The new anti-Zionism among American Jewry explained - opinion

Zionism has competed with many other ideologies and political engagements championed by fellow Jews over the past 160 years since Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer’s Derishat Tzion (Seeking Zion) in 1862 and then Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation in 1882. These two authors, an Orthodox rabbi and a former cultural assimilationist, laid the foundations for the political activism to facilitate the repatriation of the Jews to their homeland rather than vague Messianic expectations.

The Hibbat Tzion (Lovers of Zion) movement was established and, in the 1890s, Theodor Herzl applied his organizational vision and brilliant pen to the project and the modern Zionist movement arose. It immediately faced the opposition of other Jews, as well as the competition from them.

The rejection of modern Zionism long before the First Zionist Congress originated among various groups. The ultra-Orthodox would not budge until they were told to do so by the Messiah. The Reform movement removed “Zion” from its prayer books and claimed the entire world for Jewish residence. Some even suggested that Jewish dispersion was a blessing for mankind.

The assimilationists desired a total rejection of a Jewish peoplehood. Jewish socialists transmuted Judaism into what is today more familiar as a movement for general tikkun olam, rectifying the world. Stefanie Dox, Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, used the term in her October 13, 2023, piece in The Nation thusly:

“At this moment, when so many Jews feel our worlds torn apart by violent death… we [ask to] treat Palestinians with the empathy and decency that we ourselves long for … In the midst of our grief and pain, let’s remind each other… we are people committed to tikkun olam … When we say never again, it includes Palestinians, and it means right now.”

WHAT IS a particular Jewish trait, it would appear, is the extreme necessity of all the non-Zionists and anti-Zionists to constantly and loudly declare their orientations. It is as if they are possessed of a psychological need to declare “I’m not with them.” To parallel Descartes, their life’s principle is nego, sic existo – I deny, therefore I exist. Which recalls one of Pinsker’s complaints in his above-mentioned work: “How pitiful do they appear. Their homeland – the other man’s country; their solidarity – with the battle against us.”

Their acts and words of denial highlight just how deviationist they are. Judaism has known apostates who aided persecutions of the Church as did Johannes Pfefferkorn in his anti-Talmud efforts – or those, like Karl Marx, who adopted the memes of antisemitism. Nevertheless, the adoption of a denial of Jewish ethno-nationalism combined with what I term “transposed inversion” is a unique phenomenon.

American Jewish critics of zionism

Anti-Zionism is, well, a normative Jewish thing. Babson College Professor Marjorie N. Feld has just published Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism. The book doesn’t manage to pass 300 pages although she claims there’s a “long” history of “contrary perspectives.” It would seem it’s not the quantity that counts but the “quality.”

It is not only that they support the cause of a “free Palestine” or that they oppose an “occupation” – those positions are not abnormal. They, however, fully adopt the terminology of the Arab side and their framing of the conflict, reject any semblance of moderate politics and fine-tune their denial of Jewish national identity, Jewish history and rights of Jews with a devilish demonization.

Even a skimming of their literature appearing on social media platforms, from X to Instagram and Facebook, displays a total submergence into the glossary of Israel’s eliminationist enemies.

The slogans and shout-outs are illogical and nonsensical. Jews, they assert, cannot be free until Palestine Arabs are. And yet the consistent position of those Arabs for over 120 years has been to deny Jews a state. They have never agreed to any diplomatic proposal which involves compromise and recognition of Israel as the Jewish national state.

IN KEFFIYEH-clad unison, they exclaim various pro-Palestine propaganda terms that pervert historical truth. They are “progressive” yet regressively twist terms on their heads. “Genocide”, “Apartheid”, “Settler-Colonialism” and “West Bank” all are applied with no justification to Israel and Zionism.

At a public Passover Seder, they deny the end result of the Exodus from Egypt as the repatriating the Jewish people to their homeland. And the “from the River to the Sea” chant erases that land.

Here is from IfNotNow’s Instagram post “honoring” Lag B’Omer – what they claim is a day of “mourning” on the background of Gaza: “the holiday this year … [is] a reminder of what we’re fighting for – the IDF brazenly violated the orders of the ICJ [International Criminal Court], dropping US supplied 2,000 pound bombs on defenseless refugees in Rafah.”

The fact that no bomb was dropped on defenseless refugees is minor. What is major in their propaganda is, at the least, not comparing Hamas’s incineration of Jews in several kibbutzim on October 7 to the Holocaust, or to East European pogroms.

On the other hand, on Holocaust Memorial Day, IfNotNow heard “chilling echoes of our history since the beginning of this [Gaza] genocide.” In The New York Times on May 27, James Kirchick wrote of this as not only “overheated and imprecise language” but a “grotesque moral inversion.”

In 2010, in an article in the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart set about to cause the failure of the American Jewish establishment. He has been too successful. He has done much by purposefully ignoring much of the side of “Palestine,” if not concealing their deeds and words, while highlighting – often unfairly and in a perverted fashion – Israel’s actions, past and present. He denies.

His new generation of young Jews thrive on the new “blame the Jews!” game. The 32-year old Rachel Gelman’s Bafrayung Fund, for example, is the single largest sponsor of pro-Palestinian activist groups involved in the latest campus unrest, according to the Daily Beast. There are many others.

The time has come to deny them their dangerous heresies.

The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.