The Gaza genocide broadened the demand for a history of Jewish anti-Zionism from beyond its previously more niche corners in academic and political discourse. Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History seeks to meet this demand by “uncover[ing] a suppressed tradition.” While presenting itself as a “rediscovery,” however, it in fact discovers nothing that has not been known to those working in this space for quite some time. In the book, Moser profiles a broad array of individuals, from Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares of the Pale of Settlement during the anti-Jewish pogroms, to the emergence of Herzlian Zionism, to Hannah Arendt’s post-Holocaust critique of Zionism, and to Nan Goldin, a US-based queer contemporary photographer and celebrated artist born in the middle of the twentieth century. The throughline across these profiles, for Moser, is each historical actor’s ability, from their unique vantage point, to see Zionism for what it is, namely, a violent ideology born at the intersection of imperial designs and racism (including antisemitism). To this extent, Moser’s selective history of anti-Zionist Jews departs refreshingly from the more exclusive focus on secular anti-imperialist genealogies, such as we see in Molly Crabapple’s history of the Jewish Labor Bund or Benjamin Balthaser’s study of Jewish American Marxist-radical-internationalist traditions rooted in the 1930s. However, a recovery of lost stories and lost movements holds no value for the Palestinians who have undergone a genocide in Gaza and the ongoing Nakba, the systematic settler colonial depopulation and uprooting of Palestinians, for over a century.
While Moser’s story might offer some solace to Jews who seek to articulate a different version of their tradition than that of the Israeli state, it fails to grapple sufficiently with the kinds of politics needed to confront the ongoing legacy of Zionism. My critique here is thus threefold. I will argue that (1) Moser’s account offers nothing “new” in terms of scholarship on anti-Zionism; (2) that it is not always reflective about its selection criteria for significant figures and movements in the “canon”; and (3) that it fails to meet the political moment it claims to. Given the imperative to respond to the Gaza genocide in the present, we need accounts of anti-Zionism that go beyond such conventional framing.
Not a Scoop
The most novel story Moser tells is in the introductory chapter to the book. There, he discusses his late grandfather’s attachment to Theodore Herzl’s Zionistische Schriften, a volume which he brought with him as a European refugee to America as one of his only possessions. Moser writes powerfully about his own prolonged process of unlearning Herzl’s fairy tale account of Zionism: “A phoenix rises from the ashes; a magic wand turns an orphan into a prince” (5). Moser, the grandson, reads in Herzl an internalized antisemitism, delusions, eurocentrism, and a reliance on imperialism, racism, and colonial designs. Thinking of his grandfather, who lived through Nazism, Moser ponders Zionism’s “intoxicating…promise of power” (18) and its pivotal “denial of Palestinian existence” (20). He traces this long process of personal and historical reckoning up to his visit to Palestine for the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2016, where he saw the brutality of the occupation in the West Bank. “When I look at pictures of myself from those days, I see someone who looks bloated,” he writes (22). The pictures from the visit, he continues, “are a perfect mirror of what was taking place in my interior. It is hard to take a picture of moral disgust” (22). This is a powerful anchor for a book on Jewish anti-Zionism and on thinking about Zionism as a massive delusion and lie that has been catastrophic for Palestinians. Still, this anchor and sense of urgency recede into the background as the reader proceeds through the rest of the book, where Moser presents a bricolage of Jews critical of Zionism from different times and places. In doing so, the book reproduces what is already well-known, even as it frames its intervention as a novel undertaking—a scoop.
Similar to other attempts to excavate leftist revolutionary Jews from the debris of Zionism, Moser’s book strikes a chord because of the yearning of (some) Jews to be associated with something other than a genocidal political regime. Recent robust scholarly investigations, devoured by a social movement hungry for such Jewish alternatives, include rigorous histories such as Geoffrey Levin’s Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 and Marjorie Feld’s, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism. Levin’s book reveals how the topic of Palestinian rights in the aftermath of the Nakba, in fact, was vigorously debated among those who inhabited the so-called Jewish American establishment. Feld’s book further illuminates the internal policing of American Jewish dissent from the 1880s to the 1980s. Feld shows that the axiomatic Zionism and disregard for Palestinians that have come to characterize “the Jewish world” are not inevitable but an upshot of the intentional erasure of other voices who articulated criticisms of Zionism and Israel. Feld’s analysis thus also helps us see why Moser’s book can present itself as a scoop despite it not presenting any new research or findings. These erasures raise several questions: Who gets to inhabit an alternative Jewish archive and who gets to narrate it? What role does the ongoing depopulation, domination, and destruction of Palestinians play in this effort at Jewish rehabilitation vis-à-vis Zionist crimes? Are Palestinians centered in such works of recovery and canonizing of Jewish critics of Zionism, or is their suffering instrumentalized for this project of Jewish rehabilitation? Moser’s book repeats familiar motifs in the contemporary wave of anti-Zionist Jewish counter-archiving. The urgency of the Gaza genocide, combined with a movement already saturated and familiar with the counter-archive, demands a reassessment of this genre.
Reassessing Anti-Zionist Narratives
The Principle of Selection?
The book contains no analysis of how the distinct stories of Jewish dissent or questioning cohere with one another and with the overall claim regarding Jewish accountability to Palestinians. Moser does not explain why he chooses the characters and the Jewish geographies he has focused on. His choices are made to seem self-explanatory by virtue of their diversity.
The table of contents suggests that Moser is committed to highlighting the international history of anti-Zionist Jews. Each chapter covers one or more geographic location. For instance, his profile of Avi Shlaim covers Iraq, Israel, and the United Kingdom. At the same time, journalist Helena Salem’s story takes us to Brazil and through her other fascinating travels, especially in the MENA region. Ronnie Kasrils’s profile draws links to apartheid South Africa. The story of Felicia Langer brings us to Poland, Israel, and Germany. The list could go on. Moser makes a few parenthetical connections among the characters across geographies and contexts. One example of such a connection is in his brief remark (on page 300) that Salem quotes the work of Felicia Langer in the latter’s capacity as a human rights attorney working with Palestinian prisoners. But such links between the different characters are just that: parenthetical, random, and impressionistic. As a reader, I was not sure how, for instance, Salem, Langer, Arendt, and Goldin cohere even in their Jewish anti-Zionism, and how their respective interventions connect to Tamares in the small village or to British Jewish Edwin Montagu, who served as the Secretary of State for India during the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Moser assumes that they can be read together one chapter at a time and then combined to constitute “a tradition” of Jewish anti-Zionist critics. This is a very problematic assumption.
We are told in the introduction that these figures represent a suppressed and silenced tradition, but do they all do so to the same extent? Likewise, we are likely to wonder how we should understand these characters. Are they canonized saints? Or are they historical actors confronting contingent realities?
Cherry-Picking Biblicalism
Moser’s inclusion of rabbinic voices in his bricolage of Jewish anti-Zionists has the potential to challenge the other anti-Zionist excavations of secularist Jewish histories. Indeed, Zionism (which Moser correctly roots in Christian eschatological imagination) is foundationally an ahistorical fantastical narrative predicted on redemptive violence and Palestinian erasure. It is also premised on the negation of Jewish histories outside Zionist teleology. Hence, challenging Zionism requires us to move from the ahistorical ideological, fantastical, biblicalist level to the sociological, political, and historical level, along with—and this is critical—the religious or “theological” level. The latter is important because of how religion is deployed in the settler colonization of Palestine and in the attendant negation of Jewish meanings outside a violent biblicalist ideology that frames itself as a historical return. One cannot simply dismiss religious hermeneutics as irrelevant to the process of reclaiming Jewish meanings outside the claws of Zionism. This is also why we need to caution against a discourse of Jewish authenticity.
The front matter of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History reproduces two full pages of biblical verses beginning with Leviticus 2:22, which conveys how violations of divine law would lead to the land vomiting the Israelites out, and 1 Chronicles 22:8, which explains that those who “shed blood abundantly” cannot also “build a house” in God’s name. While all the verses gesture toward consequences for violating divine prescriptions or a covenantal relationship, Moser leaves them unexplained and unexamined in the front matter. The unacknowledged assumption is that somehow these verses convey something authentic about Judaism. They are, however, just as authentic as the Amalek genocide commandment is. When Moser deploys divine warnings for bad, unethical behavior of the Israelites without engaging the interpretive traditions of such biblical texts, he reverts to the same kind of unacceptable “literalism” of Zionism (both in its Christian and Jewish varieties). Reproducing biblical verses in a book seeking to recover “good” Jews from Zionist historiographical violence reflects an uncritical yearning for Jewish authenticity. This is ironic considering that one of the characteristics of Zionism is its negation of hermeneutical traditions through an unmediated reading of the biblical texts. This mode of biblical cherry-picking echoes the bricolage methodology Moser uses in curating his anti-Zionist Jewish tradition.
Haredi Romanticism
An unmediated biblicalism also intersects with Moser’s romanticizing embrace of the Haredi anti-Zionist world. This embrace underscores the fact that Moser’s anti-Zionism is dependent upon glossing over underlying tensions and inconsistencies that an intersectional account of anti-Zionism would bring to the surface. If, as Moser suggests, one should refuse to analyze Palestine as a theological issue (without dismissing the need to interrogate the theological and religious dimensions of redemptive Zionist violence) in the biblicalist sense, then the idea presumably is that one should not only be anti-Zionist but also broadly anti-racist, feminist, anti-colonial, and so forth. The activists who participated in the movement of American Jewish Palestine solidarity I profiled in Days of Awe concluded that their Judaism and their critique of Zionism needed to tackle all sites of oppression and bigotry. Their solidarity with Palestinians was not based on theological prescriptions, though accessing the tradition for its rejection of false messianism and of Zionist readings became central to many Jewish activist spaces. In such spaces, activists needed not only to say that the occupation of Palestinians is not their Judaism but also to wrestle with the positive quest to determine what their Judaism is. A temptation, found in Moser’s, is to pursue this kind of goal through a romanticized reading of Haredi anti-Zionism. Because Haredi Judaism rejects Zionism on religious hermeneutical grounds, regardless of a host of oppressive heteropatriarchal practices and bigotries, it is given a prominent place in Moser’s narrative.
Along those lines, Moser engages with two very different Haredi figures, Rabbi Tamares and Israël de Haan. With their respective stories, he is gesturing to Haredi “authenticity” as a counter to the Zionist perversion of Judaism (not unlike what he does implicitly with his cherry-picking of biblical texts). Tamares is indeed an unsurprising choice because, as Moser describes, he questioned the Zionist flirtation with imperial powers and underscored that Judaism was not tied to the land, in contrast to the anti-Jewish Christian desire to think of “the Jews” as belonging somewhere else in Palestine, not in Europe (43). This insight, however, opens the door to a discourse of Jewish authenticity centered on reembracing Judaism as a religion to counter its modernist redefinition as a “race” or “nation” by Zionism. Making such a move is essentially secular in orientation and reinscribes the place of Judaism in Christian European colonial history (46).
Moser’s discussion of Tamares would have been more generative had he discussed the fact that Tamares is one of the thinkers that the contemporary Bnei Avraham movement—the activist arm of the Faithful Left in Palestine/Israel—retrieves in its rethinking of Jewishness in Palestine outside a settler-colonial prism. Moser does not tell us how Tamares’s anticipation of the Nakba is read today in Palestine as part of a broader project of excavating a Jewish hermeneutics of exile, such as we find in the work of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. This is a missed opportunity. Examining how Tamares’s hermeneutics function in a transformative way for a social movement in Palestine/Israel highlights the necessity of analyzing Jewish hermeneutics in context, rather than as an abstracted, distilled account of a Jewish anti-Zionist tradition.
Furthermore, an expansive approach to liberation and freedom from oppression demands that we ask what Haredi romanticism means for multiple communities, including women, LGBTQI people, and others. Such questions should be asked even if they do change the principle of inclusion in the Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism that Moser seeks to articulate. Asking such questions becomes even more urgent when Moser turns to his profile of de Haan. Moser includes de Haan, whose assassination is considered to be the first Zionist assassination of a Jew in Mandatory Palestine, in his pantheon of anti-Zionist Jews. However, de Haan ended up in Palestine in 1919 initially as a Zionist administrator and primarily due to his inability to remain in the Netherlands due to his explicitly homosexual erotic poetry. His disillusionment with Zionism once in Palestine pushed de Haan closer to the Haredi community, embracing their critique of secular Zionism (97). To this day, he is an icon both in the anti-Zionist Haredi community and the gay community, with neither group acknowledging the normative implications of his belonging to the other. De Haan’s assassination in June 1924 was due to the Zionist leadership’s recognition that his criticism of Zionist practices reached higher-ups in the British regime.
Non-Haredi anti-Zionist Jews, like Moser, have celebrated de Haan as part of a broader project of excavation. Fascinated by his “intersectional” location as a queer Haredi anti-Zionist, those who seek to canonize him as a prophetic forerunner fail to interrogate many problems. Moser, for example, does not explain why de Haan is included in his pantheon despite de Haan’s extensive writing about his love for young Palestinian boys. De Haan’s intensified criticism of Zionism was entangled with his passion for young boys in the land. In a recent event marking 100 years since his assassination, I was shocked to hear no critical engagement with his pedophilia, as if such a legacy can be bracketed as irrelevant to the overall project of recovering yet another Jewish anti-Zionist “saint,” one whose excavation is predicated on Haredi romanticism and a hazy account of intersectionality. Moser’s inclusion of de Haan, therefore, chooses to ignore hard questions, including about de Haan’s poetic representation of the Indigenous people, his “lovers,” those who never get to represent themselves in such poetry.
Meeting the Moment: On the Limits of The Rehabilitative Genre
Moser’s stitching together of stories of Jews he calls anti-Zionists—though occasionally this label does not fit perfectly or immediately without anachronisms—builds (often without attributions) on an already crowded shelf of books that seek to recuperate Judaism from Zionism and canonize dissidents and critics. Even if not explicated in Moser’s book, “a tradition” constituted by exceptional individuals (presumably like himself) who can speak truth to power and see outside the bounds of socio-political conformity is “prophetic.” Certainly, some of the unexplained cherry-picked verses in the front matter are taken directly from the biblical prophets.
Both the “prophetic” and movement-focused anti-Zionist Jewish rehabilitative archaeologies instrumentalize Palestinian suffering for their own projects of Jewish authenticity and rehabilitation.
Unlike Crabapple and Balthaser’s situating of Jews within broader movements on the Left, Moser’s account fixates on prophetic motifs. Hence, while their anti-Zionist archeology is movement-focused, Moser’s excavation is focused on individuals. To this end, he abstracts the characters in his book from their wider contexts. He elevates them to the status of prophetic figures, even when they are deeply connected to historically situated broad coalitional movements. This inclination to fixate on individuals and canonize them, juxtaposed with Crabapple or Balthasar’s romanticization of underpinning social movements, obscures and abstracts the need for mass-level political education and, critically for this book, collapses profound differences between people who draw on different ethical sources in drastically different times and spaces. In doing so, Moser flattens the genealogy of Jewish anti-Zionism. Both the “prophetic” and movement-focused anti-Zionist Jewish rehabilitative archaeologies, however, instrumentalize Palestinian suffering for their own projects of Jewish authenticity and rehabilitation. In many respects, the archeological dig into Jewish pasts redirects attention away from Jewish accountability to Palestinians.
British Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad’s critique of the “recognition” genre in her Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative applies to these rehabilitative anti-Zionist Jewish scripts. Hammad deconstructs the proliferation of personal narratives, conveying how, for example, former Israeli soldiers or young American Jewish college students, upon an encounter at a checkpoint or a tour in Hebron, began to see Palestinians as humans, precipitating a “turning point” in the plot over and over again (one person at a time). This “recognition” genre is troubling for Hammad because of its focus on self-realization, and because such stories “center the non-Palestinian as the one who experiences the decentering shock of recognizing Palestinian humanity” (35). Hammad further understands the potential political upshot of recognition and its emptiness when acknowledgment (for example, of the Nakba) does not translate into material economic and political reparative policies. Recognition without “economic and political redistribution,” she writes, “is an act of language that leaves out the plot of history, where a word tries to stand in for material reparations through the smoke and mirrors of discourse and ceremony” (49). Even though Hammad endorsed Moser’s book as one exhibiting “a searching moral candor,” I worry that, by harkening back to other epochs or prophets abstracted from their contexts, anti-Zionist Jewish literature in our genocidal times “leaves out the plot of history.”
Certainly, Moser grounds himself in a clear and justifiable rejection of Zionism and disgust with what it has done in the name of Jews to Palestinians. He tells us in his introductory (and most compelling) chapter that his sense of accountability to Palestinians motivated his work of unearthing “a suppressed tradition” (31). However, Palestinians appear in the book mostly in abstraction as victims (and in some instances also as “lovers” through a Jewish gaze).
Palestinians, in other words, remain de-centered throughout the book, just like in the “recognition” genre. If Zionism is presented merely as a perversion of Jewish history and values, we are not having an honest conversation about how it is also Jewish. This fact cannot be denied or wished away by marshaling a selection of biblical quotes or the stories of some people (and even some movements) who, in the past, did not subscribe to Zionism for whatever reason. The direct Jewish accountability for the ongoing Gaza genocide, in the present, demands that we begin by acknowledging that we simply can’t disown this genocide and ongoing Nakba as not really Jewish through an escapism to other Jewish times and spaces. The question is how to center this acknowledgment in articulating an anti-Zionist Jewish Palestine solidarity. Do we need another book recuperating Jewish critics? What work do such projects do beyond making Jews feel better? Hammad’s critique of “recognition” therefore also extends to the rehabilitative literature. Its motifs of Jewish “authenticity” escape “the plot of history.”
When I write that “we” are not having an honest conversation, it is important to interrogate who the “we” is. Even though Moser writes at the outset of his desire to “shed the solipsism that has ever been a fault of the Jews and place the real victims of Zionism, the Palestinian people, at the heart of all they [future thinkers inspired by his tradition of anti-Zionist Jews] do” (32). Ultimately, however, Moser’s bricolage is not about Palestine. But it should be.
