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.

The founding of Israel in May 1948 did not resolve the anti-Zionist argument: it redirected it. Before 1948, the debate centered on whether a Jewish state should exist. After 1948, it shifted to whether the one that existed had a right to continue. Theodor Herzl’s foundational argument, that Jewish political homelessness was the root cause of antisemitism and that only a state of their own could provide Jews security, was no longer debated theoretically. The Arab League’s rejection of partition and the war of 1948, fought by five Arab armies against the newly declared state, proved the military dimension of that project.

The war produced two defining consequences that would shape every subsequent argument: Israel’s survival beyond the UN partition lines, and the Nakba—whose claimed “right of return” became the central demand of Arab anti-Zionism for the following seven decades. The Six-Day War compounded both. The swift defeat of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, transformed the conflict’s dimensions. Soviet anti-Zionism, already developing since Stalin’s postwar turn against Jews in the USSR, found a receptive audience around the world. Arab nationalism had a new grievance. And Western leftism, awoken by 1968, found in the Palestinian cause a struggle it could absorb completely into its own.

Anti-Zionism in this period operated through three largely distinct but mutually reinforcing means. The first was Soviet state infrastructure. Stalin’s postwar campaigns against Jewish cultural life inside the USSR (the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1948, the Doctors’ Plot of 1953, and the execution of Jewish intellectuals) established that Zionist hostility was not only a foreign policy position, but a domestic weapon. It was directed at Jews whose mere whisper of a connection to Israel was treated as grounds for suspicion. After 1967, the KGB developed Operation SIG to discredit Zionism, producing publications in dozens of languages distributed through organizations like the World Peace Council. The WPC’s November 1967 conference in New Delhi, attended by delegates from 55 countries, equated Zionism with Nazism before audiences spanning the Third World and the Western left. Soviet Zionologists, intelligence-affiliated propagandists including Yevgeny Yevseyev, distributed these publications to an estimated half-million committed leftists across 145 countries. Mahmoud Abbas, current president of the Palestinian Authority, wrote his dissertation equating Zionism with Nazism at a Soviet think tank expressly charged with developing the scholarly foundations for this campaign.

The second channel was Arab nationalism. The Arab League boycott of Israel was sustained after 1948 into a comprehensive economic effort. Member states worked through UN forums to build a coalition, culminating in Resolution 3379 in November 1975, introduced by Soviet-dominated Somalia, which explicitly declared Zionism a form of racism. That resolution was repealed in 1991, but its vocabulary never disappeared. The third channel was Western leftism. American and European movements of the 1960s, reshaped by the civil rights movement and Third World solidarity, began absorbing anti-Zionism as a vital component of anti-imperialism. The Soviets had traded the word “Zionist” for “Jew” while keeping the underlying associations (dual loyalty, media control, governmental manipulation, and conspiracy) intact within a vocabulary that claimed to target a position and not a people. Stokely Carmichael, the famed Civil Rights activist who coined the term “Black Power,” entered this leftist world at a conference in Cuba in 1967. Angela Davis met Yasser Arafat at a Soviet-sponsored festival in Berlin in 1973. These figures carried the vocabulary into American politics, where it took root in academic campus life.

The post-1967 turn did not begin on campus as an abstraction. It moved through newspapers, exile networks, and the language of Third World liberation. SNCC was the first major civil rights organization to make the shift explicit, portraying the Palestinian cause as part of a worldwide anti-colonial struggle. The Black Panthers carried it further, aligning themselves with the PLO and presenting Israel not as an outpost of American imperial power. Eldridge Cleaver’s exile in Algiers made the connection literal. From there, the rhetoric of the American radical Left entered a broader revolutionary circuit, linking Black liberation, Arab nationalism, and anti-Zionism into a shared grammar.

I.F. Stone gave white liberals a different path to the same conclusion, arguing that Israel’s post-1967 occupation could not be reconciled with the humanitarian conscience of the Left. Students for a Democratic Society then turned these ideas into campus doctrine, putting Israel in the anti-war movement’s larger vocabulary of colonialism, militarism, and empire. By the time Noam Chomsky entered the debate as a major intellectual voice, the story was already in place. His critique of the U.S.-Israel alliance and advocacy of binationalism helped give the anti-Zionists a language. What had begun as scattered postwar patchwork became something more durable: a grouping in which Israel was no longer treated as a state with policies to contest; it was a symbol of imperialism.

Anti-Zionism in this period carried an increasingly explicit position: that Israel was not only a state with objectionable policies, but one whose existence was itself a crime. The Nakba provided the foundation—the argument that Israel was built on ethnic cleansing, and that its continued existence required the removal of the Palestinian people. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) gave this position an academic voice, presenting Western and Israeli treatment of Arab peoples as a coordinated project of domination. His The Question of Palestine (1979) applied the same account directly, arguing the national movement was a product of European imperial expansion that had displaced an indigenous population. Palestinian historians like Rashid Khalidi produced works arguing that the founding of Israel was a premeditated act of cleansing, and that the post-1967 occupation was its logical extension. Postcolonial theory absorbed these arguments and generalized them: Israel as settler colonialism and Zionism as racial supremacy. By the 2001 Durban Conference NGO Forum, where the apartheid designation was codified, the vocabulary had been welded into a single charge. Israel was not a state that had done bad things; it was an illegitimate state whose dissolution was the only morally acceptable outcome. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), widely distributed across the Arab world throughout the Cold War, supplied a conspiratorial resource beneath the “respectable” and public versions of the same position.

Herzl’s foundational argument in Der Judenstaat (1896) was that European liberalism could not protect Jews from antisemitism, and that only statehood could. The Arab rejection of partition in 1947 was a direct challenge to that argument on geographic grounds. Stalin’s postwar campaigns against Jewish life in the USSR reflected a parallel concern: that Jewish nationalism, now embodied in a real state, was incompatible with Soviet communism. These rejections developed independently in the late 1940s, but converged at Soviet-sponsored conferences in the late 1960s, where the language of anti-colonialism was attached to the Palestinian cause and pushed through the Non-Aligned Movement, Western trade unions, and academic networks. The BDS campaign, launched in 2005, gave this politics a focus adapted to Western civic life. By 2010, the movement had homes across the range of Western spaces: universities, professional associations, cultural sites, and NGOs.

Antizionism in this period functioned as a way to argue that Israel was a uniquely illegitimate state. Soviet reach provided a ready-made vocabulary. Arab League diplomacy secured UN forum access and economic leverage. Western leftism opened universities, media, and cultural organizations to the argument. Postcolonial theory made the case of Israel into a wider argument about colonial power. Together these converging influences aimed not to reform Israeli policy, but to actively challenge the premise on which the state rested, providing a sophisticated veneer for physical violence and civilian terrorism.

Antizionist language from both the left and right recycled classic antisemitic themes (dual loyalty, media control, governmental manipulation, Nazi equivalence) with the word Zionist substituted for Jew. The Zionism-is-racism connection was successfully absorbed into NGO networks and Western activist culture, each transfer keeping the indictment’s force while presenting it in a sanitized, modern manner. The methodical erasure of Mizrahi history became a necessary component: acknowledging the Jewish expulsion from Arab states, with a number of over 850,000 Jews, disrupts the white-colonizer label entirely. By October 6, 2023, the vocabulary and habits were already in place. What had begun as a Cold War, Arab nationalist, and postcolonial campaign against Israel’s legitimacy had spread across Western civic life. October 7 did not invent this infrastructure: it exposed how ready it was to act.

Modern antizionism names something profoundly different from the philosophical and social movements that preceded it. The October 7, 2023 Hamas massacres in southern Israel, which killed over 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, and took 251 hostages, did not produce the modern movement: it revealed exactly how strong its latent potential was. This potential had been enormously underestimated, and due to the lopsided understanding by which Western populations saw Jew-hatred only as a right-wing problem, many were not expecting the enormous waves of antizionist protests that followed. This demographic tends to view Muslim and Arab groups as victims in society—an understandable sentiment following post-9/11 Islamophobia—and because of this and other factors, they were prime social real estate to take up what they consider an important “political” cause against Israel. What October 7 did was activate those hidden mechanisms, transforming decades-long efforts into a highly visible mass phenomenon. The attacks were absorbed into the symbolic world not as an atrocity, but as an act of resistance and liberation—the logical outcome of a perspective that already characterized Israel as a sinister, illegitimate state. It demanded the complete dissolution of the state itself, and crossed lines into openly excusing the slaughter of civilians. It continues to do so.

Antizionism can be quite difficult to define, especially since people tend to view it as just another iteration of antisemitism. The focus here is its American and Western form. Izabella Tabarovsky says antizionism “speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state; equates it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; disparages Jews for having turned into oppressors.” Shaul Kelner describes it as the “Othering of Jews from the American left.” He calls it a “political mass movement defined not by abstract ideas but by lived praxis” that “finds its social base in the educated, urbanized professional class.”

This lived praxis, he says, is seen when “demonstrators pitch tents, wave flags, chant slogans, block walkways, storm libraries, and confront Jews…occupations of university spaces, boycotts of Israeli scholars, masked harassment of Jewish students, defacement and destruction of Jewish property, disruption of performances by Jewish musicians.” Naya Lekht describes it quite clearly: “Anti-Zionism is a structural form of Jew-hatred, one that reproduces the Jew as villain through the delivery mechanism of anti-Zionist libels.” My position is that all of these are correct. Modern antizionism is a social movement whose praxis involves encampments and protests, targets Jews, and seeks the destruction of Israel using ideas and language influenced by Soviet, Arab, and Western leftist caricatures of Zionism and Israel. It functions by using libels like genocide, apartheid, colonizer, ethnostate, and imperialist to ostracize Jews and delegitimize Israel. It is a sui generis form of Jew-hatred that casts Jews and Israel as white, powerful, racist, and guilty.

Since October 7, this movement has operated through a repertoire that defines itself with the utmost, dogmatic confidence. Encampments occupied university spaces across the United States and Europe in spring 2024, combining tent cities, masked demonstrations, and the severe harassment of Jewish students. Faculty open letters, signed by hundreds of academics at major research universities, portrayed the Hamas attacks as legitimate resistance and Israeli operations as genocide. Student government resolutions passed across North America and Europe called for strict boycotts of Israel. Professional associations in anthropology, linguistics, and other fields advanced boycott measures against Israeli scholars.

Municipal governments in several cities passed resolutions designating Israel an apartheid state. The word genocide circulated as a foregone conclusion in spaces where it had never been applied in any ongoing conflict for a country historically allied with America. Protest slogans including “Globalize the Intifada” and “By Any Means Necessary” circulated in quads and professional conferences—settings where their implications for Jewish safety were casually dismissed. The drive was sustained not by argument, but by practice: by the accumulated weight of boycotts, exclusions, university disruptions, and symbolic performances of solidarity. The antizionist movement was built through marking and isolating an Other.

Antizionism during our time is used as a closed system of outward indictment. It constructs a symbolic version of Zionism as the axis of global injustice, a position in which every available crime converges in the image of Israel, and deploys words like genocide, apartheid, and settler-colonialist not to clarify specific claims, but to condemn. It aggressively ignores any challenges, and prefers a loudspeaker to a podium. The central mechanism is libel by repetition: judgments circulate without serious evidence until they produce the appearance of incontestable reality. Proponents claim their target is a political program, not a people, though it is directed at the only Jewish-majority country in the world. The sheer happenstance of this fact is an overdose of serendipity. In other words, while antizionism is not identical to antisemitism, it is definitely antisemitic.

The hostility that erupted publicly after October 7 did not originate on October 7. Its vocabulary was manufactured by Soviet state propagandists in the 1960s, distributed through front organizations across the Third World and Western left, formalized at events like the 2001 Durban Conference, absorbed into post-colonial academic theory, and pushed through boycott campaigns across Western civic life over the following decades. The specific words in circulation were not arrived at independently by the students and faculty who used them in 2023 and 2024. They inherited a transmission chain running from Soviet Zionologists, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Durban Conference, leftist circles, and postcolonial publishing. What October 7 added was not new vocabulary or a new argument. It added terrifying urgency and scale and collapsed whatever inhibitions had previously kept the movement’s lesser angels out of the academy. The genealogy, running from the Grand Mufti’s wartime collaboration with Nazi leadership through Soviet state propaganda against Zionists and Islamist organizing and postcolonialism, crossed aesthetics and borders repeatedly without changing its object. Each transfer repackaged the same libels in whatever language the receiving culture found most compelling.

Antizionism in our period works as a type-of exclusionary ritual dressed in the language of inclusion. Words like decolonization, anti-racism, and solidarity operate as currencies within universities and cultural hubs, conferring legitimacy on those who use them while enforcing conformity on those who disagree. Jewish students who expressed grief after October 7 found themselves socially isolated, professionally penalized, or physically confronted by peers. Jewish faculty who declined to sign open letters viewing the Hamas attacks as legitimate resistance reported being told their continued participation was unwelcome. The movement, which has grown exponentially since October 7, shares a language with the pre-state philosophical tradition and with post-1948 Soviet and Arab histories. However, it is distinguished from both by its members’ demographics, its organizational reach, and the speed with which it moves. Kelner notes that its social base is the educated professional class, the same demographic that most Jewish Americans inhabit—which means Jewish people are more likely to encounter it in professional settings than the overtly racist antisemitism Jews had as their main threat for quite some time. This reach produces very real, tangible discrimination in sectors where its targets work and organize.

It primarily expresses itself through three ubiquitous vilifications of Israel: “colonizer,” “apartheid,” and “genocide.” It treats these allegations as a fait accompli. The gap between the immense weight of the accusations and the bar they have not met is a defining feature of modern antizionism. It is a system of judgments delivered before a case is made, rationalized circularly through the same accusatory fiat it assumes, and spread through repetition, loaded language, and emotional fervor. Its endpoint is not reform, criticism, or coexistence, but a world emptied of Jewish statehood.