No, Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism

As the bombs fell in Gaza, one strategy that the right wing and, yes, many “liberals,” adopted to silence activists — and social justice educators — was to claim that to oppose Zionism is automatically antisemitic. In December, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution — 311 to 14, with 92 voting “present” — that “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” 

It is not.

Yes, there are examples of the entanglement of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. But this resolution is an effort to silence critics of Israeli aggression and U.S. complicity by insisting that opposition to Zionism is — and has always been — antisemitic. The courageous Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow activists featured in the new film Israelism demonstrate how wrong this conflation is. But so does knowing some history of Zionism and Palestine.  

I’ve spent the past several weeks working on a role play that explores the “seeds of violence” in Palestine-Israel. It covers early Zionist immigration to Palestine during the Ottoman period — late 19th, early 20th century — up through the first years of the British Mandate in the 1920s. In the activity, students attempt to “become” individuals whose lives intersected with one another — and who sometimes clashed over whether or not Palestine should become a “national home for the Jewish people,” as Lord Balfour wrote in the fateful one-sentence Balfour Declaration in 1917. (The activity is available at our Zinn Education Project.) 

I include roles on the “father” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl; an idealistic young radical Zionist of the second Aliyah Jewish migration to Palestine, which began about 1904; and Arthur Ruppin, the prominent Zionist land agent of the Jewish Agency in Palestine. As Herzl writes in his seminal The Jewish State, the Zionists’ mission was to establish a Jewish “national homeland” in Palestine: “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

One role features a wealthy absentee Beirut landlord, Elias Sursuq, who owned vast tracts in Palestine and was happy to profit from land sales to the new arrivals from Europe. Landlords like Sursuq sold prime agricultural land to Zionists who had no place for Palestinians in their planned national homeland and expelled peasants — fellahin — who’d lived on and farmed the land for generations. As Ruppin wrote, “We are bound in each case of the purchase of land and its settlement to remove the peasants who cultivated the land so far, both owners of the land and tenants.” 

Palestinians resisted their displacement by Zionist settlers. Peasants organized and fought to hold on to their land. Newspaper editors like Najib Nassar and ‘Isa al-‘Isa, also included in the role play, amplified the peasants’ anger, and wrote articles and editorials warning about the Zionists’ ultimate plans for Palestine. As al-‘Isa wrote in 1914:  “[We are] a nation threatened with disappearance by the Zionist tide in this Palestinian land . . . a nation that is threatened in its very being with expulsion from its homeland.”

But here’s the thing: In the world — and in the individuals students encounter in the role play — some of the fiercest critics of Zionism were other Jews. Students meet Yosef Castel, a Sephardi Jew whose family had lived in Jerusalem since King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. He and other Sephardi Jews lived contentedly, as Jacob Yehoshua wrote, in “joint compounds of Jews and Muslims. We were like one family. . . . Our children played with their [the Muslim] children in the yard, and if children from the neighborhood hurt us, the Muslim children who lived in our compound protected us. They were our allies.” Many Sephardi Jews, like Castel, opposed the ethnic separatism that Zionists were so militantly committed to. In 1921, Castel wrote, “Both sides [Palestinians and Zionists] are fighting each other over a single land [Palestine], and they must, as a matter of historical necessity, live in it together and peacefully develop their national homes in the same land, which is destined to be one state.”

Another anti-Zionist Jew who students encounter is Pati Kremer, a member of the socialist Jewish Bund in what was then Russia. As her role indicates, “Working-class Jews had a choice: socialism or Zionism.” The Zionists urged flight instead of fight. While members of the Bund were committed to the struggle for Jewish cultural rights and socialism in Eastern Europe, Zionists saw hope only in immigration to Palestine. As Kremer’s role articulates, working-class Jews should have “no desire to go to Palestine, where Jewish capitalists would continue to exploit us.”

Also featured in the role play is the Christian Zionist President Woodrow Wilson, who in 1919 was petitioned by prominent anti-Zionist U.S. Jews — congressmen, former ambassadors and consuls, surgeons, businessmen, rabbis, professors, attorneys, and even Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times. The March 5, 1919, Times published the full text of the anti-Zionist petition, “setting forth our objections to the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine . . . and to the segregation of the Jews as a nationalistic unit in any country.” Petitioners wrote that “The American Zionists represent, according to the most recent statistics available, only a small proportion of the Jews living in this country . . .” 

The petition offered four arguments against Zionism: 1. The “establishment of a sovereign state in Palestine” implied that Jews in other countries held a “double allegiance.” Zionists are “under the spell of an emotional romanticism or of a religious sentiment fostered by centuries of gloom.” 2. Not all Jews will be able to immigrate to Palestine, and in many countries, Jews will be branded as aliens, it will put their safety at risk, and justify more repressive legislation. 3. There are other people living in Palestine, and Zionist settlement will “provoke bitter controversies.” These “bitter and sanguinary conflicts . . . would be inevitable . . .”  4. “[T]he reestablishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State is utterly opposed to the principles of democracy . . .”

Finally, it is worth remembering, that there were — and are today — Zionists who are antisemitic. For example, as students learn in the role play, Lord Balfour himself was both a Zionist and an antisemite who pushed the 1905 Aliens Act in Great Britain, expressly to keep out Jews — “undesirable immigrants” — fleeing the horrors of Eastern European pogroms. 

In the role play, students have conversations that surface different perspectives on Palestine, Zionism, and justice. The seeds of today’s violence were planted in those turn-of-the-century years — by the choices made and the alternatives left on the table. Students can see it themselves as they encounter conflicting visions for the future of Palestine. 

It is not simply my opinion that anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism, as the U.S. House of Representatives insists. That’s what history teaches. And this is as true today as it was 100 years ago — as mentioned, witness the inspirational anti-Zionist activism of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Educators should not be bullied by politicians — or by their own administrators — who use phony claims about anti-Zionism in their attempt to suppress a curriculum that seeks to honestly understand the dynamics that led to today’s tragic events in historic Palestine. Zionism needs a critical look in our classrooms — it’s sound history, it’s good teaching.