By Jeremy Salt
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History'. (Photo: Book Cover)
The book Benjamin Moser has written is a selective study of anti-Zionist Jews, but the history of anti-Zionism is much deeper and broader than the individual cases he describes.
Benjamin Moser knew he would be stepping into a snake pit when he wrote ‘Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History’, but he still stepped in. That takes courage, but it is what the true historian or recorder of history has to do. The reactions have been varied but heavy on the side of dismissal from the usual sources, not the ‘extreme’ Zionists but the ‘liberal’ Zionists whom Moser detests most of all.
Colin Shindler writes in History Today that Moser has written “a one-dimensional appraisal of the Jewish people’s broken home,” by which one has to assume he means Palestine, which had never been the home of the European Jews who settled there.
Aaron Gell in the Guardian regards the book as “a work of historical inquiry/self purification.” In religious terminology, this might be called mortification of the flesh as punishment for believing in Zionism in the first place. Clearly Schindler thinks there’s nothing wrong with that. “Not all Zionists favor ethnic cleansing, Jewish supremacy and the obstruction of Palestinian self-determination,” he writes.
‘Not all’ is true, but the exception does not prove the rule, and in Israel the overwhelming majority of Jews do support ethnic cleansing and the rest of it, as every single public opinion poll taken since 2023 has shown. The politicians have set out the markers very clearly: Israel is not the state of its citizens but a Jewish state and as confirmed by the Knesset, there will be no Palestinian state in any part of Palestine.
That there will only be a Jewish state ‘between the river and the sea’ raises no objections among ‘Western’ supporters of Israel who persecute or prosecute Palestinians for using the same phrase to declare their cause.
Isaaac Chotiner writes in The New Yorker that the argument that Zionism and Nazism were congenial to each other “relies on distortions and elementary factual errors.” Perhaps, but there are certainly factual truths. One is that Lehi (the Stern Gang) sought an alliance with the Nazis on the same racist/totalitarian principles.
Another is that after Eichmann visited Palestine in the 1930s, the Nazis commemorated the occasion by issuing a medallion with the Star of David on one side and the Swastika on the other. That does indicate an appreciation by the Nazis of a similar exclusive nationalism within the Zionist movement.
The ins and outs of the dealings between Lehi and the Zionist mainstream and the Nazi regime have been dealt with by Lenni Brenner and, in more detail, by Francis Nicosia in his book The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (1985).
Lehi wanted affiliation with the Nazis; the Zionist mainstream wanted to get Jews out of Germany and settle them nowhere but in Palestine. The threads are worth following up. In 1948, Lehi and another terrorist organization, the Irgun, combined forces to carry out the massacre at Deir Yassin, with the support of the Haganah and the Palmach, the regular Zionist armed forces.
Yitzhak Shamir, the Lehi commander, and Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun, both went on to become Israeli prime ministers. At first proscribed, Lehi’s role in 1948 was later sanctified with the award of the ‘Lehi Ribbon’ for military service. The thread leads directly to what Lehi sought in the 1940s and what has now been achieved in the life of the Netanyahu government: the consolidation of a Jewish supremacist regime over all of Palestine.
In discussion with the Australian journalist Ramona Koval (see below), the English historian Simon Schama brushes off Anti-Zionism. A Jewish History as “bizarre and repellent.”
This is matched in the Jewish Review of Books (Fall, 2026) by the remark that the book is “pervaded by hatred of Zionism.”
Other reviewers engage with it more calmly. Kirkus Reviews (September 22, 2026) finds that the author has made “a principled case against a powerfully entrenched doctrine.”
Writing in +972 (September 22, 2026), Yahya Lababidi says the book recovers “a tradition of dissenters who paid a price for opposing Palestinian displacement even as they could not prevent it. ‘Displacement’ is too kind a word, of course. The correct phrase is ‘ethnic cleansing’, which fits into the UN genocide convention’s definition of what constitutes genocide.
In LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books), Shaul Magid writes that while Zionism was a complex set of competing ideas, it was “never supposed to go as far as destroying a society.” In fact, this is not accurate. The idealists – the ‘liberal’ Zionists – had a marginal effect on the course of events and were mostly a useful distraction from what was really going on, as they are today.
Those with their hands on the levers of power – Ben-Gurion and those around him – knew exactly what they wanted, which was to rid Palestine of its indigenous Muslim and Christian people.
In his History Today review, Colin Shindler says Benjamin Moser “raises the question of whether Herzl suffered from mental illness and by extrapolation the supposition that Zionism was a delusion writ large that sucked in many Jews”, which Shindler does not believe, despite the evidence that ‘many Jews’ (tens of thousands) were quite capable of being ‘sucked in, ’ as they had been in the 17th century by the false Jewish messiah Sabbatai Zvi.
Herzl was a moderately successful Hungarian journalist who specialized in the writing of feuilletons, short, snappy, witty pieces of fiction or criticism. He had grand dreams, which eventually settled on the establishment of a Jewish state away from Europe. That it could only be Palestine was not finally settled by Zionists until 1904, the year of Herzl’s death at the age of 44.
Within Jewish communities everywhere, Zionism was regarded as a crackpot idea that would only end in trouble for everyone. Moritz Gudemann, the chief rabbi of Vienna, declared that it was “incompatible with Judaism’s teachings.”
In 1885, well before Herzl’s rise as the Zionist visionary, American reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh declared that “we consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
In a declaration made to the Paris ‘peace’ conference in 1919, 299 rabbis declared their opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Jews visiting Palestine in the early 20th century had their misgivings, as Israeli and other Jews have had since, to the point of breaking with the state of Israel and the ideology on which it was founded. One, the historian Zeev Sternhell, linked growing Israeli fascism and racism to early Nazism and described Israel as a “monstrosity” for non-Jews.
Given that Colin Shindler raised the issue, what was Herzl’s mental condition when he wrote on Zionism and the Jewish state? In a conversation with Krithika Vavagur published in The Paris Review (September 22, 2026), Benjamin Moser relates that when Herzl showed his book Zionist Writings to a friend, the friend started crying. “Herzl goes, ‘Oh, I was so moved when I was writing it, too.’” But the friend is, like, ‘No, no, I’m not crying because I’m moved by it – I’m crying because you’re nuts.’ And that was exactly the feeling I had.”
Does ‘nuts’ connect with the question of mental illness raised by Schindler? In his biography, Theodor Herzl. Artist and Politician (1981), Desmond Stewart publishes a letter in which Herzl makes it very clear (pp. 71-2) that he was suffering from a venereal disease, in Stewart’s view, most probably gonorrhoea.
The infection was not all that uncommon amongst young men. While gonorrhea was not as serious as syphilis, there was no cure for either in the 19th century, only ineffective treatment, often with serious side effects that, in the long term, could include heart, liver, and brain damage/cognitive decline.
Herzl’s failing health over several years and death at such a young age could suggest that indiscretions as a young man – the “delayed results of his Vienna youth” as Stewart writes – finally caught up with him.
Behind the formal cause of death as ‘heart disease’ lay the likelihood of subacute bacterial endocarditis, which at the time was “invariably fatal,” as Stewart writes. The extent to which Herzl’s illness might or might not have affected his state of mind as he wrote Der Judenstaat and other publications has to remain an unanswered question.
His wife’s death four years later, at the age of 39, after spending long periods in nursing homes, raises the possibility that he might have been “responsible for her sickness,” as Stewart writes.
This would be one obvious cause of their unhappy marriage. As Stewart suggests, “if she suffered for her husband’s youthful dissipations, then she endured a disease described as wickedly damaging in women.” Her remains were not buried according to Jewish custom but burnt, thus ruling out any future forensic inquiry into the reason for her death at such a young age. Even the urn containing her ashes was lost.
Anti-Zionism. A Jewish History inevitably came up in the recent conversation between the writer Simon Schama and the Australian journalist and broadcaster Ramona Koval, held under the aegis of Melbourne Jewish Book Week. The ‘book of the week’ was Schama’s recently published Jew Hatred: The Latest Edition.
The Gaza genocide is quickly dealt with as a “monstrous libel.” Schama’s rationale seems to be that Israel did not kill enough Palestinians for it to be called genocide, irrespective of the 1948 UN convention, which is based not on numbers but intent.
Neither Schama or Koval spend any time examining what Israel has actually done in Gaza. Needless to say, that would have undermined their whole performance. The killing of thousands of children elicits the remark only from Schama that the “death” of children is “always to be lamented.”
There is a big difference between ‘death’ and the deliberate killing of children in their homes or in their tents after the destruction of their homes or through the sniper’s bullet deliberately aimed at the head or chest.
Koval did mention her concern for the safety of her children in Australia, but not any concern she might have for the children of Gaza, many thousands of them, not just threatened but already killed by the state she supports.
Schama remarks that part of being Jewish is the “wonderfulness of family life” but has nothing to say about the Muslim families in Gaza killed by Israeli soldiers, even totally obliterated by them so that the family name no longer exists on the population register. How does this square with the wonderfulness of Jewish family life?
Finally, Schama and Koval turn to the Jewish “AZers” lining up with the rest of the anti-Zionists. The whole purpose of anti-Zionism, in their view, is intended “to make us ashamed of Israel.” Anti-Zionism is just “a poisonous brew of ignorance and fanaticism” with no apparent other cause.
For Schama, the Jewish “AZers” are the children of “outrageous privilege,” with a guilt complex born of the fact that the Palestinians are having to pay for what the Germans and Ukrainians did to Jews.
This is not followed up by obvious responses: “So why are they having to pay for the crimes committed by someone else, and why are you supporting so enthusiastically the state committing such terrible crimes against them?”
And are all Jewish ‘AZers’ the children of “outrageous privilege”? Is no one amongst them middle or lower middle class, or even poor?
It is surely ironic that Herzl’s wife Julia was herself an ‘AZer.’ Although described by the New York Times after her death as having “devoted her whole fortune to the (Zionist) cause,” it was Herzl who spent their money on the cause, and it was his cause – not hers. Sold by propagandists as a beloved figure in the Zionist movement, she had no interest in the Zionist idea and was disliked by leading Zionists.
For Simon Schama, the Palestinians are not really the victims of Israel, as most of the world seems to think, but rather “the tragic victims of the tyranny of Hamas.” This projection of blame onto the victims themselves has been the standard response of Zionists all along.
The book Benjamin Moser has written is a selective study of anti-Zionist Jews, but the history of anti-Zionism is much deeper and broader than the individual cases he describes. The entire Jewish mainstream was anti-Zionist up to 1914 (or 1917) and an updated full-length study right now could not be more timely.
In the long history of Judaism, modern political Zionism is an aberration and in the minds of many, a heresy. It was the foundation stone of what has been built since 1948, a genocidal state that has ruined any possibility that it might once have had of settling into West Asia as a genuine neighbor.
For young Jews in particular, finding their way out of the cul-de-sac of lies into which they have been led, the recovery of a Judaism without Zionism awaits them. This is their heritage, and this is the way it was until Herzl came along.
The idea of establishing a Jewish state in a land that was not Jewish but largely Muslim would have remained the pipe dream of a fantasist but for British intervention. Zionism was a tool Britain could use to strengthen its hold on the Middle East, but establishing a Jewish state in a land that was predominantly Muslim was a very bad idea destined to come to a sticky end for everyone.
Jews knew this in the first place and rejected Zionism for practical, humanistic and theological reasons. The wheel has now turned almost full circle and in increasing numbers, Jews are rejecting it again.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
