Anti-Zionism

Opposition to Zionism in the Jewish diaspora was surmounted only from the 1930s onward, as conditions for Jews deteriorated radically in Europe and, with the Second World War, the sheer scale of the Holocaust was felt.

Formal anti-Zionism arose in the late 19th century as a response to Theodor Herzl's proposal in The Jewish State (1896) to create an independent country in Palestine for Jews subject to persecution in the "civilized nations" of Europe,[10] but even before Herzl, the idea of Zionism – of Jews as constituting a nation rather than a people constituted by their religion – promoted by Moses Hess (1862) and Leo Pinsker (1882) elicited fierce opposition within European Orthodox Jewry.

[d][e] The Jewish establishment in Germany, France (and its Alliance Israelite Universelle),[f] and America strongly identified with its respective states, a sentiment that made it regard Zionism negatively.

In Palestine, the Agudah sought complete separation from secularists, though one key leader, Rabbi Yosef Sonnenfeld, was amenable to limited cooperation with local Zionists.

[26][m] Kahn showed the letter to Theodor Herzl, who on 19 March 1899 replied to Khalidi in French arguing that both the Ottoman Empire and the non-Jewish population of Palestine would benefit from Jewish immigration.

The Maronite Christian Naguib Azoury, in his 1905 The Awakening of the Arab Nation, warned that the "Jewish people" were engaged in a concerted drive to establish a country in the area they believed was their homeland.

[28] Palestinian and broader Arab anti-Zionism took a decisive turn, and became a serious force, with the November 1917 publication of the Balfour Declaration – which arguably emerged from an antisemitic milieu[o] – in the face of strenuous resistance from two anti-Zionists, Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu, then the (Jewish) Secretary of State for India.

Other than assuring civil equality for all future Palestinians regardless of creed, it promised diaspora Jews territorial rights to Palestine, where, according to the 1914 Ottoman census of its citizens, 83% were Muslim, 11.2% Christian, and 5% Jewish.

According to Henry Laurens, uneasiness among British troops stationed in the region over the task of ostensibly supporting Zionism, something that clashed with their customary paternalistic treatment of colonial populations, accounted for much of the anti-Zionist sentiment that UK military personnel based in Palestine expressed.

[v][42] The energetic arguments of Jacob Israël de Haan on behalf of sectors of the Orthodox yishuv who disagreed with Zionism also played an important role in getting Mandate authorities to grasp that Zionists did not represent the entire Palestinian Jewish community.

[47] Official sponsorship of Zionism, as evidenced by the Balfour Declaration, had been influenced by the communist takeover of Russia, which Anglo-Jewry itself abhorred,[48] in which Jews were alleged to have played a major role.

The Commission found that there was a widespread perception among the Arabs, reflected also among British residents and officials, that the Zionists' attitudes and zealous behaviour exacerbated hostilities, being perceived as "arrogant, insolent and provocative.

[52][z] It dismissed its antagonist Zionism's vision of resolving matters definitively by emigrating to Palestine as marked by a "separatist, chauvinist, clerical and conservative" outlook, values diametrically opposed to Bundism's secular, progressive and internationalist principles.

[53] The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was resolutely anti-Zionist throughout this period, believing that "that the only way Zionism would be able to emerge in Palestine was through a colonial project and through the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians from the land".

[54] Under CPUSA general-secretary Earl Browder, a clear distinction was drawn between anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, which were likened to the activities of white supremacist groups in the U.S. such as the Ku Klux Klan and Black Legion, and Arab resistance to Jewish settlers in Palestine.

Italian anti-Zionists such as Ettore Ovazza reacted by creating their own newspaper, La Nostra Bandiera (Our Flag), whose editorial line maintained that the establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine was anachronistic.

[2] On the eve of the foundation of Israel in 1948, Judah Magnes, president of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, adopted an anti-Zionist position in opposing the imminent establishment of a Jewish state.

His opposition was grounded on a view, anticipated in the 1930s by Arthur Ruppin, that such a state would automatically entail a situation of continuous warfare with the Arab world, an inference Moshe Dayan later endorsed.

But at roughly the same time, in early 1948, Ilya Ehrenburg had been co-opted to write an article for Pravda that set forth what later became the authoritative rationale for Soviet hostility to Zionism, as aspiring to create a dwarfish state of capitalism.

[ak] Anne de Jong asserts that direct resistance to Zionism from the inhabitants of historical Palestine "focused less on religious arguments and was instead centered on countering the experience of colonial dispossession and opposing the Zionist enforcement of ethnic division of the indigenous population.

"[71] Until 1948, according to Derek Penslar, antisemitism in Palestine "grew directly out of the conflict with the Zionist movement and its gradual yet purposeful settlement of the country", rather than the European model vision of Jews as the cause of all the ills of mankind.

Even in the very heartland of Zionism, in Israel, the Jew sits in the midst of an armory, surrounding himself with barbed wire, minefields, and all kinds of weaponry to prevent an onslaught which he knows for certain is coming, sooner or later.

In 1959, the Satmar Hasidic group's leader, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, published the book VaYoel Moshe, which expounds an Orthodox position for anti-Zionism based on a derivation of halacha from an aggadic passage in the Babylonian Talmud's tractate Ketubot 111a.

[130][131][132] Advocates of this notion argue that much of what purports to be criticism of Israel and Zionism is demonization, and has led to an international resurgence of attacks on Jews and Jewish symbols and an increased acceptance of antisemitic beliefs in public discourse.

[144] A 2003–04 European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia report aroused intense controversy over aspects of its provisory definition of antisemitism,[as] which many regarded as ambiguous in blurring distinctions to the point that the two concepts became porous.

Améry did not expect anti-Zionists of his time to take an unbending pro-Israel stance in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; he merely beseeched them to think critically, use common sense, and judge Israel fairly.

[148] 127 Jewish intellectuals in the diaspora and Israel formally protested the French resolution equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, arguing that the definition was injurious to numerous anti-Zionist Jews.

[149][page needed] Kenneth L. Marcus, former staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, identifies four main views on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, at least in North America.[150](p.

[153] Professor Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland, College Park wrote: "One distinctive feature of the secular leftist antagonism to Israel ... was its indignant assertion that it had absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism.

[ay][177] Zionists are able to do this in the United Kingdom, according to Shelby Tucker and Tim Llewellyn, because they are in "control of our media"[178] and "suborned Britain's civil structures, including government, parliament, and the press.