MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE – REVIEW OF BENJAMIN MOSER’S ANTI-ZIONISM: A JEWISH HISTORY
MEMO in Conversation with Benjamin Moser
The publication of Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism – A Jewish History could not be more timely. The Genocide in Gaza, the Pogroms and Ethnic Cleansing, demonstrate what Hannah Arendt and many of those featured in Moser’s book predicted. Zionism, the project to form a Jewish State, was based on racial myths and fantasies. It could only end in violence, terror and messianic madness.
That Zionism would lead to war with the indigenous people and Israel’s Arab neighbours was inevitable. During the British Mandate the Zionists had opposed any move towards self-government whilst the Arabs were in a majority.
Arthus J Balfour, Zionist hero & author of the Balfour Declaration, was an Imperialist & White Supremacist
A Jewish State in a land where the Zionists were in a minority could only lead to ethnic cleansing. All strands of anti-Zionism, from bourgeois to socialist, predicted this. Transfer had been an integral part of Zionist assumptions even before the Balfour Declaration was issued.
Anti-Zionism, A Jewish History: Benjamin Moser with Rashid Khalidi | Cullman Center
The reason it is instructive to look at the history of Jewish anti-Zionism is because Jews today provide the moral alibi for imperialism’s support for the settler state in Palestine. But that is all it is, an alibi. The real reason for imperialism’s support of Israel is that it deems that it is in its own interests.
It also needs to be emphasised that Jews today are not the Jews of a century ago. Up till the 1950s British Jews were seen as being on the left. They were mainly working class. Today they are middle and upper middle class and are to be found primarily on the right and far-right politically,
Zionism has had a profound effect on Jews’ political alignment as well as their psyche. When the history of the Jewish people comes to be written, Zionism will be seen as both an aberration and an abomination. Something to be quickly passed over.
There is a very good reason why BBC interviewers and other right-wing journalists ask ‘Do you support Israel’s right to exist’. They don’t ask this of any other state. The reason is simple. Israel is an unnatural state. Israel is a state not of its own citizens but of its Jewish citizens only. It is an inherently racist state. By definition.
Jewish author describes Zionism as a racially exclusive movement
Someone should ask the idiot Green MPs like Sian Berry & Adrian Ramsay, who believe that Zionism isn’t racist, why Arabs who vote in Israeli elections are accused of ‘stealing the elections’
We can see that in the coverage of the latest Israeli election. The visceral racism was on display when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Israel’s Arab voters of “trying to steal the elections” by voting in high numbers.
It was also on display when both the Netanyahu and the anti-Netanyahu bloc both promised that any coalition government they formed would not include Arab parties. The very fact that parties are Jewish and Arab testifies to the abnormalcy of the Israeli state. As the Times of Israel reported:
While the anti-Netanyahu parties were projected to have an edge over the ruling bloc, they won’t be able to form a coalition unless several party heads violate campaign promises not to partner with Arab-led parties.
Zionism has turned the Jewish religion into a genocidal religion which looks to the Book of Joshua not the Prophets. A religion that turns the land of Israel into a golden calf, a piece of real estate to be worshipped.
Moser’s book starts off with two pages of quotations from the Bible about those who coveted the land and perpetrated injustice. Moser quotes from I Chronicles 22:8 where God told David he could not build the first temple because:
‘You have shed much blood and have waged great wars; you shall not build a house to my name, because you have shed much blood in my sight on the earth.’
Micah 2:1-2 criticises those who seize property by force like the West Bank settlers:
‘Woe to those who plan iniquity… They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them of their inheritance.’
Zionism ignores the Prophets preferring the blood thirsty, atavistic passages of the Bible to those which welcome the stranger.
Why Many Jews hate Zionism: The Long History of Jewish anti-Zionism
Zionism belongs on the same political spectrum as Nazism and Apartheid. Even neo-Nazis love it. Richard Spencer, who organised the Charlottesville march which chanted ‘the Jews will not replace us’ described himself as a White Zionist.
After spending 75 years pretending that there was no Nakba, that the Arab refugees had voluntarily left Palestine in order to make way for the Arab armies, it fell to the new Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Simha Flapan and Ilan Pappe to use recently released archives (now reclassified) to reveal that Palestinians were driven out at the point of a gun.
It was the ‘socialist’ Zionists who committed the worst massacres such as Dawayima in October 1948, when the army, led by Yitzhak Sadeh, a member of the ‘Marxist’ Mapam, killed hundreds of civilians. Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling declared: ‘I couldn’t sleep all night … Jews too have committed Nazi acts.’
Christian Zionism and the ‘Return’ of the Jews
Some of the most fanatical Zionists are not Jews but Christian Zionists, like the ones who turned up recently to demonstrate outside the Green Party conference chanting ‘there is no genocide’, as if they were holocaust deniers who had got lost.
Zionism was not a Jewish but a Christian project. Christian Zionism predated Jewish Zionism by 4 centuries, the product of the Reformation, Protestant Restorationism and millenarian fantasies.
A B Yehoshua, the ‘honest Zionist’ and novelist who told fellow Zionists what they didn’t want to hear namely that ‘the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’
The idea of a ‘Jewish Return’ was an anti-Semitic idea based on the belief that Europe’s Jews were visitors who had outstayed their welcome in other people’s countries. In the words of A B Yehoshua, Europe’s Jews ‘were using other people’s countries like hotels.’ [Jewish Chronicle, 22.12.1989]
Jews represented ‘semitism’ in the eyes of Wilhelm Marr who popularised the term ‘anti-Semitism’ and formed the League of Anti-Semites in 1879. According to Marr Europe’s Jews belonged in the Middle East not Germany. The Zionists agreed, which is why Zionism was seen by most Jews when it arose as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.
When Prime Minister Lord Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in 1840 he received a ‘a very meagre response’ to his suggestion of a Jewish return to Palestine.’ [Regina Sherif, Non-Jewish Zionism p.58] and in a resolution passed on 7 November 1842 the Board resolved that
it is precluded from originating any measures for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria.it is precluded from originating any measures for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria.
Colonel Charles Henry Churchill had written to Sir Moses Montefiore advocating that European powers should aid Jews in attaining “the sovereignty of at least Palestine’.
The main goal of 19th century Jewish leaders was civil emancipation. The suggestion that they should return to where they had never been was viewed as a threat to securing equal rights. The tension between the British imperial desire for a Jewish ‘return’ and the Jewish Establishment’s desire for equal rights explains why the Board was not interested in the desire of the Evangelical Christians for a Jewish ‘return’:
Lucien Wolf, Secretary of the Board’s Conjoint Committee wrote that ‘until the time of Herzl all the most prominent protagonists of Zionism were Christians’ [Notes on the Diplomatic History of The Jewish Question]
Zionism was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism
Those who proclaim that anti-Zionism is equal to anti-Semitism are either rogues or charlatans, like Bella Sankey. Zionism was a product of Christian imperialism and anti-Jewish racism.
Most leading Nazis were supporters of Zionism. In an interview in 1955 with Wilhelm Sassen, Eichmann declared
I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine being anything else.’
Eichmann wasn’t alone among the Nazis in his admiration for Zionism. Heydrich also was an admirer. The fact that Zionists and Nazis got on famously has been excised from the historical record or excused with tales about how they were really trying to save Germany’s Jews.
Manis Friedman is an influential Rabbi in the Lubavitch Hasidic Movement – Apart from Killing Palestinian Children He Believes That Child Sex Abuse is No Worse Than Diarrhea
Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis stated during the attacks on Ken Livingstone that you can “no more separate Zionism from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain” All he demonstrated was his own ignorance. His predecessors as Chief Rabbi, like Herman Adler, were anti-Zionists.
The Zionists don’t give up in their campaign to equate Zionism and anti-Semitism as the bogus report above demonstrates
The British Establishment does its best to equate Zionism with being Jewish because it provides a moral justification for imperialism’s support for Israel. Their latest stunt being the ‘anti-Semitism’ report by David Bell that pretends that anti-Semitism is on the rampage when his own report finds that:
British attitudes relating to Jewish people and Israel show two broad trends. Anti-Jewish attitudes are typically less prevalent and have remained more stable, whereas anti-Israel sentiments are more prevalent and have been increasing.
The traditional definition of anti-Semitism, hostility to Jews as Jews, has been redefined as ‘anti-Israel sentiments.’ This is the purpose of the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism.
Ben Moser’s Jewish anti-Zionism
When Ben Moser, a Jewish Pulitzer Prize winner, was young supporting Israel was as American as god, mother and apple pie. It was common sense. How, after the Holocaust could anyone, except anti-Semites, oppose a Jewish state?
That was my upbringing. The UN had passed Resolution 181 in November 1947 partitioning Palestine between Jews and Arabs and on May 15 1948 Israel gained its independence.
We learnt that the wicked Arab states, whose only desire was to drive the Jews into the sea, had invaded Israel at the stroke of midnight and those plucky Zionists, despite facing all the Arab armies, had with God’s help and a few miracles, won.
The story of Israel was a modern day morality tale. Leon Uris wrote a propaganda novel, Exodus. Jews were now able to defend themselves. But unlike most fairy tales, Zionism will not have a happy ending. Israel has, in Netanyahu’s words, become a Jewish Sparta where military might is venerated.
Today Jews and non-Jews are rediscovering a past that was carefully hidden away. The myths of Zionism have come tumbling down. Zionism has lost its sheen. Just as in the Snow Queen, the splinters in peoples’ eyes have melted and Zionism is shown as nothing more than an ugly, racial supremacist doctrine, a reflection of German racial nationalism.
The Snow Queen
The fable of two thousand years of ‘exile’ is shown to be of more recent, colonial origin. Instead of a chronological story of Jewish opposition to Zionism, Moser has chosen twelve figures, each of whom represent different traditions.
Edwin Montagu and Hyman Schactel represent a bourgeois and Reform anti-Zionism which are now gone. Today the bourgeois Jews are the most fanatical Zionists.
I consider myself well read in the history of Zionism and anti-Zionism but I confess to not having heard of five of the figures in the book – Aaron Samuel Tamares, the rabbi from Poland nor Ahmad Sadiq Saad, the Arab Jewish communist from Egypt, who along with other Arab communists was betrayed by Stalin when he decided to support the creation of the Israeli state and arm it.
The other figures I hadn’t heard of before were Hyman Judah Schachtel, rabbi of the Congregation Beth Israel, the largest congregation in the South, the oldest temple in Texas. Beth Israel was a Reform synagogue and Reform Jewry had been a stalwart of American Jewish anti-Zionism. The Pittsburgh Declaration of 1885 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.
Reform Judaism is the majority strand in American Jewry and represents the Judaism of the American Jewish bourgeoisie. As Zionism grew in strength during the second world war so Beth Israel was torn by divisions between those who supported Zionism and its opponents. Schachtel rejected the Zionist idea “that we are Jewish by race and nationality”
In the years 1943 and 1944, a century after Beth Israel’s establishment, controversy over Zionism split the congregation. By 1948, with the establishment of the Israeli state Schachtel had become a Zionist arguing that you couldn’t fight history.
The other figures I hadn’t heard of were Helena Salem, Brazil’s first woman war correspondent. In 1977 Helena authored Palestinians, the New Jews. An echo of the Italian holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s claim, in an interview with the newspaper Il Manifesto, that “Everyone is somebody’s Jew, and today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”
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Benjamin Moser in Conversation with Ahdaf Soueif
The final figure I hadn’t heard of was Nan Goldin who in 2023 was described as the most influential person in the art world in ArtReview‘s “Power 100” list of influential people.
Moser’s choice of 12 representative figures of anti-Zionists will inevitably be controversial. I’m not sure why Hyman Judah Schachtel was chosen since he abandoned his anti-Zionism when Israel was formed. A far more important figure in the continuity of American anti-Zionism would have been Rabbi Elmer Berger who never recanted.
However we would have known nothing about the Beth Hillel controversy if Elmer Berger had been chosen and that I suspect was the reason for the choice. Another prominent American Jew on the right of politics was Alfred Lillienthall.
On the left one might ask why Marek Edelman from the Bund was not chosen or someone from the ranks of the Satmar Chasidim or an Israeli anti-Zionist such as Moshe Machover.
The choice was Ben’s. The most talented Jews have always tended to disavow Zionism, which attracts the violent, loud mouthed, bigot whose vocabulary consists mainly of shouting ‘anti-Semitism’ at anyone they disagree with.
Zionism never had an enlightened side although it is often claimed that it covers a broad political spectrum. All wings agreed on the need for a majority Jewish state.
The Labour Zionists rejected socialism and the ‘Marxist’ Zionists of Mapam rejected class struggle. Ze’ev Sternhell, himself a Zionist, said in The Founding Myths of Israel, that he would have described Labour Zionism as national socialism but for the association with the Nazis. So he called it nationalist socialism, itself a contradiction.
When you think of Marx, Trotsky, Freud, Kafka, Michael Rosen, Alexei Sayle, Miriam Margoyles, Einstein and Arendt, you realise that Jewish anti-Zionism appeals to those with a brain and a sense of humanity.
The Zionists have Jeffrey Epstein, Alan Dershowitz, Alan Sugar and the junk BBC historian Simon Schama. Even those who began as Zionists – Arendt and Einstein –jettisoned it. Zionism has nothing to offer but the murder of children and racial ‘cleansing’.
Zionists claim that they ‘returned’ to Palestine but they have spent their time destroying the biblical landscape not preserving it. It is the best proof that they are colonisers.
In the West Bank there are the ugly settlements. In 1967 they destroyed the ancient biblical village of Emmaus and two others with the JNF’s Canada Park covering the crime. In pre-67 Israel they consciously razed the old Arab villages.
The history of Gaza stretches back over 5,000 years. It is one of the most continuously inhabited places in the world. The Zionists, like all settler-colonials, hate the history of the people who came before them. They have destroyed the archives and memory of the Palestinians. The Zionists are the world’s Philistines along with Trump and his Riviera.
The chapter on Felicia Langer is revealing. I can remember when I was a child how she was reviled in Zionist circles. I never understood why but she was a lonely hero at a time when anti-Zionism was not in fashion. A holocaust survivor and a Communist human rights lawyer, Langer decided that appearing in Israeli courts was simply providing them with a legitimacy that their 99.74% conviction rate deserve.
On paper Israel has a justice system, complete with a Supreme Court. But this is a colonial court. Not once has it rejected a racist law as unconstitutional. Instead it has developed doctrines such as ‘stealing in good faith’ to justify the theft of Palestinian land.
It has enabled the theft of the land of Arab citizens of Israel by applying the Absentee Property Law only to them not Jews. It has gone on to apply it to Palestinians in Jerusalem but never Jews because it is a Zionist court.
Ronnie Kasrils – a Living Legend and Fighter Against Apartheid & Zionism
Ronnie Kasrils is a friend and comrade. He represents everything that is best about the traditions of diaspora Jewry. Most of the White Anti-Apartheid activists in South Africa were Jewish but most Jews were Zionists.
A leader of the military wing Um Konto we Sizwe and Minister of Intelligence in Nelson Mandela’s first government, he has become one of the most implacable anti-Zionists of all, drawing the links between apartheid in South Africa and Israel. Until I read Moser’s book I didn’t know that Ronnie nearly ended up a Revisionist Zionist!
Avi Shlaim is the most prominent Middle East historian in Britain, alongside Ilan Pappe (another candidate). His anti-Zionist politics disqualify him from being interviewed for the BBC. Shlaim’s Three World’s is a wonderful description of how the Arab Jews were de-Arabised and treated like untermenschen when they arrived in Israel, being sprayed with DDT on leaving their planes.
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Benjamin Moser in Conversation with Ahdaf Soueif
Shlaim provides further proof that the exodus of Iraqi Jews was primarily because Zionist agents in Iraq went around bombing Jewish targets in order to stimulate emigration.
Shlaim describes his shame when his father called out to him in Arabic in front of friends. Arabic being verboten in Israel. Shlaim was one of the post-Zionist Israeli historians.
Hannah Arendt
Many of the 12 figures in this book had a journey to make from Zionism to anti-Zionism, none more so than Hannah Arendt who ended up with incisive criticism of Zionism but who strictly speaking was never an anti-Zionist as opposed to one of its most trenchant critics.
One person who didn’t have a journey to make was Sir Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in the Lloyd George government. His claim to fame was that he was the only member of the War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration. He was also its only Jewish member. He was outnumbered by the Christian Zionists and their imperialist allies. He resigned in 1922, the target of anti-Semites and died two years later aged 45.
Moser paints an interesting portrait of the man who was a member of the Cousinhood, the interconnected and intermarried Anglo-Jewish Establishment.
“Liberal Zionists Are the Real Enemy” | Benjamin Moser & Barry Malone
The New Yorker Betrays the Legacy of Hannah Arendt & Critical Thinking for the Sake of Liberal Zionism & Chotiner
It is the chapter on Hannah Arendt which is the most interesting. Hannah Arendt, even when one doesn’t agree with her, was a highly original thinker, as The Origins of Totalitarianism demonstrates. Readers of my book, Zionism During the Holocaust, will find some of the material in Chapter 7, The Conscious Pariah, familiar. This attracted the wrath of ‘liberal’ Zionist Isaac Chotiner who was fascinated with the question of whether or not Zionism’s ‘moral crisis’ was about roads not taken or original sin.
It is a stupid question from someone who gives the appearance of being one of those intellectuals who wants to make their own stupidity the object of others’ fascination.
Zionism doesn’t have and never did have a ‘moral crisis’. Not only because moral crises only belong to the living but because it should be obvious, even to the most in(s)ane Zionist, that carrying out a genocide and using kids as target practice, plumbs the depths of what is usually known as evil.
Did the Nazis have a moral crisis? Its supporters believed in building a youthful, vigorous Germany that wasn’t in hock to the bankers. It paved the roads of Germany and built autobahns. However no one in their right mind would talk of a Nazi ‘moral crisis’ and after the genocide and torture camps to talk of Zionism’s moral crisis is an obscenity. Zionism has no morality to have a crisis.
Chotiner is nothing if not a representative of the obscene ‘liberal’ Zionism which dresses up piety in flowery language. When Moser wrote about American Jewish support for genocide in Gaza and the attacks on free speech by the Biden/Trump administrations, Chotiner saw this as an example of an ‘angry’ essay. Chotiner writes that Moser
was troubled by the exceptionalist ideas that even secular American Jews had developed about their community after the Second World War. “We really did think, in some way that we would never have dared to articulate, that Jews were better,” he wrote. In his telling, this superiority eventually allowed American Jews to accommodate the United States’ “imperial power structure.” And, if “the marriage of American exceptionalism and liberal Zionism led to genocide,” reform was inadequate; Zionism itself had to be abandoned.
Chotiner’s dismay at the conclusion that Moser reached was palpable. Even worse Moser’s new book reminds Jewish Americans that another tradition is available, one that opposes Israel’s existence rather than merely seeks to curb its worst impulses.
Chotiner complains that
‘Moser does not detail what a future resolution might entail; he argues instead that anti-Zionism offers a way out of the moral abyss to which Zionism has led.’
For someone who writes about Zionism’s ‘moral crisis’ this is what might be called double entry semantics.
Like most Zionists, Chotiner is carefree in his allegations of anti-Semitism. However he was most reluctant to pin the label on Arthur Balfour, despite the latter openly admitting that he supported many of Cosima Wagner’s anti-Semitic postulates.
Balfour, had been Chief Secretary in Ireland where he earned the soubriquet ‘Bloody Balfour’ after having set the military on a demonstration in Mitchelstown which killed 3 demonstrators. The best Chotiner can say is that Balfour ‘seems to have had a streak of antisemitism himself.’
Chotiner’s diatribe, because it can hardly be called a review, asked questions that barely require a reply such as
How did Zionism become a movement that could accommodate such compromises [the agreement with the Nazis called Ha’avara]? How did it come to attract so many adherents? For a people whose safety had repeatedly proved provisional, Zionism held out the promise of refuge—a promise that acquired new force after the Nazis murdered two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. Moser acknowledges this history, but it rarely enters into his account of the movement.
An agreement with the Nazis was no compromise but a logical extension of Zionism’s own racial politics. They called it realpolitik. Chotiner might care to read the letter that the Zionist Federation of Germany wrote to Hitler on June 21, 1933 offering to collaborate on the basis of shared values.
As for how Zionism came to attract so many adherents, the answer is Hitler. Most of the Jews of the pre-Nazi period were not Zionists. It is not for nothing that I described Israel as ‘Hitler’s bastard offspring’. Zionism came too late to provide a refuge to anyone and the Ha’avara trade agreement was made in order to secure a portion of German Jewish wealth for Palestine. Saving people was not its purpose.
Chotiner reserves his bile for Moser’s chapter on Hannah Arendt, the foremost political scientist and philosopher of the 20th century. The title of the chapter is named after Arendt’s essay The Jew as a Pariah. It reflects her division of diaspora Jews into Pariahs and Parvenus.
Chotiner tried to point out a series of mistakes in Moser’s account but in the process he evidenced his own mistakes, as I pointed out in a rejoinder. I sent it to The New Yorker out of a sense of public duty but it failed to print it.
To take but one example Chotiner denies that the Introduction to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws contained a sentence
“The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people.”
adolf eichmann
There was no Introduction he wrote. In fact the quote appeared in the official explanatory accompaniment (written by Reich Ministry of the Interior experts like Bernhard Lösener) and was published in the main Nazi legal gazettes and the official party press (such as Völkischer Beobachter) to justify and interpret the new laws to the public and legal apparatus. That is why legal scholars like John Quigley refer to this as “the introduction accompanying that law“.
Chotiner attributes it to a subsequent article in the German legal and administrative journal ReichsVerwaltungsblatt. But this was an official legal commentary or introduction which clarified the law. In addition a highly similar and famously controversial text was published on 17 September 1935, just two days after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in an interview with Zionist George Kareski.
Chotiner was engaging in hair splitting. Readers can see Chotiner’s review here and my response here and below. Chotiner, in a sideswipe at me, refers to my expulsion from the Green Party and my suggestion that it was at the behest of the Israeli Embassy that I was expelled. A quite reasonable suggestion since they were up to their necks in the anti-Semitism smear campaign in the Labour Party.
Chotiner focuses on alleged mistakes because he is unable to challenge the thrust of the argument that during the Holocaust the Zionist movement had just one objective – building the ‘Jewish’ state. Not only did they obstruct the rescue of Jewish refugees from the Nazis if their destination was not Palestine, to the extent of lobbying the Gestapo to prevent Jews going elsewhere but it resented groups campaigning for the refugees because they were taking away money that they saw as theirs by right.
Chotiner all but ignores the ferocious campaign against Hannah Arendt after she published her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. It was this that was primarily the subject of Moser’s chapter on Arendt but Chotiner was more interested in defending Zionism’s collaboration with the Nazis. Arendt wrote that
The campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy…. (it was) as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came “out of a mimeographing machine” … the clamor centered on the “image” of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.
Ben-Gurion had carefully planned the Eichmann trial as a show trial which would wipe away the memory of the Kasztner trial and refocus Israel’s self-image, not as a nation of macho fighters but as perpetual victims. Only Israel can describe its genocide as its ‘right to self-defence’.
Chotiner’s other reason for objecting to Moser’s book is his desire to rescue something from the wreckage of Zionism. He relies for support on genocide scholar, Omar Bartov that Israel could have taken a different path to the one taken. This is substituting a wish and a prayer for serious political analysis. It is understandable coming from Omar Bartov who is on his own journey, but coming from a liberal Zionist intend on defending the apartheid state it is no more than a last ditch attempt to defend genocidal ethno-nationalism.
Below is my response to Chotiner’s review in The New Yorker.
Tony Greenstein
Was Zionism’s Moral Crisis About Roads Not Taken or Roads That Never Existed?
A Response to Isaac Chotiner’s Review of Benjamin Moser’s “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History”
Isaac Chotiner’s attack on Benjamin Moser is a liberal Zionist lament, masquerading as a review, for a Zionism that never existed. Chotiner rests heavily on Omar Bartov for support but even Bartov has concluded that the Zionism that still exists today is a racist ideology of Jewish supremacy, and that ideology, like the ideologies of the twentieth century, must end up in the dustbin of history.
Israel’s supporters have long defended it on the grounds that it provided Jews with a home and a refuge against persecution. However not only did the Zionist project fail to save the Jews of the Nazi holocaust but it failed to protect the Jews of Argentina when a neo-Nazi Junta came to power in 1976, when up to 3,000 Jews were murdered.
The Israeli state preferred a profitable trade supplying weapons to the Junta to protecting Jews. In any event Israel was aligned to Argentina as part of the US led war against communism in Latin America. Argentina’s Jews were irrelevant to those geo-political calculations. The diaspora was expendable.
Benjamin Moser has explored a rich history of Jewish anti-Zionism with a portrait of the lives of 12 very different anti-Zionist Jews. Instead of a considered critique, Chotiner prefers to mourn the collapse of the Zionist dream and Zionism’s ‘moral crisis’.
Instead of addressing why it is that Israel, once held to be the Middle East’s only democracy, has turned into a morass of Jewish supremacism and messianic fascism, Chotiner takes aim at Moser’s book. The original sin of Zionism, its settler-colonial antecedents, are left unmentioned.
Chotiner’s argument is that there could have been another Zionism. That there was a good as well as a bad Zionism. It is this illusion which helped perpetuate the idea that Zionist colonisation was different from all other colonial ventures and thus justify Zionist exceptionalism.
The triumph of Zionism in the wake of the Holocaust meant not merely rewriting Jewish history but writing Jewish anti-Zionism out of that history.
Anti-Zionist Jews became invisible because their message, that being Jewish was not a national but an international identity, was unacceptable to those who reduced Judaism to the gold calf of a piece of land and who substituted worship of the state and real estate, for worship of a god.
Not only has anti-Zionism been written out of Jewish history but even the Zionist heroes of the Jewish resistance against the Nazis, such as Chajka Klinger, have seen their writings rewritten and distorted, their memory changed if not erased, in order to accord with a national Zionist narrative.
Zionism began with a rejection of the Diaspora, the ‘negation of the diaspora’ and with it both Jewish Emancipation and the revolutionary Jewish tradition of the Pale of Settlement. Its founder, Theodor Herzl summed this up in his pathetic plea to Count Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Czarist Minister of Interior and instigator of the Kishinev pogrom: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’
Whereas Jews were once seen as the harbinger of socialism and the agents of change, today the perception of Jews is that of reactionary politics, racism and Islamaphobia. Zionism and the far-right walk hand in hand as Israel becomes a magnet for fascists and racists internationally. Figures such as Tommy Robinson, Geert Wilders and Viktor Orban make the trip to Yad Vashem to pay tribute to the dead of the Holocaust that their predecessors murdered.
Chotiner cites Omar Bartov as saying that ‘”There were many forks in the road where the country (Israel) could have chosen to go one way and not the other.” It is this failure to understand that Zionism, with its quest for a Jewish ethno-religious state, could only take one road. The road of ethnic cleansing, Jewish supremacy and now genocide.
Chotiner refuses to accept that Zionism, as a settler-colonial movement, had of necessity to seek out an alliance with imperialism with all that that entails. Winston Churchill explained the choice in his 1920 article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, ‘Zionism or Bolshevism’. It is this longing for choices that never existed that explains Chotiner’s scattergun attack on Moser’s book.
Chotiner takes exception to the pairing of Herzl and Hitler for their racialisation of Jews. Yet how else can one describe Herzl’s essay, Mauschel, which Jacques Kornberg described as an ‘anti-Semites dream.’ The very title was the German language equivalent of the anti-Semitic slur ‘kike’. His first play The New Ghetto was ‘a storeroom of anti-Semitic stereotypes’. Herzl may have sought a homeland for the Jews, something which neither Hitler nor Eichmann objected to, but he sought it in alliance with the persecutors of the Jews!
When the leader of the anti-Dreyfusards, Edouard Drumont reviewed Herzl’s The Jewish State in La Libre Parole, Herzl’s reaction in his Diaries was ecstatic. Chotiner praises Herzl’s treatment of Dreyfus, yet Herzl thought he was guilty. Bernard Lazarre, the first campaigner for Dreyfus and a member of the Zionist Actions Committee resigned over this and Herzl’s whitewashing of the Ottoman Empire’s massacres of the Armenians. The Jewish State doesn’t even mention Dreyfus and his Diaries only mention him in passing.
Chotiner calls Moser’s belief that Zionism and Nazism shared “an ideological sympathy that bled into collaboration” an ‘explosive thesis’. Perhaps, but it is also true. If it is explosive, it is because Israel claims that it is the inheritor of the memory of the Holocaust dead.
On June 21, 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany voluntarily wrote a letter to Hitler stating that
Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group…
On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race… fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group.
Joachim Doron, noted that ‘the Jewish self-criticism so widespread among the German Zionist intelligentsia often seemed dangerously similar to the plaints of the German anti-Semites.’ According to Francis Nicosia, the anti-Semites considered Zionism ‘a useful vehicle for ridding Germany of its Jewish population and thus found it worthy of support.’
It was this that led Rabbi Jacob Agus to ask if ‘the Zionist programme and philosophy contribute(d) decisively to the enormous catastrophe of the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis by popularizing the notion that the Jews were forever aliens in Europe?’ It is little wonder that Chaim Weizmann wrote to Simon Marks on December 15, 1935 ‘that unless some radical measures are taken fairly soon, we Zionists may stand charged, when history comes to be written, with criminal indifference in the face of the greatest trial to which Jewry has been subjected in modern times.
This ideological symmetry led inexorably to collaboration with the Nazis as was evidenced in the 1954-8 Kasztner trial in Israel. Two-thirds of the Judenrat (Jewish Councils), which did the work of the Nazis in rounding up Jews for deportation, were staffed by Zionists.
Chotiner is eager to point out what he considers mistakes in Moser’s chapter on Hannah Arendt. He blames this on Tony Greenstein, who he informs readers has been expelled from the British Green Party. This gratuitous piece of information, which has no relevance to the review, betrays Chotiner’s real motives.
Chotiner takes care to focus on what he considers Moser’s mistakes as a way of undermining his book. It is reminiscent of the Assistant Prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, Jacob Robinson, who was so incensed by Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem that in 1965 he wrote And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight detailing some 400 alleged factual errors.
Who today has heard of Robinson? He had teams of researchers hired to uncover the slightest spelling mistake but Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil has survived the touchstone of time and sold over 300,000 in the English language alone. One such mistake that Chotiner alleges is when Moser states that the following quotation
‘The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people.’
formed part of the Introduction to the Nuremberg Law. Not so he says. There was no Introduction to the Nuremberg Laws. Rather they appeared in an article in a Nazi journal two months after the laws appeared.
In fact the quote appeared in the official explanatory introduction (written by Reich Ministry of the Interior experts, like Bernhard Lösener) and was published concurrently in the main Nazi legal gazettes and the official party press (such as Völkischer Beobachter) to justify and interpret the new laws to the public and legal apparatus. That is why legal scholars like John Quigley refer to this as “the introduction accompanying that law“. Chotiner is engaging in mere hairsplitting and he is factually wrong.
Chotiner denies that the Zionists welcomed the Nuremberg Laws when it is abundantly clear that the separation of Jew and non-Jew was fundamental to the Zionist (and Nazi) projects. As David Cesarani writes: ‘Zionists saw the pressure towards segregation as fulfilment of their assertion that Jews were a separate nation with no place in Germany…’ The Zionist Executive President, Menahem Ussishkin was effusive:
There is something positive in their [German Jewry’s] tragedy… and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.
There are other mistakes Chotiner makes whilst trying to correct Moser’s mistakes. He says that Zionist hero, Arthur Balfour ‘seems to have had a streak of antisemitism himself.’ There can be no doubt about the fact. Like most Christian Zionists, Balfour was anti-Semitic.
In 1905 Balfour, as Prime Minister, introduced the Aliens Bill which was intended to stem the flow of Jewish refugees from Russia into this country. His arguments against Jewish immigration, that they were ‘a people apart… who only intermarried among themselves’ were clearly anti-Semitic.
Balfour was a convinced racist who stated, in a parliamentary debate in 1906 that ‘We have to face the facts. Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.’
When Balfour told Chaim Weizmann that he had met with Cosima Wagner; the anti-Semitic widow of Richard Wagner, he explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of protesting Weizmann agreed that German Jews were an ‘undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon’.
Chotiner also suggests that Tony Greenstein, whom Moser quotes, ‘confused a shift in Germany’s trade surplus with a shift in export volume.’ Not so. Edwin Black, where the statistics are taken from, made it clear that export volume had declined by a lower figure.
Chotiner goes on to say that ‘Moser, drawn to the implication that Zionism saved Nazism, makes claims that no serious historian would support.’
But David Cesarani, who was clearly a serious historian, wrote in The Final Solution that ‘‘the many Jews who doubted the viability of the regime were not engaged in wishful thinking’ and that it was beset by enemies coupled with a chronic balance of payments deficit and a foreign currency crisis.’
The Investor’s Review of 5 August 1933 reported that ‘authoritative opinion is that Hitlerism will come to a sanguinary end before the New Year.’ As Edwin Black wrote:
‘the Nazi party and the Zionist Organization shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany. If the Hitler economy fell, both sides would be ruined.’
Chotiner stresses that the Ha’avara agreement enabled at least 50,000 Jews to emigrate to Palestine. But these 50,000 had to have at least £1,000 in capital, which is worth over £90,000 today. These Jews would have been more than able to find refuge in other countries. It was the poor Jews whose fate Ha’avara sealed. Before Ha’avara it was easier for German Jews to take part of their wealth out after deductions for various taxes. This was no longer true after Ha’avara.
The purpose of Ha’avara was not to rescue German Jews but to rescue their wealth for the upbuilding of the future Jewish state. The Zionist Executive declared that Ha’avara was ‘the sole way of bringing into Palestine the maximum amount of German Jewish capital.’
There is no way of knowing whether the Boycott campaign would have succeeded in overthrowing the Hitler regime but what is certain is that the Nazis were sufficiently frightened by the Boycott campaign to agree to Ha’avara. Their purpose in agreeing to it was the destruction of the Jewish Boycott.
The vast majority of Jews worldwide wanted to destroy the Nazi regime whilst it was weak. The Zionists fought tooth and nail against a Boycott because they saw it as a golden opportunity to build their state. Of this there is no doubt. Ben-Gurion’s biographer, Shabtai Teveth quotes his remarks to the Zionist Executive in October 1942, at the height of the Holocaust:
Disaster is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.
Noah Lucas, another serious Zionist historian observed:
‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism… Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. … By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’)
The Zionist destroyed the Boycott in order to secure their own advantage. Without the Boycott there would have been no Ha’avara. This was treachery of the first order. Even the Zionist Jewish Chronicle condemned them for this ‘unclean act’.
So unpopular was Ha’avara that at the 1933 Prague Congress Berl Locker lied and denied that they had anything to do with it. They were as American Jewish Labour organiser Boris Vladeck said ‘the scab agents’ of the Nazi regime.
Chotiner takes Moser for task for quoting Hava Eshkoli-Wagman as saying that Ha’avara’s proponents ‘did not see the saving of lives as an independent goal at that time, rather they sought to extract German Jewish property for the benefit of the Yishuv’. But as Chotiner admits, Wagman accepted that it was a ‘widely held criticism’. It was also an accurate one.
This was the very time that the Zionist Executive was threatening to cut German Jewish immigration unless a ‘better quality’ of immigrant were sent. Even Eshkoli-Wagman admitted that the Zionists gave precedence to building Jewish Palestine to defending civil rights in Germany.
There cannot be any doubt that given the choice between the diaspora and the Yishuv, the Zionist leadership chose the latter. As Ben-Gurion himself said:
‘Zionism… is not primarily engaged in saving individuals’ and that if there was ‘a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’
Chotiner’s explanation for Robert Weltsch’s endorsement of the Yellow Star in reaction to the 1933 siege of German Jewish shops is bizarre. His famous editorial of 4 April 1933 titled “Wear it with Pride, the Yellow Star” could hardly be taken as anything other than an endorsement.
In later years Weltsch admitted that this editorial had been a mistake. In October 1941 the Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star and this marked them out for abuse wherever they went. There was nothing to be proud of in wearing this hated symbol of the medieval ages.
Chotiner asks how did Zionism come to attract so many adherents? The simple answer is that Zionism only attracted the support of world Jewry after the holocaust. Prior to the holocaust Zionism was a minority in the Jewish world.
Chotiner suggests that Moser ‘Shows little curiosity about Herzl’s arguments or the competing or contradictory forms of Zionism.’ Perhaps that’s because Herzl’s arguments were mundane, unoriginal and repetitive. Herzl saw in anti-Semitism a force for good. It was the Zionist dialectic. Herzl made defeatism in the face of anti-Semitism into a badge of honour. Herzl had little to say that was positive about Jews nor was he religious.
The ‘competing or contradictory forms of Zionism’ exist primarily in Chotiner’s head. There was no competition. Statist Zionism was the hegemonic form of Zionism. Brit Shalom was an incoherent collection of intellectuals, some of whom, Ruppin and Kalvarisky in particular, who simply sought to persuade the Palestinians to peacefully accept their dispossession.
Chotiner criticises Arendt’s formulation of Eichmann as representing the banality of evil because he was a passionate anti-Semite. But these are not contradictory. Eichmann was both a convinced anti-Semite and also someone who was incapable of original thought. He carried out orders without thinking. He did not appear as a monster but as a desk bound bureaucrat.
Hitler did describe Zionism as a ‘Great movement’ although, because it was a Jewish movement, he convinced himself that it was all a Jewish swindle. However Hitler was also capable of adapting his positions when it suited him. When Ha’avara came under attack by sections of the Nazi state, in particular the German Foreign Office, he came down decisively in its support.
Chotiner believes that Israel was not predestined to end up in the way it has. However he is remarkably short of any explanation as to how the Israeli state could have ploughed a different furrow whilst remaining a ‘Jewish’ State. This is the fundamental difference between Moser and Chotiner.
Zionism, as a settler colonial movement, is no more able to change direction than an iceberg. Settler colonial states are founded on the dispossession, ethnic cleansing and often extermination of the indigenous population. That is what marks them off from normal bourgeois democratic states.
Israel made it clear from the very start that even its Arab citizens were a potential fifth column to be treated accordingly. That is why, for the first 17 years of Israel’s existence, its Arab citizens lived under military government.
That was under a Labour Zionist government. Likud has merely continued where Labour Zionism left off. There was no different path. It was the Labour Zionists who conquered the West Bank and established the Greater Israel Movement and the first settlements.
The refusal to accept a return of the refugees was common to both the ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ of the Zionist movement. A Jewish state would not have been Jewish if it hadn’t also been an apartheid state.
Tony Greenstein
See also
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser review – the deep roots of a contemporary movement
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History – Basia Winograd, Jewish Book Council
Interview – The Paris Review – Plan B Is Extremely Dangerous: Benjamin Moser on Anti-Zionism By Krithika Varagur September 22, 2026
This History of Anti-Zionism Paints a Fraught World in Black and White, NYT, 22.9.26.
Barnaby Raine’s Encountering Zionism
