ANTI-ZIONISM (1880–1947)

Anti-Zionism in its earliest form was not a unified movement. It was a grouping of objections, philosophical and theological and political, raised against a civic program as it developed from the 1880s onward. Zionism proposed that Jews constituted a people in the national sense and required a homeland of their own to secure that future. Integrationists in the early Reform movement countered that Judaism was strictly a religion, not a nationality. They argued that the proper answer to European antisemitism was deeper integration into liberal democratic life, viewing a return to the Levant as a dangerous regression into tribalism.

Religious traditionalists saw things differently; to them, a human-led state was profoundly arrogant. Drawing heavily on the Babylonian Talmud and its concept of the Three Oaths, Orthodox authorities argued that return to the land was a divine act whose timing could not be forced. Establishing a state by human effort was viewed as a transgression, a point the German and Austrian rabbinical leadership made explicit in a public declaration against the First Zionist Congress in 1897. Meanwhile, socialist and labor movements like the Jewish Labour Bund, founded in Vilnius that same year, rejected the national project for leftist reasons. Pushing the concept of doykayt, or “hereness,” they insisted Jewish workers should seek solidarity where they already lived. They dismissed national borders as bourgeois constructs, arguing a separate homeland would merely serve the interests of the Jewish elite against the working class.

Arab opposition to Jewish immigration arose in part from land concerns. Arab notables in Jerusalem petitioned the Ottoman Grand Vizier in 1891 to prohibit Russian Jews from immigrating and purchasing land. By 1899, Yousef al-Khalidi, former mayor of Jerusalem, wrote to the Chief Rabbi of France acknowledging Jewish history, while arguing that the project should find another location. As historian Dmitry Shumsky documented in Beyond the Nation-State (2018), many early dissenters supported a Jewish presence in their ancestral homeland; they just rejected a centralized and national model of statehood. They could not anticipate the mechanics of the impending European catastrophe. Within a few decades, a state of their own would become the non-negotiable mechanism for Jewish survival.

Before 1948, anti-Zionism operated through civic and religious sites—synagogues, rabbinical assemblies, labor groups, and congresses. It produced arguments, organized opposition, and formal position papers. The American Council for Judaism, founded in 1942, represented an expression of Reform Jewish anti-Zionism in the United States, committed to the idea that Jews were a religious community over a national one. Externally, within the Ottoman power structure and the subsequent British Mandate, the term also described the political and physical resistance of Arab populations. The anti-Zionist petition presented to Woodrow Wilson ahead of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 carried the signatures of over 300 prominent American Jews, including the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Sr. It argued that a Jewish state would contradict the democratic principles World War I had fought to establish.

Gandhi wrote The Jews in Palestine (1938), an anti-Zionist work by any measure, where he argued that Palestine belonged to the Arabs, and that Jews should prove their value through nonviolence instead of statehood. Regarding their persecution in Germany, of which Gandhi says “there seems to have no parallel in history,” he boasts that if he were born Jewish he would find a German and “challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon.” Gandhi would “refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment.” Mahatma says this would have “fellow Jews…bound to follow my example.” Martin Buber, writing back in 1939, asks, “do you know or do you not know, Mahatma, what a concentration camp is like and what goes on there?” Buber stated that while pacifism “may be taken against unfeeling human beings in the hope of gradually bringing them to their senses,” it will not work against a “diabolic universal steamroller.” To ask Jews to do this during the Holocaust, Buber calls “a martyrdom cast to the winds.”

Hannah Arendt published Zionism Reconsidered (1944), offering a sustained philosophical critique of nationalism, and warned that a state established against the desires of the Arab population would require permanent external support and increase violence. Arendt supported the idea of a Jewish homeland but opposed the form Zionism ultimately took. In her work, she argued that mainstream Zionism had made a fatal error by tying Jewish survival to the nation-state model and building alliances with imperial powers instead of a binational federalism with Arabs. She warned that a Jewish state established without Arab consent and maintained by force would produce a state permanently dependent on external patrons, trapped in an endless security crisis—a prediction she considered vindicated by subsequent events. Arendt never denied Jewish peoplehood or the legitimacy of Jewish collective life in Palestine; her objection was strategic, not existential. She wanted Jews in Palestine to survive and thrive, and believed the Revisionist and Ben-Gurion models would make that harder, not easier.

In its pre-state form, anti-Zionism carried no implication of hostility toward Jews as a people. Its most prominent advocates were often Jewish, grounding their opposition in religious, political, cultural, or ethical commitments. The opposition to Zionism as a program said it was mistaken, dangerous, or contrary to Jewish values—not that Jewish collective existence or participation was itself illegitimate. Assimilationists feared the national movement would invite dual loyalty charges and undermine Jewish equality in their home countries. Orthodox leaders feared it substituted hubris for divine will. Socialists saw nationalism as a distraction from class solidarity.

Claude Montefiore, opposing the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which expressed support for a national homeland for Jews, foresaw possible “dual loyalty” issues and put the worry plainly: “how could a person belong to two nations at once?” Edwin Samuel Montagu, submitting his 1917 memorandum against the Balfour Declaration to the British government, called it a “mischievous political creed” incompatible with citizenship. To local Arab leaders, the project was a colonial imposition: a perspective that culminated in atrocities like the 1929 Hebron massacre. Organized opposition predates the First Zionist Congress of 1897, running through the full range of Jewish, Arab, and Western political life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which canonized the Reform movement’s commitment to universalism. Arab opposition developed through Ottoman-era petitions and hardened into resistance as Jewish immigration increased through 1914. After the Balfour Declaration, Western governments became the arena where these objections were argued most severely, through Montagu’s memorandum, the King-Crane Commission of 1919, and the sustained British Mandate debates.

The British White Paper of 1939, limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine for five years, was widely understood as an effectively anti-Zionist position adopted under Arab pressure. By 1947, when the United Nations took up partition, anti-Zionism in its pre-state form had exhausted its options. The UN vote of November 29, 1947, did not end the argument. In its pre-state form, anti-Zionism functioned as a position within a live political debate—one with an enormous range of interpretations, even within Jewish communities. It had Arab populations and Western governments involved. It made arguments and engaged in counterarguments. Its various strands were not unified, and did not agree with each other on much beyond the conclusion that a Jewish state in Palestine was a mistake. They were, at minimum, conducted as their own midrashim. They were answerable to evidence and refutation in ways that distinguish them from what the name would later come to describe.

Between 1939 and 1945, six million Jews were murdered across Europe: in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the massacre at Babi Yar, Croatia’s extermination camp at Jasenovac, Romania’s deportations to Transnistria, and Hungary’s deportation of 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz. Survivors who returned home faced pogroms, while the Soviet Union purged its own Jewish citizens. This catastrophe—genocide, statewide antisemitic collaborations, and postwar violence against survivors with nowhere left to go—made the 1948 declaration of statehood non-negotiable. The global Jewish population fell from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to 11 million by 1945—a loss of one in three Jews alive on earth—and has still not recovered eighty years later. The anti-Zionism of the 1880–1947 period shares a name, but not a character, with what followed. Its proponents engaged the national program on its own merits, made empirical claims, and worked within recognizable traditions. The pre-state form is frequently invoked by modern antizionists to legitimize their ideas. This does not survive scrutiny. What the traditions share is applied ex post facto: their premises, methods, means, and objectives are fundamentally different in kind.