Anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism, an international political movement that supports a Homeland for the Jewish People in Israel Anti-Zionism takes many forms, ranging from political or religious opposition to the idea of a Jewish state, to rejecting Israel's right to exist and the legitimacy of that very concept, to various forms of violence. Anti-Zionists can be either left-wing or right-wing, religious or secular, Jewish or Gentile. Critics of zionism argue that zionism is a Jewish supremist ideology that created Jewish state of Israel, ignoring the fact that 90% of the people of Palestine before 1948 were Palestinian Arabs. Critics also argue that zionists marginalize the fact that Palestinian Arabs had been living in Palestine for thousands of years before the creation of modern Israel.

Because anti-Zionism and antisemitism may be associated, and as both terms can mean different things to different people, the relationship between the two is controversial.

History of anti-Zionism

Political Zionism has encountered opposition ever since it was first articulated in the 19th century. Anti-Zionism appeared increasingly through at least the mid-1940s in relation to events in the British Mandate of Palestine, when several Arab and Jewish organizations opposed the creation of a Jewish State in the area.

Jewish anti-Zionism

Political opposition

Before the Second World War many Jews regarded Zionism as a fanciful and unrealistic movement. The loyalty and desirability of Jewish membership in the nation-state was being questioned by anti-Semites and many Jews who saw Zionism as a threat to Jewish assimilation. One major worldview amongst Jewish communal leaders in the West was to stress Jewish loyalty to the nation-state where Jews lived, the idea that Jews were not an ethnic or national group, but merely a religious community, like Catholics or Quakers - "Englishmen of Jewish faith", "Germans of Jewish faith" and so on. Examples of this worldview were the founders of the initially anti-Zionist American Jewish Committee, such as Louis Marshall and Jacob Schiff, and the leaders of the Anglo-Jewish Association and League of British Jews, such as Edwin Montagu and Lucien Wolf.

Many working class Jews supported socialist or communist political ideas, and took the view that the defeat of anti-Semitism and the winning of civic equality for Jews required participation in the common struggle against capitalism and oppressive regimes. The largest Jewish political organisation in Europe, the General Jewish Labor Union, also known as the Bund, opposed Zionism right up until the German invasion of Poland in 1939, calling instead for Jewish national cultural autonomy within a socialist state. Some Jewish socialists rejected this latter view and became Socialist Zionists.

Other Jewish political movements which rejected Zionism in this period were the Folkists, led by Simon Dubnow, a liberal movement which advocated cultural autonomy for Jews in the diaspora rather than territorial sovereignty, and the Territorialists, a Jewish nationalist movement which broke with Zionism because it was willing to pursue Jewish nationhood anywhere, not just in Palestine.

Attitudes changed after the war. Most Bund supporters were murdered in the Holocaust while Jewish communal life was suppressed under Communism. The Holocaust and Communism established Zionism as the dominant mainstream movement of modern Jews. However, some contemporary Jewish critics of Israel's policies and laws such as Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, are often described as anti-Zionists.

Religious opposition

Main article: Haredim and Zionism

In the early history of Zionism some religious Jews opposed ideas of nationalism (Jewish or otherwise) which they regarded as a secular ideology. Some Hassidic Jews in particular opposed any attempt to create a secular Jewish state, however in the 1920s, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook articulated a fusion of Modern Orthodox Judaism and Zionism that came to be known as Religious Zionism. Over time extreme ultra-Orthodox opposition to Zionism has declined for a variety of reasons, including the need for Israeli government support and protection and popular support for Zionism among the laity. A few hassidic sects have remained steadfast in their anti-Zionism, notably the Satmar sect. The leader of the Satmar hasidic sect, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum's book, VaYoel Moshe, published in 1958, expounds one Orthodox position on Zionism, based on a literal form of midrash (biblical interpretation). Citing to Tractate Kesubos 111a of the Talmud Teitelbaum states that God and the Jewish people exchanged three oaths at the time of the Jews' exile from ancient Israel:

• That the Jewish people would not ascend to the Holy Land as a group using force;
• That the Jewish people would not rebel against the governments of countries in which they lived;
• That the Jewish people would not, by their sins, prolong the coming of the Jewish Messiah.

Before the Second World War, Agudat Israel, the political party of the strictly Orthodox, opposed Zionism. Today it is a primarily Israeli party and since the seventies it has participated in most of Israel's coalition governments. Agudat Israel still oppose nationalism, but have found ways of accommodating the Israeli state.

The Belzer, and Gerer Hasidim, among others, claim that involvement in Israeli politics is necessary in order to offer a religious viewpoint in the Israeli Knesset. Some Haredi figures have become Zionist in practise. The Lubavitcher Rebbe in particular voiced his vehement opposition to land concessions, based on the Code of Jewish Law, and encouraged his followers living in Israel to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. All Hasidic Jewish opponents to Zionism, including Rabbi Teitelbaum and Rabbi Shapira, do approve of Jews living in the Land of Israel. Their opposition is not to Jews living in the Land of Israel, but to the ideology of Zionism. Indeed, there are many Hasidim and yeshivos of both Munkacz, Satmar and many other strongly anti-Zionist groups in Israel, particularly in Jerusalem. A point of view overlooked in this debate is that of the Sephardim. No significant Sephardi Rabbi had a theological problem with Zionism and many spiritual leaders supported it, except for the Baba Sali, who said that Rabbi Teitelbaum's VaYoel Moshe was the "treatise of our generation" . The lack of religious opposition to Zionism from the non-Ashkenazi world has meant that some see religious anti-Zionism to be psychological and social rather than theological.

Arab anti-Zionism

At the time when the Zionist settlement of Palestine began, most of the Arab world was under the control either of the Ottoman Empire or of one or other of the European colonial powers.

Towards the beginning of Zionist settlement in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some Arabs were willing to consider alliance with the Zionist movement. For instance, Emir Faisal, the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who helped lead the Arab nationalist revolt against the Ottomans, signed the following agreement with Chaim Weizmann at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference:

Mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people, and realizing that the surest means of working out the consummation of their national aspirations through the closest possible collaboration in the development of the Arab states and Palestine.

This agreement also called for the fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration and supported all necessary measures:

to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil.

For a number of reasons, the agreement was never realized. For one, Faisal had conditioned his acceptance of the Balfour Declaration on the fulfillment of British promises of independence to the Arab nations, which were not kept. Moreover, he had little local support for his position. Arab Palestinian leaders, among them the mayor of Jerusalem, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, rejected this agreement made in their name. The Arab inhabitants of Palestine also rejected any suggestion of Palestine being severed from the Arab-Islamic world. While a Jewish minority had lived in Palestine for centuries, the Arab Palestinians were strongly opposed to the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish immigrant state, and hence to any immigration that would threaten to change the majority status of the Arab population. Thus, while small-scale Jewish immigration (such as the First Aliyah of the 1880s) was accepted and often welcomed for economic reasons, larger influxes of Jews were resisted strenuously.

Once the Balfour Declaration made it clear that the British intended to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, Arab opposition grew much firmer. Hostilities punctuated the 1920s (Jerusalem pogrom of April, 1920, 1929 Palestine riots (in Hebron, Jerusalem and Safed) and 1930s (activities of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam and the Black Hand group, 1936-1939 Great Uprising).

File:Al-Farida, Lebanon pre-1967 war.jpg

Nasser (Egypt), backed by Arab states, kicks Israel into the Gulf of Aqaba. Pre-1967 War cartoon. Al-Jarida newspaper, Lebanon (Oren, 2002)

Anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist narratives—particularly popular in Arab countries with violent experiences of colonial rule—focus especially on parallels with cases such as Algeria or Rhodesia, seeing it in terms of a foreign power encouraging immigration into the country of a group which then sought to dominate the country. According to this view, the natural means of combating Zionism is considered to be Palestinian revolution, and the expulsion or weakening of the Zionist "occupiers". Among Palestinians, examples of notable individuals or political parties that emphasize anti-imperial and anti-colonial narratives in their opposition to Zionism include: Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said, Leila Khaled, George Habash, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and The Palestinian Revolutionary Communist Party. Examples of Palestinian solidarity groups that root their activism against Zionism in anti-imperial and anti-colonial terms include: Students for Justice in Palestine, Al-Awda [5], and Sumoud [6]. Critics of these movements argue that it is a red herring to compare Zionism to imperialism or colonialism, as Zionist ideology is focused on return to an ancestral homeland, rather than an attempt to exploit Arab Palestinians and that many Zionists are Arab Jews.

Pan-Arabist narratives—which enjoyed their heyday in the 1960s in the Nasser era, but have declined since—emphasize the idea of Palestine as a part of the Arab world taken by others (partly overlapping with the previous.) As such, Israel is seen as both a symbol of Arab weakness and—insofar as it geographically cuts the Arab world into two noncontiguous halves—an obstacle to any union of the Arab world. In this narrative, the natural means of combating Zionism is Arab nations uniting and attacking Israel militarily. Pan-Syrian narratives, promoted mainly by Syria, are essentially parallel.

In response to the Pan-Arabist narrative, Israeli historian Benny Morris commented:

Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

Local nationalist narratives of non-Palestinian Arabs emphasize the idea of Israel as a threat to the nation (commonly citing extremist Israeli individuals' dreams of a nation stretching "from the Nile to the Euphrates"). Among Palestinians, these emphasize other issues, such as the Palestinian refugee problem, and that in their view, over 90% of the pre-1948 British Mandate of Palestine is controlled by Israel.

Map of British Palestine and Trans-Jordan

Israel on the other hand claims that it controls only 23% of the original mandate, with the rest under the control of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which already has a majority Palestinian Arab population.

A poll of Arab-Israelis conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute in 2007 found that 75% of Arab-Israelis support the existence of a Jewish state:

A vast majority of Israeli Arabs would support a constitution that maintained Israel's status as a Jewish and democratic state while guaranteeing equal rights for minorities. Among the 507 people who participated in the poll, some 75 percent said they would agree with such a definition while 23 percent said they would oppose it.

Muslim anti-Zionism

File:Islam problem israel.jpg

Front cover of Islam and the Problem of Israel (1980)

Muslim anti-Zionism generally opposes the state of Israel as an intrusion into what many Muslims consider to be a domain rightfully, and permanently, ruled only by Muslims. Most Muslims generally view Israel as a foreign entity implanted by European powers in the heart of Muslim Middle East. Muslims generally compare the struggle of Palestinians to that of Black South Africans.[7]

Palestinian and other Arab groups, as well as the government of Iran (since 1979 Islamic Revolution), insist that the State of Israel is illegitimate and refuse to refer to it as "Israel", instead using the locution "the Zionist entity" (see Iran-Israel relations). In an interview with Time Magazine in December 2006, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "Everyone knows that the Zionist regime is a tool in the hands of the United States and British governments" [8].

This view means that combating Zionism is considered to be the rightful duty by Muslims, whether by Palestinians or others.

An example of this view is the work of Ismail al-Faruqi (1926-1986). In Islam and the Problem of Israel (1980), he argued that Zionism was a "disease" largely influenced by European romanticism far removed from Judaism. He opposed the "Zionist occupation" of Palestine and called for the dismantling of Israel and the launch of a jihad. He said that the injustice caused by Zionism is such as to necessitate war. From the standpoint of Islam, Faruqi wrote, Zionism represents apostasy against Judaism.

Western anti-Zionism

In the liberal Western world, opposition to Zionism has often focused on Britain since it was Britain's decision to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The decision was controversial from the start as some British people believed the Balfour declaration undermined Britain's relationship with Moslems in the Middle East and India. Racism was widespread at this time and many racists regarded British support for Jews or Zionists as undesirable. Between 1919 and 1939 the British government steadily reduced its support for Zionism. In 1939 Britain formally announced its intention to create an Arab state in Palestine and remained in opposition to Zionism until 1949.

There was little opposition to Zionism in other countries but as Arab states became independent the desire to maintain positive relations with Arab states has often affected attitudes to Zionism.

Although supporting the creation of Israel, from 1949 onwards Communist countries adopted increasingly anti-Zionist positions and this affected attitudes of Communists in the West. The increasing popularity of a world-view emphasizing a global class struggle in which the Third World proletariat fought western exploiters placed the Palestinians as a focal point in global relations. In this "Third Worldist" worldview, Israel was generally described as a tool of western imperialism and a colonial settler state.

The growing conflict between Palestinians and Israeli settlers and between Palestinian liberation movements and the state of Israel has also generated an increase in anti-Zionism in the West.

On the right forces close to the oil industry and traditional anti-Semites generally regarded Israel with suspicion, and in the case of anti-Semites with hatred.

Soviet anti-Zionism

Main articles: Soviet Union and the Arab-Israeli conflict and History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union

Zionism was viewed in the Soviet Union as a form of bourgeois nationalism, and its active promotion among Jews was discouraged and eventually banned. From 1919 through most of Joseph Stalin's rule, the Tsarist government's anti-Jewish policies of the previous century were reverted and actively denounced. The rise of various forms of Jewish nationalism prompted the government in 1928 to establish and promote a "Soviet Zion" in Birobidzhan, a project that failed to meet population goals and was soon abandoned.

Throughout this, the official position of the Soviet Union and of its satellite states and agencies was that Zionism was a tool used by the Jews and Americans for "racist imperialism." The meaning of the term Zionism was misrepresented to conform to a policy of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union: "the main posits of modern Zionism are militant chauvinism, racism, anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism,... overt and covert fight against freedom movements and the USSR."

During the years of Joseph Stalin's rule Soviet Jews were frequently attacked as "Zionists," although the majority of Soviet Jews at that time did not hold strong Zionist convictions. After the creation of Israel, however, many Soviet Jews began to sympathise with the Jewish state, thus arousing further antagonism from the Soviet government, which saw Zionism as a potential source of disloyalty.

However, from late 1944 through 1948, the Soviet Union's stance toward Zionism was strongly influenced by geopolitical concerns, and the government officially supported the foundation of Israel , although this was hidden from the Soviet media. From the end of 1948, the Soviet Union changed positions to support Arab concerns against Israeli interests through the end of the Cold War, and Israel began to emerge as a close Western ally.

During the last years of Stalin's rule, roughly 1948-1953, official Soviet anti-Zionism was intensified. While Stalin's campaigns were officially carried out under the banner of anti-Zionism, critics argue that they had a strong antisemitic content, often borrowed directly from traditional Russian antisemitism. This included a campaign against so-called "rootless cosmopolitans" and the fabrication of the Doctors' plot. After Stalin's death, anti-Zionism continued through the rise of "Zionology" in the 1960s and subsequent activities of official organizations such as the Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public.

During the Cold War, the spectre of Zionism raised fears of internal dissent and opposition. The Soviet government liquidated almost all remaining Jewish organizations, and placed synagogues under police surveillance, both openly and through the use of informers. At the same time, the persecution of Soviet Jews emerged as a major human rights issue in the West. See Jackson-Vanik amendment.

In 1975, the Soviet Union sponsored the UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, discussed below.

International anti-Zionism

Many of the most important authorities on ethics in the 20th century have contributed to the debate on Zionism, with some, such as Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s and '40s, expressing opposition to the Zionist movement.

Paralleling the rise of anti-Zionist sentiment in the west was increased hostility towards Israel at the international level. During the 1950s and 1960s Israel made great efforts to cultivate good relations with the newly independent states of Africa and Asia, and hostility to Israel was confined to the states of the Arab-Muslim world and the Communist bloc. A combination of inter-related circumstances in the 1970s radically changed this situation.

The first was the increased hostility to Israel following the onset of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the late 1960s. The second was the decline in the prestige of the United States following the end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The third was increased economic power of the Arab oil-producing states in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the resulting energy crisis. The fourth was the rise of radical anti-western regimes in a series of African countries. The fifth was the increased diplomatic and economic presence of the Soviet Union, China and Cuba in Africa.

This anti-Zionist trend was manifested in organisations such as the Organization for African Unity and the Non-Aligned Movement, which passed resolutions condemning Zionism and equating it with racism and apartheid during the early 1970s. It culminated in the passing by the United Nations General Assembly of Resolution 3379 in November 1975, declaring that "Zionism is a form of racism." This resolution was passed by 72 votes to 35, with 32 abstentions. The 72 votes in favour consisted of all 20 Arab states, another 12 Muslim-majority states (including Turkey), 12 Communist countries, 14 non-Muslim African states, and 14 other states (including Brazil, India, Mexico and Portugal).

By 1991 this international situation had been reversed following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American-led victory over Iraq in the Gulf War and the return of the United States to global political and economic dominance. On December 16, 1991, under pressure from the United States and Israel, the General Assembly passed Resolution 4686, repealing resolution 3379, by a vote of 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions and 17 delegations absent. Thirteen out of the 19 Arab countries, including those engaged in negotiations with Israel, voted against the repeal, another six were absent. No Arab country voted for repeal. The PLO denounced the vote. All the ex-Communist countries and most of the African countries who had supported Resolution 3379 voted to repeal it. Only three non-Muslim countries voted against the resolution: Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam. The rest abstained (including Turkey) or absented themselves.

International anti-Zionism, like domestic anti-Zionism in many countries, rises and falls in parallel with events in the Middle East, and the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 saw some revival of anti-Zionism in some countries; however, it is also possible that it was not until this time that media attention focused on the phenomenon.

Anti-Zionism and antisemitism

See also: New antisemitism

Some commentators believe that criticisms of Israel and Zionism are often disproportionate in degree and unique in kind, and attribute this to antisemitism. Critics of this view believe that associating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is intended to stifle debate, deflect attention from valid criticisms, and taint anyone opposed to Israeli actions and policies.

Since the support and defense of Israel has become a central focus of Jewish life for many since 1948, many Jews see attacks on the existence of Israel as inherently antisemitic. For example, Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has argued: "If you advocate the abolition of Israel ... that means in fact that you're against the people who live there. If you are, for example, against the existence of Malaysia, you are anti-Malay. If you are against the existence of Israel, you are anti-Jewish."

The historian Walter Laqueur, writes at length about anti-Zionism being used as a “cover” for anti-Semitism.

On April 3, 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced that anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism may often serve as camouflage for anti-Semitic bigotry on American college campuses.

Some scholars believe that while Anti-Zionism may not be inherently antisemitic, it very often either becomes antisemitism or is used to hide antisemitism.

Thomas Friedman writes that “[c]riticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction—out of proportion to any other party in the Middle East—is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.”

Robert S. Wistrich argues that although several types of anti-Zionism are not intrinsically antisemitic, much of contemporary radical anti-Zionism has become a form of antisemitism.

Other scholars posit that anti-Zionism should remain distinct from antisemitism. Brian Klug, for example, writes that even when anti-Zionism is expressed in unfair and foul terms, it is not necessarily antisemitism.

In 2005, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in its working definition of antisemitism, identified several ways in which antisemitism can manifest itself, such as using double standards against Israel or drawing analogies between its behavior and that of the Nazis, while also stating that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.”

In a criticism of this working definition, European Jews for a Just Peace, an organization of 18 European Jewish pro-Palestinian peace groups, contested several of its findings, and specifically targeted any inherent assumptions that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism.

In 2006, Edward H. Kaplan and Charles A. Small, both of Yale University, conducted a survey on the connection between radical anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism in Europe. The study was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in August of the same year. The authors’ overall conclusion is that evidence of anti-Israeli sentiment can consistently predict the probability that an individual is antisemitic with a direct correlation between the extent of the anti-Israeli sentiment with the probable measure of antisemitism. They conclude that severe criticism of Israel does make it reasonable for the question to be raised of said criticism is actually masking an underlying anti-Semitism. However, Kaplan and Small are careful to avoid concluding that the correlation they find (i.e., that extreme anti-Zionists are also likely to be antisemites) is proof to the theory that anti-Zionism is itself antisemitic.

Historian Diana Muir reviewed the paper and concluded that the correlation shown between anti-Zionistic attitudes and antisemitism was almost perfect. Muir also supports the study's conclusion that only a small fraction of Europeans believe the anti-Zionistic and antisemitic rhetoric.

Steven Zipperstein, professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, argues that a belief in the State of Israel's responsibility for the Arab-Israeli conflict should be considered part of what reasonably informed decent people think. Zipperstein claims that disproportionate criticism of Israel is not the result of new anti-Semitism, or even classical anti-Semitism, but, although troubling, is a reflection of the extreme responses that mark a world society that has experienced September 11, and which has focused on the United States, and its ally Israel, as their main targets.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary controversy

In addition to a conventional definition of antisemitism ("hostility toward Jews as a religious or racial minority group, often accompanied by social, political or economic discrimination"), the unabridged edition of Webster's Third New International Dictionary (2002), gives a controversial second and third definition to antisemitism, defining the word as "opposition to Zionism" and "sympathy for the opponents of Israel". (The modern college editions based on Webster's Third all omit the second definition of "antisemitism.") The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has mounted a campaign to get this definition removed. In a letter to Merriam-Webster, Hussein Ibish wrote that the second and third definition "smears and impugns the motives of all those who support the human and political rights of Palestinians"

A Merriam-Webster company spokesman defended the definition as "a relic" based on a handful of citations from about 1950 in which antisemitism was "linked more or less strongly with opposition to Israel or to Zionism." The spokesman also stated that the sense wasn't supported by current usage, and added that it would probably be dropped when the company publishes a new unabridged version in a decade or so. However, the company said it was beyond its means to send out correction sheets to all libraries.

Ken Jacobson, the associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League, urged Merriam-Webster to retain the definition. "Zionism is the national expression of the Jewish people," he told the New York Times, "and to deny that, it seems to me, most often reflects anti-Semitic views."

See also

• Post-Zionism
• Zionism and racism allegations
• Allegations of Israeli apartheid
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israel

Other resources

For other resources and external links, see Zionism and anti-Zionism (resources)