Theme
“Anti-Zionism before 1948: a real debate”
Before Israel existed, opposing a Jewish state was a respectable position, held by many Jews and by the land's Arabs. After 1948 the same word came to mean undoing a state where millions live.
Why people find it convincing
- Many of the most prominent Jewish voices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries opposed Zionism, for religious, political or patriotic reasons.
- The Arabs of Palestine opposed a Jewish national home in their country from the start, as most peoples would.
- Today's anti-Zionists, including some Jewish groups, point to this history as their pedigree.
The picture
Jewish anti-Zionism was mainstream.
Reform Judaism's Pittsburgh Platform (1885) declared: '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.' The Bund, the Jewish socialist party founded in Vilna in 1897 (the same year as Herzl's Basel congress), fought for Jewish rights and Yiddish culture where Jews lived, doykeit or 'hereness', and saw Zionism as escapism. Much of Orthodoxy held that only the Messiah could restore Zion; the Talmud's 'Three Oaths' (Ketubot 110b–111a) were read as forbidding a mass return by force, and Agudat Yisrael was founded in 1912 partly in opposition to Zionism. In 1917 Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the British cabinet, called the Balfour policy 'anti-Semitic' in a memorandum, fearing it would mark British Jews as foreigners.
primary documentThe Pittsburgh Platform (Reform Judaism, 1885) (1885) ⚠
Point 5 — verify wording against the Central Conference of American Rabbis text.
primary documentEdwin Montagu, 'The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government' (cabinet memorandum, 23 August 1917) (1917) ⚠
Arab opposition was the natural position of the people already there.
The land's Arab majority opposed large-scale Jewish immigration and a Jewish national home from the first years. The Jaffa newspaper Filastin (1911) and the Palestine Arab congresses from 1919 argued it politically, and the revolts of 1920–21, 1929 and 1936–39 turned it violent. Whatever one thinks of the violence, opposing the transformation of one's country by immigration is a position most peoples would recognise.
primary documentFilastin (Jaffa newspaper, founded 1911) (1911)
What changed in 1948, and what didn't.
The Holocaust ended most Jewish anti-Zionism. The Bund's world was murdered, Reform Judaism had already moved to support a Jewish homeland (Columbus Platform, 1937), and most of Orthodoxy came to terms with the state. After 1948 the question changed. It was no longer whether there should be a Jewish state, but what should happen to the one that existed, with its millions of citizens, half of them refugees or their children from Europe and the Arab world. Pre-1948 anti-Zionism argued about a plan; anti-Zionism today argues about undoing a country. Some small Jewish groups (the Satmar Hasidim, Neturei Karta, and on the left Jewish Voice for Peace) carry the older positions on, and are often held up as proof that anti-Zionism can't be antisemitic (see 'Identity as authority'). The history is real. It shows that opposing Zionism once was, and in a sense still can be, a Jewish position. It doesn't settle what opposing Israel's existence means now.
Traps here:◆ Identity as authority◆ Which Zionism?◆ Judging by origin