Exploring how Jewish dissent against Zionism aligns with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, arguing that unity in a shared struggle against Zionism offers a quicker path to peace than narrow nationalist liberation.
There is quite a remarkable phenomenon, which though it is in plain sight, goes almost unnoticed. It may occasionally receive a little airtime if the event is big enough and the times momentous, as they are at present. Most of the time, however, to the vast majority of people, and in particular those who can effect change, this phenomenon is either invisible or ignored. I am referring, of course, to Jewish support of Palestinians, as well as Jewish resistance to Zionism and to Israel in its current guise as Zionist creation.
Moreover, even in times when this phenomenon of Jewish resistance to Zionist supremacism in support of Palestinians receives attention, it is as a fleeting curiosity to the point of dismissiveness. While the big media networks such as the BBC and CCN give generous airtime to Israeli politicians and army spokespersons, as well as those who defend a Zionist, apartheid Israel, other than a brief clip of Jews occupying the Washington Capitol or Grand Central Station, little to no air time is given to anti-Zionist Jews in interviews and analysis to meaningfully present their stance.
It is a question by itself as to why anti-Zionist Jews – that is, Jews who stand against the destructive and divisive ideology of Zionism – are side-lined in the general debate. Though it is not a difficult question to answer as it happens. Suffice to say that it is because anti-Zionist Jews, by their mere existence, expose the falsity that Zionism is synonymous with Judaism and with being Jewish, and that it stands for all Jews everywhere, in defence of Jewish identity and for their protection as a people.
That brings us to another question: why are there anti-Zionist Jews to begin with? This too is not difficult to answer. First, Jews have a long history of countering injustice wherever it may manifest. Second, Jews who stand against Zionism recognise that Zionism is their enemy also. These points are profoundly addressed by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and it is worthwhile quoting their stance to get a full appreciation:
“Jewish Voice for Peace is guided by a vision of justice, equality and freedom for all people. We unequivocally oppose Zionism because it is counter to those ideals.
We know that opposing Zionism, or even discussing it, can be painful, can strike at the deepest trauma and greatest fears of many of us. Zionism is a nineteenth-century political ideology that emerged in a moment where Jews were defined as irrevocably outside of a Christian Europe. European antisemitism threatened and ended millions of Jewish lives — in pogroms, in exile, and in the Holocaust.
Through study and action, through deep relationship with Palestinians fighting for their own liberation, and through our own understanding of Jewish safety and self-determination, we have come to see that Zionism was a false and failed answer to the desperately real question many of our ancestors faced of how to protect Jewish lives from murderous antisemitism in Europe.
While it had many strains historically, the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a settler-colonial movement, establishing an apartheid state where Jews have more rights than others. Our own history teaches us how dangerous this can be.
Palestinian dispossession and occupation are by design. Zionism has meant profound trauma for generations, systematically separating Palestinians from their homes, land, and each other. Zionism, in practice, has resulted in massacres of Palestinian people, ancient villages and olive groves destroyed, families who live just a mile away from each other separated by checkpoints and walls, and children holding onto the keys of the homes from which their grandparents were forcibly exiled.
Because the founding of the state of Israel was based on the idea of a “land without people,” Palestinian existence itself is resistance. We are all the more humbled by the vibrance, resilience, and steadfastness of Palestinian life, culture, and organizing, as it is a deep refusal of a political ideology founded on erasure.
In sharing our stories with one another, we see the ways Zionism has also harmed Jewish people. Many of us have learned from Zionism to treat our neighbors with suspicion, to forget the ways Jews built home and community wherever we found ourselves to be. Jewish people have had long and integrated histories in the Arab world and North Africa, living among and sharing community, language and custom with Muslims and Christians for thousands of years.
By creating a racist hierarchy with European Jews at the top, Zionism erased those histories and destroyed those communities and relationships. In Israel, Jewish people of color – from the Arab world, North Africa, and East Africa – have long been subjected to systemic discrimination and violence by the Israeli government. That hierarchy also creates Jewish spaces where Jews of color are marginalized, our identities and commitments questioned & interrogated, and our experiences invalidated. It prevents us from seeing each other — fellow Jews and other fellow human beings — in our full humanity.
Zionist interpretations of history taught us that Jewish people are alone, that to remedy the harms of antisemitism we must think of ourselves as always under attack and that we cannot trust others. It teaches us fear, and that the best response to fear is a bigger gun, a taller wall, a more humiliating checkpoint.
Rather than accept the inevitability of occupation and dispossession, we choose a different path. We learn from the anti-Zionist Jews who came before us, and know that as long as Zionism has existed, so has Jewish dissent to it. Especially as we face the violent antisemitism fueled by white nationalism in the United States today, we choose solidarity. We choose collective liberation. We choose a future where everyone, including Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, can live their lives freely in vibrant, safe, equitable communities, with basic human needs fulfilled.”
[Jewish Voice for Peace: Approach to Zionism
Though it will sound very strange to some ears, the really salient note here is “collective liberation”. Currently, the Palestinian struggle is seen worldwide as a struggle solely for liberation of Palestinians, their land and their rights. However, this narrow view is not only a hindrance to justice, it is also mistaken, because it excludes the other party to the injustices of Zionism. As anti-Zionist Jews have recognised for over a century, aside from the injustice wrought on Palestinians, Jews have also been robbed by Zionism of a greater and richer existence in the region, more than anything the supremacism of Zionism can ever offer Jews. To quote again from the JVP: “Jewish people have had long and integrated histories in the Arab world and North Africa, living among and sharing community, language and custom with Muslims and Christians for thousands of years.”
Zionism has destroyed that world, and in its place created a country and imposed itself on a region in which Jews, rather than feeling safe and at home, must always live in fear, where they must perpetually live by the principle “that the best response to fear is a bigger gun, a taller wall, a more humiliating checkpoint”. It is small wonder that Jews who know the historical truth about themselves as a people so strongly resist Zionism.
But there is not only the loss to Jews of a rich heritage in the wider region, there is also the moral compromise forced upon Jews who do not reject Zionism. Zionism is un-Jewish, and indeed it is anti-Jewish in the most virulent sense. To quote the great Jewish sage Hillel, when asked to teach the Torah to a potential convert whilst he stood on one foot, Hillel replied: “Do not do to others that which is hateful to you. That is Judaism. All the rest is commentary.” And, we might add, that is humanism.
Jews who do not reject Zionism are no different to Muslims who do not reject Islamism, or white people who do not reject White Supremacists who claim to be standing in their name. All supremacist ideologies and systems, whether Slavery, Fascism, Nazism, White Supremacism, Islamism or Zionism, require the violation of humanist principles to achieve their goals, and in turn morally compromise not only those who actively perpetuate these ideologies, but also those who fail to reject them whilst accepting the benefits. As a supremacist ideology like any other, Zionism’s violation of humanist principles through its possession of the land for one group via the erasure of another, has not only harmed Palestinians, it also inflicts a deep moral wound on all Jews who fail to denounce it.
A great Jewish sage of our time foresaw the moral injury Zionism would inflict on Jews. Speaking in the 1930s, Albert Einstein warned of the “inner damage to Judaism from the creation of a Jewish state with boarders and an army”.[1] And in 1956, eight years after Israel’s imposition in Palestine, and observing how Israel’s policies towards the Arabs were already developing, Einstein wrote to the Jewish Agency warning that “…the attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.”
Einstein understood that Zionism would force Jews to go against Judaism’s deepest held precept as stated so clearly by Hillel. Zionism’s violation of this ethical core of Judaism, which is a universal to the whole of humanity, injures everyone who sees themselves as a Jew, indeed more broadly as a humanist, yet does not stand against Zionism and all forms of supremacism.
Keeping the discussion focused on Palestine, it is inescapable that those Jews who do not reject Zionism currently do not live as humanists but as oppressors. They do not live as Hillel exhorts the potential convert to Judaism to live. There is no way round this conclusion, and cannot be said in any other way. Jews who do not reject Zionism cannot be exempted from the same criticism that Muslims or Christians are rightly subject to when they fail to stand against the prejudices and supremacisms of their creed, whether it is homophobia, misogyny, religious hatred and so on. In every sense, failure to denounce is tantamount to support.
Liberating Palestine Is Not Enough
It is important to note that the inner damage inflicted on Jews as a collective by Zionism will not be healed with the liberation of Palestinians alone. To fully heal that spiritual wound and recover those moral standards, which Einstein foresaw would be sacrificed on the alter of Zionism, Jews must be part of the liberation process, both as liberators and as those to be liberated. Because, and though it will surprise and perhaps even shock many, the majority of Jews are as much victims of Zionism as Palestinians.
This all now raises a third question: is it time to unify the struggle in recognition that there is more than one party who is victim to Zionism?
To unify and redefine the struggle from being solely a liberation of Palestinians to being a struggle to defeat Zionism and consign it to history? Because it is clear that as long as Zionism continues to claim it speaks for all Jews, Jews as a collective can neither regain the former moral high ground of centuries of humanist existence nor be effective in liberating Palestinians. It is not enough to restore Palestine. Zionism must end.
It is surely in realisation of a joint struggle that peace and justice for all have their best and possibly only chance of being realised. We need to advancing beyond a struggle with the solitary goal of liberation of Palestine, to one of a joint struggle against the divisive ideology of Zionism and its harm to all of us. A struggle that advocates not only for a restoration of Palestine, but, as JVP and other Jewish and Palestinian groups advocate, for the creation of the state that should have at one time been created for both Jews and Palestinians, not simply as equals but as one people, as they were in the Palestine of the early 20th century. One people of Muslims, Christians and Jews in a secular democratic state. It does not matter which constituted the majority back then. The important point is that the identities of each is inextricably and indelibly linked to the land. Without the diversity of the people who inhabited the land before Zionism wrought its destruction, the land is incomplete and likely never see peace.
Neither the UN nor any external party, whether diplomatic or military, can bring about lasting peace in the region without the support of the majority of Jews. Lasting peace and the eventual restoration of one harmonious people of Jews, Christians and Muslims cannot be achieved without Jewish struggle. Profound recognition is owed to those Jews who, working within Jewish communities that have yet to acknowledge the truth about this supremacist and now fully genocidal ideology, have courageously opposed Zionism from its inception to the present day.
That is what it will take. If Palestinians are to be free, and there is to be peace and prosperity for all, Jews must be free of Zionism first.
There are several final points to note.
First, whilst Hamas’s killings on October 7 of unarmed Israelis can be explained in the context of the same being done to unarmed Palestinains during a 75 year settler-colonial project, they cannot be ethically justified. However, it is important to note that this necessarily falls short of condemnation of Hamas itself and its struggle, because we cannot condemn Hamas in isolation. If we are to condemn Hamas we must also condemn Israel for murderously existing for 75 years in a land where there is another people. That said, it is better to refrain from condemning either, acknowledge both as being locked in a lawless eye-for-an-eye world, and demand that both step back from violence. Such a move can be realised by establishing an international peace keeping force in the region, a move Palestinians agree to, but Israel currently rejects. Lives will be saved, and a space created in which level-headed engagement can take place.
Second, just as there needs to be a shift within the wider Jewish consciousness rejecting Zionism and re-embracing humanist principles, there also needs to be a shift in Arab consciousness. Contrary to misconceptions promoted by Zionists, Arabs do not irrationally hate Jews, despite what Israel has wrought on them in the region. They understand the enemy are not Jews (nor even Israel, were it to be freed from the stranglehold of Zionism). Palestinians and Arabs in general know very well it is Zionism that has brought misery on them. However, this is not enough. Palestinians and other Arabs need to remind and reaffirm to themselves who the Jews are as a group. In other words, Arabs need to re-visit the past and remember that the near entirety of their history was as one people of Jews, Christians and Muslims, prosperously at peace and living together in Palestine and the wider Arab world.
Perhaps it is not too outrageous to even envisage a day when Jews will immigrate to Arab countries to live, where they will once again contribute richly to society and culture, and feel at home there again.
Finally, Palestinians should actively fight against antisemitism just as many Jews actively fight against Zionism and for Palestine. This is not only the correct ethical thing to do, it is also a practical step that will help re-unite Palestinians and Jews.
[1] “Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish State, with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain — especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish State.” JTA