Notes on the Anti-Zionist Legacy Within Jewish Tradition
“This city is our Jerusalem. This country is our Palestine.” Excerpts from a talk on the long Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism.
Rev. J. Mark Davidson
8/13/20264 min read
What follows are excerpts from a talk I gave on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Triangle Free Press:
Many Americans wrongly assume that to be Jewish is, by definition, to support Israel, and that all Jews are Zionists. As a result, many Americans are reluctant to publicly criticize the actions of the government of Israel or the ideology of Zionism for fear of being perceived as antisemitic. They do not know that one of the most devastating critiques of Zionism, and the very idea of “the Jewish state of Israel,” can be found within Jewish tradition itself. Throughout much of Jewish history, the most strident critics of the idea of Jewish nationalism were Jews themselves, both religious Jews and secular Jews, both Orthodox Jews and atheistic communist Jews. All fiercely opposed it. This scathing anti-Zionism goes back over 3000 years, and carries forward to the present day. Anti-Zionism was the majority opinion of world Jewry for over 1900 years. Organized Jewish political Zionism as we know it today is a relatively new phenomenon. It has been on the rise only for the past 170 years. Since the savagery of Israel’s Cast Lead military assault on Gaza in 2008, Israel has lost defenders, Zionism has been weakening, and anti-Zionism, largely as a response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza (2023-present), is accelerating rapidly. Historians of social change and scholars who have followed Israel very closely are now observing the unraveling of the Zionist project in Israel. The Zionist settler-colonial project, the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel, is coming apart at the seams. Its internal contradictions and its terrible reputation in the world are catching up with Israel. It may take a few more decades, but the trend is unmistakable.
A little historical context: when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Talmud, one of Judaism’s sacred texts, teaches that the Jewish people accepted their exile, and made a symbolic oath to God that they would never return en masse and by force to Palestine. In the long waiting for the Messiah to deliver them, the Jews were to assimilate among the nations of the world, which is what they did for 1800 years. The blueprint for Jewish life in the Diaspora was laid out by the prophet Jeremiah in the first exile in Babylon in 6th c. BCE: “Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters, find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage. Increase in numbers, do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
For centuries, the whole idea of a “Jewish nation” sounded utterly bizarre to Jewish ears. It was anathema to Jews everywhere. The phrase in the Seder ritual, “Next year, Jerusalem!” was always “the heavenly Jerusalem,” always understood to be symbolic, a stirring of messianic hope, not a plan to uproot and actually migrate to Palestine. Here, for example, is an instance of American Judaism without the slightest hint of Jewish nationalism. This is from a liturgy from the inaugural worship service of the First Reform Synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina. Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim was the very first Reform Synagogue in the United States. The year of this service was 1841: “This house of worship is our Temple. This city is our Jerusalem. This country is our Palestine.”
Two contemporary critics of Israel and its underlying ideology of Jewish nationalism illustrate the point in our own time. Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, now a relentless anti-Zionist critic of Israel, says, “There is no Jewish nation. The Jews form a special religious community. They should cultivate the ancient Hebrew language, study their rich literature, know their history, cherish their faith, and make the greatest sacrifices for it. They should hope and trust in the wisdom of divine providence, the promises of their prophets, and the development of humankind so that the sublime ideals and truths of Judaism will gain the day. They should amalgamate with the nations whose citizens they are, fight in their battles, and promote their institutions for the welfare of the whole.”
Rabbi Elhanan Beck is a member of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, a rigorously observant form of Orthodox Judaism. You see Meturei Karta men and boys at pro-Palestine demonstrations, especially in New York, with their full beards and side curls, long black coats and hats, notably also wearing Palestinian kuffiyehs, and carrying posters that say, “Zionism is NOT Judaism,” “Israel is a Sin Against God”, and “Jews Should Be Living In the State of Palestine.” From this deeply-grounded Jewish perspective, the ethnostate of Israel should be dismantled. They believe the wickedness Israel has committed against the Palestinians is rooted in Zionist rebellion against God. Zionism is a jagged break from Judaism. Zionism is antithetical to Judaism. This religiously-based critique basically says that Zionism is a political movement guilty of severing Jews from their essential roots in divine teachings. Uprooted from their moral and spiritual foundations, they have succumbed to evil, committing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and the supreme crime against humanity, genocide.
I hope these snapshots from Jewish history give you some understanding that organized political Zionism has been an outlier in Jewish tradition. There have always been anti-Zionist Jews, or to put it differently, Jews who did not want their Jewish faith and identity associated with Zionism, with the idea that Jews should have a state of their own. They worried that becoming a nation-state would, in the end, spell trouble for the Jewish people. That getting entangled with nationalism, armies, and wars would not be good for them, much less for non-Jews under their control. A growing community of anguished young Jews in the United States, Europe, and Canada have witnessed what Israel has become, what it has done, and they vociferously reject the Zionist project of supremacy, ethnonationalism, and oppressive domination of the Palestinian people. Next week, we will take up excerpts from the talk that explain Christian Zionism.