Encountering Zionism
In 1902, a founder of Zionism wrote a utopian novel. Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland imagines European Jews, with the blessing of European imperial powers, conquering Palestine. They make its desert bloom, prompting such universal acclaim (including from the land’s existing inhabitants, even as their villages are destroyed) that the settlers find no need for an army at all. It is a happy tale, reminiscent of America’s Thanksgiving story. Herzl’s Hebrew translator, Nahum Sokolow, titled the book Tel Aviv—juxtaposing a timeless “mound” with a fresh “spring”—and so the name of a city was born. Another of Sokolow’s translation decisions was more subtle, though still influential. He rendered the book’s epigraph: “if you will it, it is no dream.” In this form, the phrase became a kind of Zionist catechism, a statement of intent and ambition for the only nineteenth-century utopian project still standing today. But in Herzl’s original, the German phrase is different, and is more accurately translated as “if you will it, it is no fairy tale.”
Benjamin Moser’s artful counter-history of Zionism, told through a selection of its Jewish critics from the 1890s to 2025, returns repeatedly to Herzl’s original phrase. Moser is fifty, and this book is a kind of growing-up story—a reckoning with the fairy tales that he and many other Jews imbibed as children. There were, in fact, lots of those. They have changed over time. “A land without a people for a people without a land” gave way to a vision of fanatical Palestinians who rejected compromise in 1947 and again in the 1990s, seeking always “to drive the Jews into the sea.” The thought to be avoided was that Jews occupied the position of the oppressor. Palestinians’ violent dispossession, the basis of the State of Israel at its foundation and ever since, was variously denied (“they left their homes willingly”) or batted away as a regional norm (“they ethnically cleansed us too”). The imperative was either not to look at Palestinians or to look through a lens that imagined they deserved their lot.
These evasions are underpinned by a particular telling of Jewish history, which the historian Salo Baron famously criticized as the “lachrymose conception.” It is a story of constant suffering, of anti-Semitism as “the eternal hatred” marking every civilization at every time, so that no resolution is thinkable except escape. By the 1960s, the Holocaust was routinely adduced as the final proof of this story, the ultimate response to Jews who believed we could live in cosmopolitan societies. This tale even explains away its opponents. Today’s global rage against “the Jew among the nations” makes sensewithin the lachrymose conception, and so with some paranoia but without disingenuousness, Zionists can avoid listening to their critics, whose bad faith is taken as read.
Amid an orgy of violence unleashed by the Israeli state in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and the wider region—much of it apparently enjoying the support of most Israelis—people now look at Zionism and ask, “what went wrong?” By identifying a fairy tale, and beginning with Herzl, Moser suggests one answer. It was rotten from the start, which is why it depended on a version of the psychological mechanism Freud called “disavowal,” whereby we tell ourselves stories to avoid facing the wronged people in front of us.
One strength of Moser’s approach is that it attends both to the scale of Israeli violence and to the aggressive policing of dissent with which critics of Israel have become grimly familiar, and which appears here as an attempt to maintain disavowal. Moser portrays twelve witnesses to different moments in Zionism’s history, each of them noticing things that got pushed down into the unconscious of a developing project as it fused colonial triumphalism to the morally consoling work of imagining itself as the victim. He shows, for instance, how Israel’s New Historians and the French polymath Maxime Rodinson exploded the saccharine portrayal of plucky, isolated, idealistic settler colonists before 1967, revealing that Zionists were consistently aggressive in seeking to grab land and project control, and colluded successfully with self-interested local and global powers to dispossess Palestinians. The lawyer Felicia Langer survived the Holocaust and represented Palestinians in Israeli courts before giving up and leaving the country. Moser finds her narrating endless, equally predictable humiliations. Settlers vandalize Palestinian homes and then laugh while the authorities tell the Palestinians it never happened (and, oops, the locks have been changed, so the previous residents better clear out of their family home). Palestinians who distribute leaflets are stripped naked and beaten, then hauled before judges who tell them that it never took place. “Those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate,” J.M. Coetzee wrote.
Moser’s contention is that to face this violence properly would require working our way out of the fairy tale that smothered it for so long—that saw Jewish children like him put coins in boxes to plant trees on stolen land, thinking it a noble endeavor. From the outset––in its bones––this was a nasty as well as an absurd proposition:
Did the European Jews have the right to take over Palestine, a country that toward the end of the nineteenth century was between 95 and 97 percent non-Jewish—a population that, unlike the Europeans, had never harmed the Jews—and then, under the sponsorship of the Western imperial powers, boycott, occupy, exile, ethnically cleanse, and commit genocide against that country’s indigenous population? Did Israel, in other words, have a ‘right to exist’?
Still now, it is striking how rarely anyone in public life in the West feels able to answer “no” to that question. Perhaps for hinting that this ought to be the obvious answer, Moser’s book has provoked a furious response in some quarters. His critics at Haaretz, The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere have suggested that this is all too neat, too totalizing in casting Zionism as a single bad thing, from the Eastern European shtetl in the late nineteenth century to the beaches of Eilat today. There have been many different Zionisms, including binational and other peacenik forms that sought coexistence with Palestinians, they insist. Explaining the ascent of Netanyahu’s peculiar pathologies therefore requires a view of history that is more textured and contingent than Moser’s morality play of absolute good and evil.
On one level, the appeal to contingency is odd. Israel is a peculiarly ideological state, its institutions wedded to an original idea. It has that in common with other settler colonial projects, whose histories reveal a common logicas well as a common reliance on fairy tales of virgin soil and chosen people. The ideas are partly predictable—under apartheid, the Dutch Reformed Church preached that South Africa was a divinely promised land for the white Afrikaners. The outcomes are too. After decrying his supposed anti-Zionist Manicheanism, Moser’s critics accuse him of the Jewish “solipsism” he condemns. They find that his tale of villains and victims merely turns Jews from “a light unto the nations” into uniquely evil people. In fact, by reading Zionism through a wider history of settler colonialism, he does precisely the opposite. All settler colonial projects have reached one of two points: defeat (southern Africa, Algeria) or the elimination of a significant portion of the indigenous population (the Americas, Australasia). They get there, as the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky recognized in a classic 1923 essay, because people don’t much like being colonized, or losing their land, and so antagonism between the settler and the native is structurally unavoidable. Jabotinsky admirers now run the Israeli state, where the decline of socialist and liberal Zionisms might be narrated as Israel’s own form of realism after fairy tales: facing their entanglement with ethnic cleansing, in some cases, with open approval.
It is not, then, that nothing changes. The logic of the colonizer encounters different historical conjunctures, which remake it as it remakes them. Like all abstractions, “settler colonialism” can flatten differences, across time as well as space. But Moser’s book is something like a genealogy, that genre associated with Nietzsche, Foucault, and their successors, which selects episodes from a wider history to highlight strange encounters that then unsettle conventional historical accounts. Moser highlights an encounter between Jews and bourgeois Europe in the high imperial age that spanned from the 1870s to 1914, with its dual doctrines of racial difference and revived national power through colonization. In Zionism, the encounter produced something that has long outlasted that moment. The irony, Isaac Deutscher noted after the Holocaust, was that Jews alighted on a peculiar mode of nationalism just as it was going out of fashion. The question that Moser therefore raises, but does not consistently answer, is how this merger of different times—a late-nineteenth-century fantasy with twenty-first century technologies of surveillance and killing—produces a distinctive challenge now. One answer is that Zionism as a surprisingly assimilationist project has aided in changing how Jews are racialized across the West. Moser’s most provocative and important suggestion is that this change has been a disaster.
Arthur Balfour is notorious to Palestinians for his tenure as Britain’s foreign secretary. In that job, he gave his name to the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting “a national home” for Jews in Palestine. The short document cast Palestinians as a negative in their own land: “non-Jewish inhabitants” with “civil and religious” but not political rights. It was a masterclass in racial thinking, and not from a newcomer. As Moser notes, Balfour had been prime minister in 1905, when the Aliens Act was passed in Parliament. The act introduced immigration controls for the first time in Britain, designed to keep out Jews. Zionism—the improbable project of turning Polish tailors into Mediterranean warriors—therefore answered a problem for him. He said he wanted to export the “age-long miseries” caused to “Western civilization” by the Jews. Better still: Exporting people could mean finding a use for them and transforming them in the process. Britain’s colonial governor in Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs, compared Zionists to the Scottish Protestants whom Britain long ago planted in Ireland as its policemen. In 1920, Winston Churchill contrasted bad “international Jews” like Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg—racialized outsiders seeking to bring down a world of nations—to the good “national Jews” who could, as Zionists, convert their people from troublesome rebels into loyal agents of British interests in a crucial region.
Jewish Zionists were assistants in that agenda. It was more than a marriage of convenience. The historian Michael Stanislawski has chronicled how Zionism’s founders were infatuated with late-nineteenth-century European bourgeois images of masculinity, which they hoped to mimic. Herzl’s early hero was not Moses but Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose Suez Canal combined buccaneering machismo with modern engineering and imperial statecraft in the service of capital accumulation. By contrast, Moser stresses that Herzl found Jews hard to like, and wanted to see them transformed to be more like members of the society that hated them. Zionism is too rarely treated as a very effective case of internalized racism, as European anti-Semitism morphed from religious to national discomfort, casting Jews less as Jesus-killers in Christendom than as rootless cosmopolitans in a new world of nation-states. The early Zionist response to anti-Semitism agreed that “Semitism” was a problem; something had to be done about these insider-outsiders, floating between the nooks and crannies of Western civilization. Like any good European bourgeois, Herzl was an assimilationist who once dreamed of converting all of Europe’s Jews to Christianity. Completing the thought: Zionism was a way of throwing out the Semitic condition by grasping the ironic need for Jews to leave Europe in order to become more like the Europeans, with their national identities tied to colonizing states. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, even adopted “rootless cosmopolitans” as a term of disdain for diaspora Jews.
Perhaps the final fairy tale of Zionism, then, is its image of Jewish power that masks a very goyisch project, whose condition of possibility has been Western imperial sponsorship: first British, now American. The Zionist narrative stretches from the Davidic kingdom through Bar Kokhba’s revolt against the Romans to the daily Amidah, with its hope for Messianic redemption, and the last line of the Seder service (“next year in Jerusalem!”) to tell an unbroken story of Jewish yearning at last fulfilled. Like everyone else, Jews count tribalism among their traditions, which Zionism reworked; but why did the project of colonizing Palestine to establish a secular but Jewish nation-state there not emerge for almost two millennia of exile, and then burst onto the scene? In Moser’s alternative telling, more explanatory power is afforded to the ideals of late imperial Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.
Take that 1902 text by Herzl, Altneuland. The fusion of the old and the new is a key Zionist theme, picturing the revival of a long-suffering tribe, but the American cultural historian Carl E. Schorske long ago argued that it emerged above all from the fusion of imperialism and romanticism in fin-de-siècle Vienna. “Nostalgia,” which was treated as a disease in the early nineteenth century, was considered a virtue among French settlers in Algeria by 1900. Love of their past coexisted with the ambition to devastate and remake foreign worlds, positing both modernity and history as things that only civilized people had. That intellectual move has fueled the Zionist encounter with Palestinians, casting them as both backward (failing to develop the soil) and as a false nation, since they supposedly lacked the splendid origins of the Israelites. Like Moser, I was taught this as a Jewishview; Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, which landed on my Bar Mitzvah gift pile, makes the case adroitly. In truth, we all know that the idea of productive land left barren by backward people is a typically European justification for colonial dispossession. But it comes as a shock to learn that Cecil Rhodes, who drove Africans from their land and the electoral rolls, the better to steal their diamonds—and to whom Herzl wrote fan-mail—also insisted that there was archaeological evidence in southern Africa of the European civilizations that had originally ruled there.
Against all this, Moser’s opening chapter on the Haredi shtetl rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamares offers an inspiring missive. In the late 1890s, Tamares was unusual among strictly Orthodox Jews for his attraction to Zionism. By World War I, that feeling had definitively soured. Witnessing the cascading violence of European states, Tamares recast diaspora as a dual blessing for Jews—they could refuse complicity in the murderous order of nations, while standing in potential solidarity with other stateless outsiders in every nation. Zionism chose the path of assimilation into the West instead. Moser finds, in the later twentieth century, the Brazilian Jewish journalist Helena Salem noting that Palestinians had more in common with the kind of Jewish history that Tamares celebrated than Israelis did. With their vocabulary of might and civilization, Israelis sounded more like Brits or Germans: Herzl’s project all along.
That brings us to Moser’s most intentionally provocative chapter—about Hannah Arendt. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt rooted the Holocaust in a moment of crisis for the European order of nation-states, where immiserated Germany’s project of national revival targeted with particular loathing the Jews (like the Roma) as an archetypically pre-national, transnational people. That text featured few, mostly approving, references to Zionism. But a decade later, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt suggested that Zionist relations with the Third Reich had been murkier than Zionists later liked to imagine. Her argument has usually been read in philosophically general terms, as a point about the ubiquity of dirty hands amid atrocities, but Moser finds something else too. Eichmann’s Israeli judges tried him for “crimes against the Jewish people,” which horrified Arendt; to really refuse Nazi thinking, he should have been tried for crimes against humanity. Moser reads Arendt refusing to see Nazis and Zionists only as opposites, since they shared an idea of intractable Jewish separateness from others. This was not just theoretical; Moser also profiles the Egyptian Jewish Communist Ahmad Sadiq Saad and the Iraqi-born Israeli historian Avi Shlaim. In quite different ways in Cairo and in Baghdad, Zionism destroyed age-old diverse worlds with its insistence instead on importing enmities honed in the West, telling Jewish and Muslim neighbors that they did not belong together. Nationalism was profoundly destructive for Jews, as people who had always lived in the interstices of nations.
Arendt disrupted an emerging Israeli origin story, and so—as Moser chronicles—a vicious campaign was organized, casting her as an anti-Semite in an early instance of a now-familiar sequence. She was not alone in seeing this similarity (Zeev Sternhell, the Israeli historian of fascism, suggested that “labor Zionism” was an analogue to “national socialism”) but Moser knows the Nazi connection is still the most challenging for many. Reviewing the book in The New Yorker––where Arendt first published her thoughts on Eichmann—Isaac Chotiner leveled the central charges of Manicheanism and solipsism while adding a long demolition job on the empirical claims about Nazi-Zionist collaboration in the Arendt chapter. Chotiner is widely celebrated as a forensic fact-finder whose interviews since October 2023 have skewered various apologists for Israeli violence. He brings that skill to bear in dissecting Moser’s quotations, and he finds many of them wanting. The wider politics of his intervention are more muted, but also perhaps more interesting. He contrasts Moser’s book with another answer to the “what went wrong?” question, from the Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov, which finds democratic thoughts jostling with colonial ones in the history of Zionism. Connecting Zionism to Nazism, by contrast, seems to move against this kind of nuance. But one important similarity is that Nazism, like Zionism, has been removed in popular Western readings from its wellspring. The Holocaust is commemorated as a unique evil outside history, or inserted within a history of anti-Semitism alone. Hitler’s admiration for the British Empire and for America’s Jim Crow racial thinking, continuities of thought and personnel between German colonialism in Namibia and the extermination camps in Poland, not to mention the distinctly settler colonial aspects of Lebensraum —depicted with remarkable power in Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest—all are effaced by a dominant mode of Holocaust remembrance that strives to commemorate a singular atrocity without asking any awkward question about the broader ideas of “race” and nation whose entanglement made the Final Solution thinkable. To say that Nazism and Zionism both emerged from an anti-cosmopolitan idea is important because it clarifies the problem, which is the aspiration to the separation of ‘races.’ Moser narrates the striving to separate Jews from gentiles. He publishes at a moment when other fantasies of separation increasingly dominate the politics of Western countries again amid renewed angst about their decline.
The choice then comes into clearer view. It is not only whether Jews should found a state in Palestine by ethnic cleansing, or even—more fundamentally—whether Jews should be nationalists at all. It is also whether we should seek to join the civilization that persecuted us for two millennia and then found a use for us in dominating others. In attending to that question, anti-Zionism is not enough. Two chapters of Moser’s twelve demonstrate the problem. They cover a Jewish member of the British Cabinet that approved the Balfour declaration, Edwin Montagu, and a Reform rabbi based in Houston, Hyman Judah Schachtel. Both opposed Zionism because of the old assimilationist worry, that it would make Jews foreigners in the imperial civilization to which these men proclaimed their loyalty. Schachtel’s synagogue shocked other Jews by openly scorning almost every Jewish tradition (kashrut, Shabbat) that distinguished them from the American Way of Life. The synagogue expressed its congregants’ opposition to Zionism by insisting, amid the racial order of the American South: “Our race is Caucasian.”
Moser is least persuasive when, in the construction of a broad anti-Zionist canon, he elides the differences between this assimilationist anti-Zionism and more resolutely universalist, anti-nationalist kinds. He pleads that Montagu was skeptical of British imperial violence in Ireland and India. But while Tamares saw World War I as evidence of the senseless slaughter marking the order of nation-states in which he wanted no part, Montagu was minister of munitions in Britain and organizing the war effort. While radicals even in Britain were organizing campaigns for “home rule” in India, Montagu was the secretary of state responsible for ruling it from London. On the eve of the Cold War, Schachtel’s anti-Zionist synagogue attracted letters of support from a Jewish American soldier who wrote: “my nationality was always AMERICAN.” A businessman in Ohio wrote saying the same, and a Navy commander heralded “the first ‘All-American’ declaration by a Jewish congregation.” This is very different from Tamares’s celebration of Jewish exclusion from the world of bordered communities as an opening for solidarity with other outsiders—or Jacob Israël de Haan, the anti-Zionist Jewish leader murdered in 1924 in Jerusalem by Zionists, whose sympathy for Orthodoxy coexisted with his homosexuality, which Moser suggests brought him into contact with Palestinian men and sympathy with the marginalized.
Montagu died in 1924. Schachtel lived to see the State of Israel, and quickly forgot his opposition to the whole business. Moser reads that generously, as an ageing man giving up on a losing fight. Another option is that Schachtel’s anti-Zionism ceased to make sense, grounded in a worry about Jews being cast as disloyal to American empire by claiming fidelity instead to a foreign nationalism. Today across the US, synagogues often place two national flags right next to the holy ark: the stars and stripes, and the blue and white. They pray for the American president and for the Israel Defense Forces. There is rarely now a contradiction between supporting the US and its aircraft carrier. Bourgeois anti-Zionist assimilationism, whether hard (secular) or soft (Reform), was never the answer, because it endorsed the basic principle at stake here, turning Jews from outsiders into loyal foot soldiers of the West. And so it folded into Zionism, once Zionism proved itself faithful to empire. This is a world away from those, like Ahmad Sadiq Saad, who in Cairo opposed Zionism out of two ferociously connected commitments, to diversity and to anti-imperialism, against the ideas of “race” and nation that structure the West. Wanting no part in that order, Jewish anti-Zionism can also avoid narcissism by grounding itself in a wider anti-colonial politics that stitches together communities of resistance on every continent into a heterogenous tribe of tribes, the wretched of the earth and all who champion their freedom.
Moser might reply that he was trying to write something slightly broader than a manifesto. He wanted to show the breadth of Jewish opposition to Zionism over time, not just to celebrate the particular anti-Zionists whose politics we might find most likeable. In one respect, that project yields rich rewards. The book opens with a series of Biblical injunctions that feel eerily relevant to Zionism. Left-wing Jews have tended to pay little attention to Orthodox anti-Zionism. Indeed, as the political theorist Julie E. Cooper has stressed in her critique of the “diasporist” Jewish theorists Judith Butler and Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, the diasporic posture of Orthodoxy has often explicitly endorsed a political quietism antagonistic to leftwing projects of social transformation. Eastern European Hasidism, which began as a movement of rural mysticism against urban-dominated Jewish Orthodoxy in the eighteenth century, usually came to see Marxism and Zionism as twin foes. Like other rabbis, Hasidim wanted Jews to stay in the synagogue and not make trouble. The Talmud’s “three oaths,” which motivate Satmar Hasidic anti-Zionism, instruct Jews to not “rebel against the nations.” Jewish left-wing history-telling has long featured the rebellious archetype, a young person casting off parental conservatism by leaving the Shabbat table to throw stones at fascists.
The chapter on Tamares highlights a different orientation, which might be more rewarding now. Orthodox Jews, stressing Jewish separation from the European idea of the nation-state, often came to different answers than Jewish leftists who defined “my people” more broadly than membership in a tribe. But given that Herzl advertised his services in providing a European “wall against Asia,” against “barbarism,” and Netanyahu now calls himself the vanguard of “Western civilization” in a savage wilderness, it might be time to return with more sympathy and sensitivity to those religious traditions that refused such assimilation.
This point is not limited to anti-Zionism. In an essay for Jewish Currents—once associated with the Communist Party and today perhaps the richest stream of leftwing Jewish discussion in North America—Avi Garelick recounts how Reform opposition to the laws of rest on Shabbat functioned in America at the turn of the twentieth century as an important tool of class power, as Jewish employers sought to cajole their Jewish workers into working longer, against a nascent alliance between unions and Orthodoxy. The idea of Shabbat, which prefigures the Messianic era of leisure and care by codifying one day free from labor and the touch of money, is a powerful rallying cry that Reform Judaism sought to suffocate, along with the very idea of the Messiah. The opposition to assimilation here need not––shouldnot––proceed from a claim about Jewish superiority, or essential difference; rather, the goal is to excavate various modes of thinking and feeling that provide routes out of attachment to the violent civilization of empire and capital, founded on the theft of space and time.
Perhaps too much credit has been given to Isaac Deutscher’s classic argument that we should draw inspiration mostly from “non-Jewish” Jews—those left on the margins of the margins by their rejection of the religious particularity of their tribe, striving instead for universalism under the defining shadow of exclusion. It is worth remembering that it is the Hasidim of Mea Shearim, rather than the sunbathing liberals of Tel Aviv, who are now the only numerically significant cluster of Jews in Palestine without a doctrinal commitment to the Israeli nation-state, and so who might become (there is a mountain of work to be done) partners of the Palestinian liberation struggle. In October 2023, Zionists bombed one of Gaza’s major roads, which is named for Saladin. That same Medieval Muslim warrior who defended Palestine from the Crusaders counted as his personal physician Maimonides, known to Orthodox Jews as the Rambam, perhaps the central codifier of modern Rabbinic Judaism. Here, in a world before the rise of “the West” and then that awful mid-century invention, “Judeo-Christian civilization,” Semites stood together against Europe’s violence.
In contesting Zionist thinking, the Jewish religious tradition is endowed with powerful resources. Remember that UN vote in 1947, which begins the Zionist myth of peaceable, compromising Jews facing off against intransigent Arabs? It was a vote by outsiders to partition a country. There can be few clearer retorts than the Biblical story of Solomon, who found two women claiming to be the mother of a baby and so offered to split the baby between the two. The real mother screamed in horrified objection. The Palestinian people did the same, when Zionists accepted partition as a step on the path of conquest.
Religious Jews as varied as the Hungarian-American spiritual leader Joel Teitelbaum and the Israeli theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz have long stressed that the Israelites were exiled from the land for their sins; the promise was contingent on good behavior. Something conceptually fundamental is implied here, which makes the Bible a treasure against the present hegemony of Zionism. G-d and the prophets offer a transcendent basis for truth beyond the tribe itself: a constant critical standpoint that wags its finger at the sins of the children of Israel. Think of Moses’s fury at his people worshipping a golden calf, or the prophet Isaiah, whose words Orthodox Jews read every year on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, when Jews fast and remember that Isaiah condemned the Israelites for fasting and considering themselves pious without “letting the oppressed go free.” One moral to draw from the story of Zionism is that suffering is not always ennobling, and love of the tribe—however oppressed it might once have been—is not enough. Traditions need devices for looking beyond themselves.
Why write a book that claims to be for Palestinians but is all about Jews? Have Jews not, as Moser put it in an essay he wrote for Equator, “talked enough about ourselves?” The pressure to find Jewishanti-Zionists, as if Palestinian ones are not enough, seems to reproduce the colonial hierarchy of who matters, which (in this case) Zionism established. There is a tactical argument for this perhaps, for uncoupling Jewishness from Zionism in the face of the conflation that functions pervasively to charge anti-Zionists with anti-Semitism. And there is a point of principle too: Resisting Zionism, or any racism, means refusing that essentialism which holds that by virtue of their imagined “race” people can only be what they currently are.
Between tactics and principles, there is also a pressing strategic rationale for this book. To the evident irritation of some reviewers, it is not an intellectual history of Zionism, or a political history of the State of Israel. All it does is identify two thoughts, “race” and “Western civilization,” that some Jews thought they could import and combine with Jewish ideas of peoplehood, but which other Jews knew spelled trouble. That is a lesson relevant for many people, not just Jews, since valorizing one’s separateness and seeking protection from power are two very common responses to experiences of oppression and precarity. The grimly universalist lesson is that none of us has pure traditions, safe from combination with the worst prevailing moods. Each case is different; Afropessimists, for example, share with Zionists the lachrymose conception of history, making themselves the constitutive (that is, the singular)Other of civilization and so ruling out alliances among the oppressed, but in postmodern times they have traded Zionist optimism about undoing that original wound for an apparent rejection of politics itself. For its part, Zionism today incorporates not just nineteenth-century colonialism but also the late twentieth-century re-racialization of Jews—cast less and less as the West’s foundational Other after 1945 and more as its model minority, once we became geopolitical allies amid shifts in the class position of many Jews too. That is now entangled in twenty-first century racism. Anxieties about Western decline are affixed to the image of the Muslim migrant, the outsider within whose savagery is illustrated by their anti-Semitism. In this story, Jews are not just a model minority but a protected minority of a West whose moral credentials are assured (since everyone remembers Auschwitz) by its philo-Semitism. The civilization can therefore express its anxieties about decline in morally righteous terms. Churchill’s 1920 project has succeeded, converting some Jews into fortress guards for the West, and that has opened up previously unthinkable ideological avenues for Christendom. If the State of Israel pioneered the charge of anti-Semitism against its anti-colonial critics, the wider political right and center across the West now finds that anti-Semitism is a plausible charge against new lefts, which include once-colonized migrants and their descendants. Identifying Jews with the West is a strategy of human shielding for protecting the fading West, not Jews, who bear the consequences when people shoot up synagogues.
“Fading” may be the crucial term there. The American empire, which gives more military aid to the State of Israel than to any other state, won’t last forever. What future, then, for those who have let themselves be its protected minorities, wielded as swords against its enemies? When Donald Trump began his war against Iran, his bombs littered the border with Iraq. US officials briefed the media that they hoped Kurdish militant groups would stream over that border under US air cover to invade and fragment Iran, dying in place of more precious US soldiers. Trump personally telephoned the leaders of several such militias. It was an uncertain moment, but the Kurds did not take the bait. They had risen up against Saddam Hussein on the promise of US support in 1991, and then they were massacred; they did the same against Bashar al-Assad, with US weapons, until the White House threw in its lot with Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Al-Qaeda man, and abandoned them. This time, the Kurds had the foresight to see that being the protected minority of a violent imperial civilization is a sure way to get yourself killed. Many of us must learn that lesson.
