Anti-Zionists

Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine – the biblical Land of Israel – was flawed or unjust in some way.Mor, Shany. "On Three Anti-Zionisms." ''Israel Studies'', vol. 24, no. 2, summer 2019, pp. 206+. Gale In Context: World History. Accessed 2 Nov. 2022.

Until World War II, anti-Zionism was widespread among Jews for varying reasons. Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism on religious grounds, as preempting the Messiah, while secular Jews felt uncomfortable with the idea that Jewish peoplehood was a national or ethnic identity. Opposition to Zionism in the Jewish diaspora was surmounted only from the 1930s onward, as conditions for Jews deteriorated radically in Europe and, with the Second World War, the sheer scale of the Holocaust struck home. Thereafter, Jewish anti-Zionist groups generally either disintegrated or transformed into pro-Zionist organizations, though many small groups, and bodies like the American Council for Judaism, conserved an earlier Reform tradition of rejection of Zionism. Non-Jewish anti-Zionism likewise spanned communal and religious groups, with the Arab population of Palestine largely opposed to what it considered the colonial dispossession of its homeland. Opposition to Zionism was, and continues to be, widespread in the Arab world, especially among Palestinians.

Zionism's proponents note its success in establishing the Jewish state of Israel in the region of Palestine, and seek to portray anti-Zionism as broad opposition to Israel and a Jewish presence in the region. Supporters of Zionism often highlight that some antisemites hold anti-Zionist views. The relationship among Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism is debated, with some academics and organizations that study antisemitism taking the view that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic or new antisemitism, while others reject any such linkage as unfounded and a method to stifle criticism of Israel and its policies, including its occupation of the West Bank.

Anti-Zionism before 1948

Early Jewish anti-Zionism

Formal anti-Zionism arose in the late 19th century as a response to Theodor Herzl's proposal in '' The Jewish State'' (1896) to create an independent country in Palestine for Jews subject to persecution in the "civilized nations" of Europe. But even before Herzl, the idea of Zionism – of Jews as constituting a nation rather than a people constituted by their religion – promoted by Moses Hess (1862) and Leo Pinsker (1882) elicited fierce opposition within European Orthodox Jewry. Samson Raphael Hirsch, for one, considered the active promotion of Jewish emigration to Palestine a sin. The creation of a Jewish state before the appearance of the messiah was widely interpreted in Jewish religious circles as contradicting the divine will, a programme, furthermore, that was visibly driven by Jewish secularists. Until World War I, across Central Europe, Jewish religious leaders largely 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 antisemites, with their treatment of Jews in their midst as "aliens", whose fundamental rationale Zionism itself sought to undermine. An exception were Mizrachi Zionists.

When Herzl began to propound his proposal, many, including, secular Jews, regarded Zionism as a fanciful and unrealistic movement. Some antisemites even dismissed it as a "Jewish trick". 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. 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. 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, antisemitism was neither a social or cultural norm. The Jewish establishment in Germany, France (and its Alliance Israelite Universelle), and America strongly identified with its respective states, a sentiment that made it regard Zionism negatively. Reform rabbis in German-speaking lands and Hungary advocated the erasure of all mentions of Zion in their prayer books. Herzl's successor, the Zionist atheist Max Nordau, whose views on race coincided with those of the antisemitic Drumont, lambasted Reform Judaism for emptying ancient Jewish prayers of their literal meaning in claiming that the Jewish diaspora was a fact of destiny.

Herzl's proposal initially met with broad, vigorous opposition within Jewish intellectual, social and political movements. Among left-wing currents within diaspora Jewish communities, strong opposition emerged in such formations as the Bundism, Autonomism, Folkism, Jewish Communists, Territorialism, and Jewish-language anarchist movements. Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union created to combat "Jewish bourgeois nationalism", targeted the Zionist movement and managed to close down its offices and place Zionist literature under a ban, but Soviet officials themselves often disapproved of anti-Zionist zeal.

Early Arab anti-Zionism

Arabs began paying attention to Zionism in the late Ottoman period. 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. 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.

Palestinian and broader Arab anti-Zionism took a decisive turn, and became a serious force, with the November 1917 publication of the Balfour Declaration – which arguably emerged from an antisemitic milieu – in the face of strenuous resistance from two anti-Zionists, Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu, then the (Jewish) Secretary of State for India. Other than assuring civil equality for all future Palestinians regardless of creed, it promised diaspora Jews territorial rights to Palestine, where, according to the 1914 Ottoman census of its citizens, 83% were Muslim, 11.2% Christian, and 5% Jewish. The majority Muslim and Christian population constituting 94% of the citizenry only had their "religious rights" recognized.

Given that Arab notables were almost unanimous in repudiating Zionism, and incidents like the massacre at Al-Sarafand stirred deep resentment against the British throughout the area, the British army view, confided to American officers with the King–Crane Commission, was that the provisions for Zionism could only be implemented by military force. To this end, the army calculated that a standing army of at least 50,000 troops would be required to implement the Zionist project on Palestinian soil. According to Henry Laurens, uneasiness over this task by a colonial army that had been accustomed to treat and defend colonial populations in a quasi-feudal/paternalistic manner, accounts for much of the hostility the British army in Palestine was to feel toward Zionists.

Reactions to the Balfour Declaration

American approval of the Declaration came about through the direct and secret mediation of the antisemitic anti-Zionist Colonel House with President Woodrow Wilson by bypassing Robert Lansing, the United States Secretary of State. The last sentence in the draft proposal passed to Wilson, mentioning Jews "who are fully contented with their existing nationality and citizenship", was struck from the final British version. This recognition by Wilson stirred great anxieties among numerous leaders of the American Jewish community, which had made the adoption of its country a "theological substitution for the return to Zion" and was highly satisfied with its prosperous lives in this "new Zion". 299 prominent rabbis registered their disapproval in a submission to the forthcoming Paris Peace Conference, rebuffing the notion that there could ever be a Jewish Palestine. When he found out, Lansing thought that Zionism contradicted Wilson's own declared principle of self-determination for the peoples of the world. One other effect was that of laying the grounds for an anti-Zionist tradition in the US State Department.

Once the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) began to implement the Balfour Declaration, both sides had reason to accuse the authorities of partisanship. Several contemporary sources credit the notion that English administrators were partial to Arabs, and diffident about, if not outright disliking, Jews. One Zionist complaint was that among the higher functionaries of the British Mandatory administration were several officials who countenanced anti-Zionist and even antisemitic policies. The energetic arguments of Jacob Israël de Haan on behalf of sectors of the Orthodox yishuv who disagreed with Zionism also played an important role in getting Mandate authorities to grasp that Zionists did not represent the entire Palestinian Jewish community. The Haganah assassinated him in 1924.

The British press during the Mandate period was often critical – the Northcliffe Press was openly anti-Zionist, and the newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook was opposed to the Mandate itself – and complaints were made of the heavy burden it was to govern the land with competing national interests. It was 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 anti-Zionist sentiment and diffidence about Jews in the early Mandate years, limited in scope like British antisemitism, was also tinged with anti-Bolshevism, since the Russian revolution had earlier engendered a sharp spike in antisemitism in the British press. Official sponsorship of Zionism, as evidenced by the Balfour Declaration, had been influenced by the communist takeover of Russia, which Anglo-Jewry itself abhorred, in which Jews were alleged to have played a major role. Palestinians raised the spectre of possible communist infiltration in the guise of Zionism before the horrified British administration with some success.

OETA and the British government took these claims seriously and addressed them in the Palin Commission report in August 1920, an investigation into the reasons behind the subsequent anti-Zionist riots at Nebi Musa. The Commission found that there was a widespread perception among the Arabs, reflected also among British residents and officials, that that the Zionists' attitudes and zealous behaviour exacerbated hostilities, being perceived as "arrogant, insolent and provocative."

Anti-Zionism in the 1920s-1930s

Some members of the Jewish-Marxist Poale Zion, which advocated under Ber Borochov a separate Zionist organization for Jewish workers and advocated emigration to Palestine as a solution to antisemitism, found to their surprise on making aliyah that Palestine was a predominantly Arab country. By the early 1920s, the realization that Zionism would be discriminatory had turned Poale militants like Yaakov Meiersohn and Joseph Berger into anti-Zionists. In 1922 the Comintern's disowning of Poale Zion spurred the growth of a Jewish anti-Zionist left in Palestine, culminating with the formation of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), which retained some residual Zionist traces. This anti-Zionist Jewish PCP was recognized by the Comintern in 1924, and, that same year, the first Palestinian Arab joined the party.

The Yiddish-speaking General Jewish Labor Union of Eastern Europe, the largest Jewish left-wing organization in Europe between the two wars, focused on a practice of ''doykayt'' (hereness) as the key to Jewish identity; that is, it advocated addressing practical issues Jews faced all over the diaspora in their respective national contexts. It dismissed its antagonist Zionism's vision of resolving matters definitively by emigrating to Palestine as marked by a "separatist, chauvinist, clerical and conservative" outlook, values diametrically opposed to Bundism's secular, progressive and internationalist principles.

The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) was resolutely anti-Zionist throughout this period through to 1947, seeing it as embedded in an imperial British colonialist oppression of the Arab masses. Under its general secretrary Earl Browder, a clear distinction was drawn between pogroms in Europe, which were likened to what hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Black Legion practiced in America, and the Arab resistance to Jewish settlers in Palestine. At the time around half of the CPUSA's membership was Jewish, with perhaps 10% of the American Jewish population joining the movement over a decade. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, members of the American Jewish left and its intelligentsia were almost all anti-Zionists, the exception being Meyer Levin. Mike Gold's 1930 novel '' Jews without Money'', which depicts a Zionist entrepreneur's fatal extortion of a poor Jew, can be read as a proletarian critique of both American capitalism and, tacitly in its subplot, of Zionist practices in Palestine.

As well as left-wing critiques of Zionism, many mainstream liberal and conservative communal organisations in the diaspora continued to promote an assimilationist anti-Zionism. In Germany, for example, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) argued that German Jews should be primarily loyal to Germany and identify as Jews only on religious terms. Soon after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933, Jews, and anti-Zionists among them, were galvanized to organize global protests against the new regime's discrimination against their German confreres.

Similarly, as Italian fascism came to identify Zionism with enemies of the country abroad, in 1934 the Italian-Israeli Community Union responded to pressure by solemnly affirming the community's allegiance to their country. Italian anti-Zionists such as Ettore Ovazza reacted by creating their own newspaper, ''La Nostra Bandiera'' (Our Flag), whose editorial line maintained that the establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine was anachronistic.

The Biltmore programme and its anti-Zionism fall-out

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. At the American Jewish Conference in late August-early September the following year, Zionists received 85% as opposed to 5% for the anti-Zionists. 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. Ichud represented a very small minority of Jewish Palestine; there were only 97 party members in 1943. Opposition to the Biltmore Program also led to the founding of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, which, according to Noam Chomsky was the only Jewish group in America immediately after WW2 to lobby for the immigration of Jewish Holocaust-survivors to the United States, rather than Palestine.

Religious

Orthodox Judaism, which stressed civic responsibilities and patriotic feelings in religion, was strongly opposed to Zionism because 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. According to Menachem Keren-Kratz, the situation in the United States differed, with most Reform rabbis and laypeople endorsing Zionism. Dina Porat