The Case for Anti-Zionist Judaism
How a culture with deep and rich traditions and history betrayed itself by succumbing to fascist thinking, and how it can be reinvented
How to even begin to approach this topic? It feels like the consensus is that to even attempt to do so is a self-evidently futile effort. I obviously know that relatively few people will have their positions swayed by this article. But just like the previous entries of this series that I worked through last summer, The Case for Social Democracy, what motivates me to put pen to paper today is a sense that the mainstream political discourse is sorely missing a perspective aiming to get to the heart of the misunderstandings that underlie its dysfunction. That will be my goal as I examine how Zionism in the form adhered to by its self-described proponents is an ideology fundamentally incompatible with peace, the outcome that ought to be sought by every healthy person.
Before anything else, we have to recognize that the two sides in this conflict are working with very different definitions of the word “Zionism.” For the Israeli government and its supporters, Zionism refers to the belief that Jewish people deserve a homeland (specifically, their traditional homeland in the Levant), a proposition that not many people would likely object to. But for the Palestinian community, living in Gaza, the West Bank and abroad, Zionism refers to the practice of bombing, sniping, dispossession and disenfranchisement that they experience at Israeli hands day in and day out. As a result, when someone says they’re a Zionist, that does not necessarily mean that they’re in support of the same thing that a person who says they’re anti-Zionist is against.
Therefore, especially as a person with Jewish heritage, I have to acknowledge that if we only had the former definition of Zionism to deal with, I would certainly be in favor of it, given the Jewish people’s history as an oppressed people in most places where they’ve lived as a minority, and the general scarcity of opportunities for diasporic peoples to return to their homelands. But that’s not all I have to do. I also have an obligation to speak out against the so-called leaders of this community, who have attempted to redefine Jewishness into a state of warmongering oppressorhood, claiming that history shows conclusively that this is necessary in order to ensure survival. I will be working with the definition of Zionism that accurately describes the impact of the actions of those who most vociferously shout that all Israel is doing is exercising its right to self-defense.
When Hamas carried out their brutal attack on October 7th, 2023, the world sympathized with the civilians of Israel, just as they did with Ukraine after February 23rd, 2022, and as they did with the United States after September 11th, 2001. But that attack is over now. Hamas does not actually have the means to destroy the state of Israel, which everyone knows is in possession of nuclear weapons. And after seven long months of Israel’s merciless onslaught aimed at retributively wiping Hamas from the face of the earth, no matter how many civilian lives it costs, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his accomplices have little to show for, except squandering the good will of the entire planet, save for the United States government and a handful of its allies. Faced with this overwhelming rebuke by the international community, the Zionist response has not been to self-reflect or to do damage control. It’s been simple: cry wolf. “You just hate us because we’re Jews! You want Hamas to kill us all! Well, we won’t go! Am Yisrael Chai!” Does that sound familiar? You’ve probably heard some variant of it just by turning on the news or scrolling social media. The narrative goes that if you don’t want Israel to obliterate Gazan society, therefore you want Jewish people to be unsafe, which makes you …. *gasp* … antisemitic. But does it? Google defines “antisemitism” as “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people.” This argument therefore only holds water if you think that if Israel does anything other than what it currently is, then Hamas will rise up again and finish the job, but we’ve already established that they don’t have the means to do so, even if they’ve said that they would like to. And I think Netanyahu knows that (never mind the fact that he covertly funded them in order to sabotage the development of a stable Palestinian state). So what is this really about?
Let’s look at some history. During the Second World War, the Jewish people of Europe were subject to one of the worst genocides in world history under the Nazi German regime. As a result of this, the survivors decided en masse that they had to leave Europe behind in favor of what at the time was referred to as the British Mandate for Palestine (although other destinations were also briefly considered). They declared they would never again suffer from such an atrocity. And the only way they could see to ensure this was to construct a state where, for the first time in millennia, they would constitute a majority. There was only one problem: other people had moved in in the time since the Jewish exodus (and in fact, some of the original Jews never left, but converted to Christianity and later Islam). So in November 1947, as soon as the British gave a six-month notice that they would be withdrawing, fighting broke out between the radicalized Zionists, who wanted to expel non-Jews from the land, and primarily Arab militias who wanted to prevent this from happening. This escalated further when a coalition of the surrounding Arab countries joined in against the newly founded Israeli state. But they were unsuccessful, and in the process of defeating them, the Zionists forced over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, establishing Israeli villages where there had been Arab ones, in an event known by Palestinians today as the Nakba (in Arabic: نَكْبَة, meaning “disaster”). Most Arab countries responded by expelling their local Jewish populations, who then moved to Israel. In the subsequent decades, multiple rematches were fought, with Israel coming out on top each time, supplied with arms from the West, with whom it became closely associated, despite the implementation of its apartheid regime. Attempts at achieving a peaceful détente were sabotaged by extremists on both sides, as Zionist settlers encroached onto land that had remained in Palestinian hands, and periodic terror attacks were carried out by Palestinian groups like Hamas.
Fast forward to today, and the Israeli establishment has maintained a profound conviction that their country is constantly under siege. Because of the Holocaust, antisemitism is seen as the worst possible prejudice to have (even though Jewish people made up only a little more than half of Hitler’s victims), and Jewish safety takes precedence over literally all other concerns. Until October 7th, however, this viewpoint was accompanied by confidence that the state was up to the task of keeping its people safe. When this proved to be untrue, it threw Zionism into an existential crisis. If maintaining an oppressive apartheid system over the Palestinians hadn’t guaranteed their security, then what was the point of it all? Netanyahu’s response was to double down in the biggest way possible, suffocating the economy of the West Bank by revoking Palestinians’ permits to work in Israel, and reducing living conditions in Gaza to medieval levels. When Zionists are confronted with the astronomical death toll of Israel’s operations, you can see it in their fixation on the trauma of the events that took place on that one day: “But what about the hostages? What about the worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust?” Zionists truly see 150 Israeli hostages, who can be brought back, as holding greater significance than 35,000 Palestinian casualties, who cannot be (except, of course, those hostages that have been killed by Israeli forces). They feel that they have the right to whine to the world for months on end about something that happened to them relatively briefly, while inflicting something orders of magnitude worse onto others continually. In their mindset, Jewish lives simply matter more than Palestinian lives, and the land simply belongs to them according to their religion (which designates Jews as “God’s chosen people”), which also naturally believes in the right to live in safety, which, as mentioned above, can only be achieved where Jews make up a majority. Therefore, if you think the land ought to be shared, you must be against the Jewish religion, making you — and get this — an antisemite (never mind the fact that Zionist organizations have welcomed antisemites from the Republican Party into their ranks, and the fact that Zionism benefits from the perception of widespread antisemitism).
This should remind you of another group that saw themselves as called upon by destiny to fulfill what they saw as their birthright (i.e. supremacy over a given territory and its inhabitants), who maintained a strict ethnicity-based system of membership in its ruling class, and who took it upon themselves to brutalize whomever got in the way of the realization of their vision for the world. Under Nazi rule, Germany pursued a nationalist policy of Lebensraum (“living space”), intended to provide the “Aryan” race with land stolen from Slavic and Jewish untermenschen (“sub-people”), delineated by blood-quota race laws inspired by America’s Jim Crow South, and waged a vicious campaign to take this land, having been radicalized by Germany’s defeat two decades prior, which they attributed to a “stab in the back” by Jewish saboteurs. During this time, the true horror of the fascist experiment unfolded as tens of millions were forced into slavery, starved into submission, or simply slaughtered in the name of a new secular religion that syncretized itself to the Christianity already practiced in the region. After the war ended, a country that had once been respected as a powerhouse of culture, science and philosophy was now reviled as the home of bloodthirsty butchers.
The world attempted to put guardrails in place in an effort to raise the human species above and beyond such savagery, in the form of the United Nations, but as I discussed in an earlier article, this never really got off the ground due to the coinciding opening of the Cold War. When the war broke out between the Zionists and the Arabs, both sides simply saw themselves as doing what it took to ensure survival for themselves at the cost of their competitors, inadvertently affirming the fascist tenet of social Darwinism. Just as the Nazis believed existence to ultimately be a perpetual struggle (primarily against the Jews, but really against everyone) for resources in an uncaring world, the Zionists believe that there will never come a day when Jews can live at peace (primarily with the Palestinians, but really with the world at large). They believe that the Nazis’ actions scarred the fabric of life on Earth so deeply that any sense of optimism or trust would be a naïve utopian pipe dream, and feel that the only option is to live walled off from the rest of an irredeemable world. When the fascists hurt them, they saw that as proof of that ideology’s correctness, except they also co-opted the progressive aversion to bigotry against minorities. And now the Zionists have advanced the cycle by another stage, and if Hamas had the opportunity, there is little doubt that they would advance it by yet another.
I am not alone when I say that I REFUSE to believe that this is the only way that history can play out. I REFUSE to consider myself a person who needs fascism in order to survive. I REFUSE to be smeared as “Jew-hating,” as the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations described the delegates who voted today in favor of granting the State of Palestine full membership in their ranks. And I know that if Zionism is such a core tenet of this variety of the Jewish faith that opposing it in this way makes you want to call me antisemitic or kapo, I can’t stop you, but I can invite you to consider a different variety that could help us find our way again. I can think of pikuach nefesh (in Hebrew: פִּקּוּחַ נֶפֶשׁ), the principle that states that essentially any other religious regulation can be disregarded in the interest of the preservation of human life. I can think of tikkun olam (תִּיקּוּן עוֹלָם), the principle that calls upon Jewish people to do whatever they can to “repair the world,” as some believe God chose us to do. And I can think of never again, a rallying cry that should never have been made exclusive to one group only.
I don’t expect this potential schism to be resolved any more amicably than the one between Catholics and Protestants, or the one between Sunnis and Shi’ites. Already, groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow and Standing Together have been dismissed as illegitimate representatives of the Jewish community for running counter to an alleged Zionist four-to-one supermajority, but as discussed above, just because someone uses the term “Zionist” to describe oneself, because maybe they were raised in such a household and attend such a synagogue, does not mean that they automatically agree with what Israel is doing, which means that they are reachable.
Judaism has been practiced for millennia, and its survival to the present day is a testament to the strength of its adherents, who have made invaluable contributions to civilization. Hebrew is an intricate and elegant language, but not necessarily more or less so than Arabic, both of which can trace their roots to Proto-Afroasiatic, a language thought to have been spoken around the time of the dawn of post-hunter-gatherer society. History is long, and although it may feel to many as though we’re living in the biblical end times, there will in fact be generations for whom our experiences and actions will be but a distant memory. It’s easy to call those whose actions we find reprehensible “inhuman,” but by doing so, we delude ourselves into a version of reality where human people like you or me or Hamas or Netanyahu aren’t capable of unthinkable cruelty. We are. In order to build a better world, which is the whole point of progressivism, we have to consciously recognize that side of ourselves and turn away from it, rather than act as if we are somehow special and were born without it. A planet divided against itself cannot stand.
The two languages of Israel-Palestine have very similar ways of greeting another: Shalom aleichem (שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם)/As-salāmu ‘alaikum (ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُم), both meaning “peace be upon you.” No conflict has ever lasted forever, and we’re only 76 years into this one. Eventually, shalom aleinu (שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ)/as-salāmu ‘alaina (ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْنَا) will be said:
Peace be upon us.
