[2] Particularly, Neturei Karta's relationship with Iran and its attendance at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust drew condemnation from other Orthodox Jewish movements.

The name Neturei Karta means "city guards" in Aramaic[3] and is derived from an aggadta recorded in several Talmudic texts, including y. Hagigah 1:7.

[citation needed] In 1921, some of the most devout of the Ashkenazi Old Yishuv formed the Haredi Council of Jerusalem as a counterpoint to the Chief Rabbinate, created by the British Mandatory Palestine government.

[3] The Aguda movement represented by the Haredi Council opposed the formation of a Jewish political state in the Land of Israel and discouraged its European members from immigrating to Palestine.

Along with Rabbi Aharon Katzenelbogen, Blau split with the Aguda in 1937 and co-founded Chevrat HaChayim, quickly renamed Neturei Karta.

Neturei Karta is notoriously vague about its size, and there are no official population statistics available, in 1971, it was reported to consist of several hundred families in Israel and throughout the diaspora.

[10] Haaretz estimated in 2024 that the group had a membership in the low thousands, predominantly in Israel, but also in diaspora locations with large populations of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

[3] The group's strong anti-Zionist stance and controversial tactics place Neturei Karta on the fringe, even in Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox circles.

[2][11][8] The Satmar movement criticized Neturei Karta for attending the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust in Tehran in 2006.

[12] During the Israel-Hamas war, Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum, one of the two Grand Rebbes of Satmar, condemned Neturei Karta, calling the group's support for Hamas "a terrible desecration of God's name."

Neturei Karta subsequently issued a leaflet criticising the Chabad movement for its relations with "the filthy, deplorable traitors – the cursed Zionists that are your friends."

The leaflet also criticised the invitation of Israeli state officials to the funerals of the victims, claiming that they "uttered words of heresy and blasphemy."

[8] Neturei Karta stress what is said in the mussaf Shemona Esrei ("The Standing Prayer") of Yom Tov, that because of their sins, the Jewish people went into exile from the Land of Israel ("umipnei chatoeinu golinu meiartzeinu").

[3] Neturei Karta believe that the exile of the Jews can end only with the arrival of the Messiah, and that human attempts to establish Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel are sinful.

One provision of the pact was that the Jews would not rebel against the non-Jewish world that gave them sanctuary; a second was that they would not immigrate en masse to the Land of Israel.

On the Jewish holiday of Purim, Neturei Karta members have routinely burned Israeli flags in celebrations in cities such as London, Brooklyn and Jerusalem.

Chief among these was Moshe Hirsch, leader of an activist branch of Neturei Karta, who served in Yasser Arafat's cabinet as Minister for Jewish Affairs.

Neturei Karta supports a sovereign Palestinian state in the present, however, argues for complete Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land upon the arrival of the Messiah.

[27][26][28] They call for the return of all Palestinian refugees to "their rightful land" and attribute the degradation of Jewish-Muslim relations, as well as the bloodshed of both Arabs and Israeli Jews, to Zionism, claiming that before the creation of Israel, both peoples lived together in peace.

[32] Upon their return to Israel, Israeli authorities arrested two of the Neturei Karta members for unlawful entry to Area A of the West Bank.

[8] In October 2005, Neturei Karta leader Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss issued a statement criticising Jewish attacks on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"[36] In March 2006, several members of a Neturei Karta's faction visited Iran, where they met with Iranian leaders, including the vice-president, and praised Ahmadinejad for calling for the "Zionist regime" occupying Jerusalem to vanish from the pages of time.

We stress that there are hundreds of thousands Jews around the world who identify with our opposition to the Zionist ideology and who feel that Zionism is not Jewish, but a political agenda.