 1966, Webster's Third New International Dictionary cited anti-Zionism as one of the core meanings of anti-Semitism, and Martin Luther King Jr., a year latter, was cited as having made the same equation in a letter. [lower-alpha 23] In the early 2000s, it became increasingly commonplace by defenders of Israel to regard criticism of Zionism and Israel as tantamount to, interchangeable with, or closely related to anti-Semitism. Tony Judt in 2007 considered the merging of the two categories in polemics as relatively new.[73] A 2003-2004 report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia aroused intense controversy over aspects of its provisory definition of antisemitism,[lower-alpha 24] which many regarded as ambiguous in blurring distinctions to the point that the two concepts became porous.[100]

Scholars who subscribe to this identity between the two include Robert S. Wistrich, former head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who argued that post-1948 anti-Zionism and antisemitism had merged and that much contemporary anti-Zionism, particularly forms that compare Zionism and Jews with Hitler and Nazi Germany, has become a form of anti-Semitism[95]

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a Working Definition of Antisemitism, one which subsequently was officially recognized by various governments, foremost among them, the United States and France, which endorsed the equation of certain manifestations of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.[101]

Deborah E. Lipstadt has documented several cases of individuals who made remarks that were clearly against Jews, but when criticized, those individuals defended themselves by saying that they were against "Zionists."[102]

Professor Kenneth L. Marcus, former staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, identifies four main views on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, at least in North America:[103]^{(p. 845–846)} Marcus also states:[104] "Unsurprisingly, recent research has shown a close correlation between anti-Israeli views and anti-Semitic views based on a survey of citizens in ten European countries."[105]

Dina Porat (head of the Institute for Study of Antisemitism and Racism at Tel-Aviv University) contends that anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it is discriminatory: "... antisemitism is involved when the belief is articulated that of all the peoples on the globe (including the Palestinians), only the Jews should not have the right to self-determination in a land of their own. Or, to quote noted human rights lawyer David Matas: One form of antisemitism denies access of Jews to goods and services because they are Jewish. Another form of antisemitism denies the right of the Jewish people to exist as a people because they are Jewish. ... To the antizionist, the Jew can exist as an individual as long as Jews do not exist as a people."[106] Emanuele Ottolenghi argued for the same view.[107]

In 2010, Oxford University Press published Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England by Anthony Julius. In that book, Julius claims that the borders between anti-Zionism and antisemitism are porous.[108] However, Julius makes a distinction; though it is possible to be in conflict with a Jewish ideology without discriminating against Jews, anti-Zionists cross the line so often as to make the distinction meaningless.[109]

ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt told Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, "[What] many in the anti-Zionist camp want for Palestinians or would want for other peoples, they would deny to Jewish people. Unless you don't believe in nationalism as a concept and unless you support denying the legitimacy of any national project from France to Ukraine, if you hold the idea that Zionism is the only form of nationalism that's wrong, that's discriminating against Jewish people. That's the anti-Semitism."[110] According to the ADL, "Anti-Zionism is a prejudice ... [that] may be motivated by or result in anti-Semitism, or it may create a climate in which anti-Semitism becomes more acceptable."[111] The American Jewish Committee expressed similar views: "The belief that the Jews, alone among the people of the world, do not have a right to self-determination — or that the Jewish people's religious and historical connection to Israel is invalid—is inherently bigoted."[112]

Political scientist Peter Beattie, in an analytical overview (2016) of the specialist literature which actually used polling data in several countries to test the purported link between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism found no necessary empirical correlation, cautioning that assertions of such an innate connection were calumnious. He concludes, "Most of those critical of Israeli policies are not anti-Semites. Only a fraction of the US population harbours anti-Semitic views (Levitt 2013), and while logically this fraction would be overrepresented among critics of Israel, the present and prior research indicate that they comprise only a small part. Inaccurate charges of anti-Semitism are not merely calumny, but threaten to debase the term itself and weaken its connection to a very real, and very dangerous, form of prejudice."[113] The German sociologist Werner Bergmann's analysis of empirical polling data for Germany concluded that whereas right-wing respondents critical of Israel tended to have views overlapping with classical antisemitism, left-wing interviewees' criticisms of Israel did not transfer into criticism of Jews.[114]

Former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research Antony Lerman argues:

The anti-Zionism equals antisemitism argument drains the word antisemitism of any useful meaning. For it means that to count as an antisemite, it is sufficient to hold any view ranging from criticism of the policies of the current Israeli government to denial that Israel has the right to exist as a state, without having to subscribe to any of those things which historians have traditionally regarded as making up an antisemitic worldview: hatred of Jews per se, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, belief that Jews generated communism and control capitalism, belief that Jews are racially inferior and so on. Moreover, while theoretically allowing that criticism of Israeli governments is legitimate, in practice it virtually proscribes any such thing.[115]