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ANTI-ZIONISM: A Jewish History, by Benjamin Moser
Some 60 years ago, the historian Carl E. Schorske judged Theodor Herzl’s founding of Zionism to be a symptom of liberalism’s failure at the turn of the 20th century. Rational politics had given way to a new style of leadership — one based on myth, emotion, resentment and rage. Schorske provocatively linked Herzl with the Pan-German nationalist Georg Ritter von Schönerer and the antisemitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger. They all were practicing “politics in a new key,” he wrote, and the music was loud and threatening.
Benjamin Moser, the prizewinning biographer of Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector, doesn’t include Schorske (or many of the other historians who have since written on this topic) in the bibliography of his new book, “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History.” He does tell us how dismayed he felt to learn in recent years that his “grandfather’s Herzl” was not such a heroic figure after all.
“Much of that discomfort,” he writes, “was the sense of betrayal that comes from feeling duped.” He recalls a conversation with a friend who argued for the fundamental injustice of Israel’s existence, but for years he “lingered in the halfway house of liberal Zionism,” with hopes that with reforms “an authentic democracy might yet emerge.”
Then, in 2016, after attending a Palestinian literary festival and touring the West Bank, he came to realize that the whole peace process was “something for patsies, for chumps.” He tells us in an introduction rife with self-righteousness that he has now “become a man” and “put away childish things.” And so with great solemnity he dedicates his book to the Palestinian people: “Grant to them the Fatherland of their desire, and make them again citizens of Paradise.”
There are few topics more controversial than the place of Israel in the world today. There are critics and defenders armed with absolute certainty, and there are others who object to the brutal policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government without chanting “Free, free Palestine!”
Moser belongs in the camp of absolute certainty. Notwithstanding his subtitle, he sees Zionism “as merely a chapter in the broader history of Western colonialism and imperialism.” He organizes his critique of Israel’s legitimacy through profiles of a dozen Jewish intellectuals, artists and activists who were anti-Zionists. In the process, he reveals what he claims has been a hidden history because he wants Jews who reject Israel to “feel less alone.”
But the fact that the Jewish history of anti-Zionism escaped Moser’s attention does not mean that it was hidden. For years, popular philosophers like Judith Butler and mainstream historians like David Myers have written about the intellectual tradition that celebrated diaspora culture and rejected core tenets of Zionism. Jews have long debated the importance of Palestine to their culture, yet Moser ignores most of them, unless they champion Palestinian nationalism.
Many Jewish thinkers have argued that the experience of exile helped forge a moral vision of the world untainted by the narrow-mindedness of nationalism. Beginning in the mid-19th century, members of Judaism’s Reform movement, especially assimilated German Jews, argued that Jews should blend into the countries in which they lived (and often thrived) and do nothing to stand out. This seems to be Moser’s preferred version of Judaism.
The refugees from pogroms in the East, whom he categorizes as settler-colonialists when they land in Palestine, were often disdained by the German-descended Jews, who wanted to be just like everyone else. Moser quotes a 1920 statement from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations: “Modern political Zionism came into being as a result of the tears, the suffering and the despair of the Jewish people in the 19th century, whereas Reform Judaism arose out of faith and hope and confidence.”
He charts how thinkers from “the sensitive rabbi” Aaron Samuel Tamares in the first part of the 20th century to his friend the photographer Nan Goldin today have confronted the violent founding, expansion and maintenance of the State of Israel. Of course, the often repeated claim about Israel, that it was established by a people without a land in a land without a people, is now widely recognized as false.
There were people in Palestine, to be sure, and via his discussion of his profile subjects from around the world, Moser recounts the bloody history of Israel’s origins. There are massacres and war crimes, bombings and coldblooded assassinations. It is heartbreaking to read about the countless violations of Palestinian rights and about lives taken in the name of Jewish nationalism. And Moser writes as someone whose heart has been broken by his illusions about Jews, and who now wants to make amends by praising Palestinians. He has an evil perpetrator and a virtuous victim.
Despite his declared aversion to Zionist claims to the Promised Land, Moser still manages to wrap himself in sentimental attachment to land-based nationalism. He has discovered settler-colonial theory, and knows that Europeans are bad and non-Europeans are good. He writes approvingly of the Brazilian journalist Helena Salem, who argued that Europe merely exported its Jewish problem to the Middle East, and made the Arab world foot the bill for the Holocaust.
He has apparently convinced himself that there was no significant antisemitism in the Muslim world before 1948, so 19th-century pogroms go unmentioned and inconvenient facts like the Farhud massacre of 1941 are dismissed as minor aberrations. Antisemitism in this account is caused by Jews. Since Jews were a minority of the inhabitants of Palestine in the 1940s, Moser waves away their historic presence in the region. The existence there for centuries of Jewish states is called a “brief” episode of political sovereignty. (A review of “Anti-Zionism” in The New Yorker found multiple errors and distortions in Moser’s account.)
Moser’s cast of anti-Zionists offer various criticisms of Israel, from denying the rights of Jews to move to the Holy Land to expressing revulsion at the brutality of the nation’s founding. Some of these critics, he seems almost embarrassed to admit, believed at various times in a two-state solution, or in some other version of peace in which people of different faiths and ethnicities could find a way to share the land. He applauds when they arrive at what he sees as the truth, which is that Jews are colonizers without a right to be there.
Hannah Arendt, despite her deep reservations about Israel, fits uneasily into this simplistic narrative. She certainly didn’t consider the children she saved in the 1930s by facilitating their departure for Palestine to be settler-colonialists. But Moser is less interested in this fact than in what he sees as a Zionist conspiracy to ruin her reputation decades later, following her critique of Jewish leaders’ actions during the Shoah.
The musical key of “Anti-Zionism” is not the mythic anti-rationalism of turn-of-the-century Vienna, but the siren sound of reductionist academic theory. Confronted with the war crimes of Israeli leaders, Moser sees only inevitable expansionist violence in Zionism’s colonial project. Perceiving only angelic indigeneity, he is blind to violence against Jews. Even the sickening cruelties of Oct. 7 are discussed mostly in terms of the ways the attacks fed Israeli propaganda — and resulted in a drop in demand for Goldin’s photographs.
Moser is confident that dialogue is for dupes and that with his dualism of good and evil he has achieved “the correct understanding, which is that there is an occupier and a people under occupation.” In fact, he has transposed the filial piety of his youth to new “childish things.”
ANTI-ZIONISM: A Jewish History | By Benjamin Mose
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