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Anti-Zionism
Abstract
Historians have frequently struggled to produce satisfactory historical accounts of anti-Zionism. The term itself is often characterized as largely indistinguishable from some generic political opposition to Zionism or classified as a built-in component of a larger ideological worldview. In this chapter, I argue that any attempt to historicize anti-Zionism must move past both contingent and essentialist explanations to treat it as a distinct, self-conscious ideology with a history of its own. Using brief case studies of anti-Zionism in its Jewish, Arab, and Soviet variants, I demonstrate how anti-Zionism developed dialectically in relationship to antisemitism over the course of the entire twentieth century.
This dissertation outlines continuity and change in Swedish radical nationalism – a political ideology predominantly focused on connecting an imagined people with a distinct territory. The study focuses on how religion has been understood within the landscape of Swedish radical nationalism between 1988 and 2020. The landscape is termed radical-nationalist since its central articulation is nationalism. It is radical because of its actors’ urge to return nationalism to its roots, without compromising with other political ideologies, and because it is seen as a radical solution to the problems of national degeneration. The Swedish radical-nationalist landscape consists of ideological formations that are culture-oriented, race-oriented, and identity-oriented. These formations animate the actors moving across the landscape. Three such actors are analyzed in the dissertation, each having its own history and distinct position in relation to the ideological formations: the political party Sweden Democrats, the national socialist organization Nordic Resistance Movement, and the online influencer The Golden One. The study builds on a theoretical shift, usually labeled critical religion theory, which departs from religion as an analytical category to instead focus on the various definitions of, and ideas about, religion among the actors themselves. Religion is analyzed as a political concept within Swedish radical nationalism. The terminology of political concepts is borrowed from the theory of ideological morphology, where such concepts are located on an axis between center and periphery of a political ideology, from core concepts via adjacent concepts to peripheral concepts. In Swedish radical nationalism, the concept of religion is a demarcation against them, external enemies as well as internal traitors. Religion functions as an essential exclusionary mechanism aimed at imagined Others who are assumed to, in varying degrees, be superstitious, conspiratorial, fanatical, or divisive. However, the concept of religion also construes us, an imagined people, through ideas of a shared collective unconscious and a Volksgeist that via paganism and Christianity travels from a distant, and often forgotten, past. In conclusion, religion is recurrently one of the adjacent concepts that temporarily stabilizes the core of Swedish radical nationalism: people and territory. Like other concepts that are adjacent to the core – such as culture, race, and identity – the concept of religion stipulates who belongs to the people and the territory, and who should be excluded, disadvantaged, or eliminated.
This article focuses upon the social psychological aspects of antisemitism. Empirical research into three forms of antisemitism is reviewed through the lens of social psychological theories of social representation, intergroup relations and identity processes. Across research, perceived threat from Jews and Israel is a recurrent theme. The proposed integrative model suggests that negative social representations of Jews and Israel that accentuate intergroup threat can in turn have implications for identity processes at an individual level, mainly by curtailing feels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, continuity and distinctiveness. Identity threat can lead the individual to react defensively by engaging in antisemitism.
The relatively short period at the turn
of the year 1910–1911 was of profound
importance for the development of political
opposition to Zionism in Palestine and its
neighboring Arab regions. During a period
of about a year, several important events
and incidents occurred; a number of Arab
journalists, notables, and officers became
involved in anti-Zionist activities and
campaigns; and the quantity of articles
critical of Zionism published in the Arabic
press markedly increased. Based on these
and other reasons, we are convinced that
the months at the end of 1910 and the first
half of 1911 represent the turning point in
the attitudes of the educated Arab public
toward Jewish land purchases in Palestine,
Jewish immigration, and the Zionist
movement.
The task of this article is to pose the question: Can there be a principled anti-Zionism? That is, can there be an anti-Zionism that escapes the scourge of anti-Semitism? After suggesting criteria by which this may be possible, the article excavates a tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (or Zionist agnosticism) in the past that can hardly be branded anti-Semitic. The first current of this tradition flows out of early-twentieth-century Germany, where Jewish thinkers, in conscious opposition to Zionists, envisaged a Judaism that did not submit to the contingencies of time or space. The second current, comprised of twentieth-century Orthodox Jews, similarly opposed Zionism for its attempt to return Jews to history and to their ancestral homeland. After following these overlapping currents, the article concludes by returning to the contemporary scene and inquiring whether a principled Jewish anti-Zionism is possible today.
Undeclared Wars with Israel examines a spectrum of antagonism by the East German government and West German radical leftist organizations - ranging from hostile propaganda and diplomacy to military support for Israel's Arab armed adversaries - from 1967 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. This period encompasses the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973), Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and an ongoing campaign of terrorism waged by the Palestine Liberation Organization against Israeli civilians. This book provides new insights into the West German radicals who collaborated in 'actions' with Palestinian terrorist groups, and confirms that East Germany, along with others in the Soviet Bloc, had a much greater impact on the conflict in the Middle East than has been generally known. A historian who has written extensively on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Jeffrey Herf now offers a new chapter in this long, sad history.
This chapter highlights the pitfalls of essentializing and explores the hazards of imprecise and irresponsible terminology. It uses medieval historian Gavin Langmuir's Toward a Definition of Antisemitism and History, Religion, and Antisemitism as a reference point in illuminating the case study of the reification of an influential historical descriptor. It reviews how many people have behaved violently towards Jews and have depicted them verbally or artistically in derogatory fashion throughout the centuries. It also argues that self-declared historians of antisemitism have assumed the basis of socio-semantic convention created in the nineteenth-century. The chapter focuses on antisemitism as the popular notion of Jewish assimilation to have lost its clarity and utility in the eyes of various contemporary scholars.
A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists
The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remained tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the global challenge of fighting antisemitism.
Soviet ideology and practice have been consistently hostile to Zionism, though that hostility has varied somewhat in form and intensity over the course of the past 80 years. No government in Russia could ignore Zionism, since it emerged a century ago as a major ideological and political force among a Jewish population that was then the largest in the world, and which remains today the world’s third largest Jewish community.
Topical discussions on antisemitism, in order to be useful, have, I think, to be founded on a combination of approaches — historical, psychological and sociological. The historical approach is vital, unless one believes that antisemitism today has no roots in the past and is characterised by completely new phenomena. The problem really arises out of the fact that there is a discrepancy between our consciousness of ourselves as individuals who measure time by their own lives, and the objective time measures of human societies. We live a life-span of around seventy or eighty years, and delude ourselves into thinking that historical processes take place within such time-frames. In actual fact, historical developments in societies take very much longer than that; the time that has elapsed since the writing of the Book of Esther, in which radical anti-Jewishness is reported in the language of clear murderous intent — as is the Jewish response — is not that long. Modern psychology teaches us that human responses to social pressures are not that different today from what they were a few thousand years ago. When we discuss contemporary anti-Zionism, we are therefore thrown back to basic questions: Why the Jews? Why is this particular ‘prejudice’ so time-resistant as to have lasted for 2500 years and yet remained with a basic core of dislike, fear, unease, hatred or inflation of the power of Jews? Can contemporary anti-Zionism be explained without referring to such basic, historical problems? I do not think so.
This article explores how the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its Research Center in Beirut appropriated classical Reform Jewish ideas to serve the PLO’s ideological battle against Zionism. How did PLO leaders and researchers learn in the 1960s of the Reform movement’s by-then long-overturned Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, and why did they think it still mattered? After noting a fascinating, if apparently unconnected, Late Ottoman precedent that may represent the starting point in the history of Palestinian Arab interest in Reform Judaism, the article identifies a more direct source of influence: the idiosyncratic twentieth-century American anti-Zionist Reform rabbi Elmer Berger. The article examines Berger’s collaboration with PLO intellectuals in challenging the legitimacy of Zionism. The article concludes with reflections on the broader question of how mutually hostile nationalisms relate to each other’s religious traditions and on the unexpected alliances fostered by debates over the nature of Jewishness.
Abstract
As the prospects for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have dwindled, Jewish scholars in the United States have increasingly invoked the concept of diaspora to counter a purported Jewish consensus regarding Zionism. In this essay, I critique prominent exponents of this approach (Judith Butler, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin) from a diasporic (i.e., non-Zionist) standpoint. My concern is not that Butler and the Boyarins attack Israel publicly, endorse a binational solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and/or support the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—rather, it is that they lack a compelling vision for diasporic politics. Their visions prove wanting because they contest Zionism on the terrain of Jewish identity. To loosen Zionism’s hold, Butler and the Boyarins recover alternative approaches to the attainment or grounding of Jewish identity. Yet when framed as an ethic of particular identity, diasporic thinking can neither rebut Zionism’s political arguments, nor can it develop alternative models of Jewish self-rule. Instead of theorizing Jewish identity, I argue, diasporic thinkers should envision Jewish political solidarity beyond the confines of the nation-state.
Despite granting permission for limited Jewish emigration to Palestine in the 1930s, the ideology and policy of the Nazi regime never supported establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. During World War II, Hitler's ideologically consistent view that such a state would be a branch of an international Jewish conspiracy converged with shorter-term efforts to gain Arab and Islamic support for the Third Reich's military goals in the Middle East. The ideological convergence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism found expression in the works of Nazi propagandists as well as in the speeches and radio addresses of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, broadcast from wartime Berlin to the Middle East. Examination of the lineages, similarities and differences between Europe's totalitarian past and its aftereffects in the Arab and Islamic world remains an important task for comparative historical scholarship.
There are some questions that need only be debated in the seminar room or lecture theatre. There are others that battle it out on the wider university campus but also on the airwaves, in the newspapers and, occasionally, even the streets. These questions have an importance that goes beyond mere intellectual or academic interest. They matter in the real world, with implications for individuals and even whole nations. This is one of those questions.
American Jewish History 86.3 (1998) 309-321
Historians of the Jewish experience in the American West have struggled to break free of generalizations based on the eastern metropolitan experience that have ruled American Jewish history. Critical studies of Jewish life in the western states have delineated important points of contrast with eastern Jewry, such as the continued dominance of Jews of German descent; the relative absence of anti-Semitism; the declining proportion of Jews in the western population at the time when the Jewish population share in the East was increasing rapidly; and the small numbers of East European migrants to the West and their correspondingly slight impact on political and cultural developments. These contrasts have led historians to argue that concepts so basic as the customary periodization of American Jewish history do not apply to the American West.
Yet within the field of western Jewish history, new generalizations are emerging -- now based on California, and particularly San Francisco, rather than New York. One of these regards the significance of Zionism -- and anti-Zionism. John Livingston argues in the introduction to Jews in the American West that weakness in the Zionist movement was characteristic of the West. Both historians of western Jewry and of Zionism have noted the relative strength of anti-Zionism among western Jews. This paper tests the validity of this generalization by evaluating the strength of anti-Zionism in Portland, Oregon, and examining factors shaping the variety of responses to Zionism in the American West. While the anti-Zionist movement, represented most prominently by the American Council for Judaism, gained a solid foothold in San Francisco in the early 1940s, the organization never became popular in Portland. Despite apparent similarities between the San Francisco and Portland Jewish communities, crucial differences, both in the composition of the Jewish population and in the attitudes of the leadership group, made the Portland Jewish community far less receptive to anti-Zionism than generalizations about western Jewish communities would lead us to expect.
While the Zionist movement had long caused discomfort for many American Jews, particularly those in the Reform Movement, anti-Zionism did not coalesce into a political movement until the early 1940s. The formation of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) took place just as the destruction of European Jewry served to convince the majority of American Jews that the establishment of a Jewish state was essential. As anti-Zionist sentiment dissipated among most Reform rabbis in the face of Nazism, the organizational body of Reform rabbis, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), moved from an explicitly anti-Zionist position to non-Zionism and official neutrality in 1935, and, finally, to sympathy to Zionism at the end of the decade.
In the face of this shift, those rabbis who maintained the classical Reform, anti-Zionist position became alarmed at what they saw as a nationalistic form of Judaism, threatening their commitment to a Jewish identity based solely on religion. Their alarm led to the formation of the ACJ in 1942.
While initially expressing concerns rooted in Reform Judaism, the ACJ message became increasingly political in the years following 1942. At the time of the Council's formation, Reform rabbis held sway, and articulated a position based on the sensibilities of the Pittsburgh Platform, arguing that embracing a Jewish identity based on nationalism would sap the religious basis of Reform Judaism. Quickly, however, lay leaders who presented the ACJ position in political terms -- arguing that Zionism was racist, undemocratic, and a threat to the political status of American Jews -- eclipsed the influence of these rabbis. President of the ACJ, Lessing Rosenwald, explained the organization's position in the June, 1943 issue of Life magazine, arguing that Zionism revived the obsolete conception that Jews were a racial or national group and in doing so "embrace(d) the very racist theories and nationalistic philosophies that have become so prevalent in recent years, that have caused untold suffering to the world and particularly to the Jews." He contended that
In this article I seek to apply the notion of anti-Semitism as a cultural code, which I initially developed 25 years ago with relation to the antimodernist trends in late-nineteenth-century Germany, to the phenomena of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism today. From the 1960s anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism formed part of a larger ideological package consisting of anticolonialism, anticapitalism, and a deep suspicion of US policies. In the eyes of members of the developing countries, Jews became a symbol of the West and legitimate targets for hatred. Thus, the position on the Jewish question, even if not in itself of paramount importance, came to indicate a belonging to a larger camp, a political stand and an overall cultural choice. The question is whether the position towards Israel today, which has become a central issue for the European left, can still be considered a cultural code or whether it rather indicates a more direct anti-Jewish attack, above all as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This article compares European and Middle Eastern anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the 1870s through the 1930s, in parallel fashion anti-Semitism became a mobilizing, all-embracing ideology in Europe, while the Arab world witnessed an eruption of anticolonial and nationalist sentiment, often directed against the Zionist project. Arab anti-Semitism featured the irrational and fantastic qualities of its European counterpart, but it took form against the reality of the Zionist project. The article draws a distinction between the realms of systemic intolerance, aggravated by socio-economic crisis, and political strife, driven by discrete events and policies. Its main sources are fin-de-siècle European anti-Semites' writings on Zionism, which are shown to be fundamentally different from the anti-Zionist rhetoric emanating from the Middle East at that time.
The article explores the evolution of religious opposition to Zionism in Vienna between 1882 and 1918. Beginning with Adolf Jellinek's critical response to Leon Pinsker's Autoemancipation and to the Jewish nationalist student fraternity, Kadimah, Viennese rabbis by and large, supported the ideology of emancipation, identified with German culture and with the multi-national Habsburg state. They defined Jewry in religious terms, rejected the secular thrust of Zionism and feared it would exacerbate antisemitism. This was common ground for both orthodox and more reform-minded Jews. Even those like Rabbi Joseph Bloch, who emphasised the ethnic consciousness of Jewry, rejected the Zionist definition of Jews as a separate political nation. The sharpest opposition to Herzl came from Chief Rabbi Gildemann, who regarded political Zionism as a backward step from the spiritual universalism of the diasporic mission. Only with his death in 1918 and replacement by Zwi Perez Chajes at the the moment of breakdown of the Habsburg state, was the gulf between Zionism and Judaism bridged.
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