Thursday, November 12, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Moser wants to demonstrate that Jewish anti-Zionism was an authentic Jewish tradition that was suppressed, that Zionism was historically an aberration, and that the people who resisted it were the courageous dissenters who saw what other Jews could not.
In his introduction, Moser imagines what he would have learned had he been taught this alternative history of the Jews:
I would have learned that to oppose Zionism did not mean amputating a part of myself. It meant placing myself in an alternative tradition—a hidden tradition, like those of the Kabbalists or the Marranos—a tradition of people who, though long dismissed and despised, were ultimately proven right.
Ultimately proven right? Really? Let's keep that little phrase in mind.
One of the first things I look for when reading an anti-Zionist book is how the author defines Zionism. it is fashionable nowadays to create a definition of Zionism that makes racism part of the definition and then declare it racist using circular reasoning. See the Green Party.
Moser initially avoids this problem. His definition is quite reasonable:
There have been many definitions of Zionism. But perhaps the simplest is favoring the establishment, and then the existence, of a Jewish state in Palestine.
That's about right. Except that Moser then silently redefines the term in the course of the book.
For example, in Chapter 6, Moser writes:
The theory of settler colonialism posits that such entities are inherently expansionist, that they require and generate ongoing conquests. So it proved with Israel. To accept the Arab offer would have meant drawing a permanent border—and that, precisely as the theory had shown, Zionism was unable to do.
Zionism has now become an ideology incapable of accepting permanent borders. Apparently the withdrawal from the Sinai, the peace agreement with Jordan (with defined borders) and the agreed Blue Line with Lebanon never happened.
By Chapter 8, he adds a bunch of additional things to the definition that were never there:
In a land that, only a few years before, had been overwhelmingly Arab, Zionism meant establishing a Jewish state, racially pure and firmly majoritarian: a race-state in which Palestinians could never aspire to equality.
I don't know how a country where 20% of the population is non-Jewish and has equal rights under the law is "racially pure." And using the word "race" here for Jews who have every skin color is fairly offensive, too.
Even if we set that aside, if we pretend that Palestine remained an Arab majority state from the river to the sea as Moser would prefer, can he even pretend to imagine that Jews would be treated as equal citizens there? We have several models of Arab majority states to look at. The demands he makes for Arab equality in a majority Jewish state would never be approached in an Arab state.
We don't even have to speculate. The Arab proposal at the 1946–47 London Conference explicitly called for a "permanent Arab majority" in Palestine and stipulated that Jewish representation in the legislature could never exceed one-third of its members, irrespective of the number of Jewish citizens.
Apparently a firmly majoritarian state is only a "race-state" when the majority is Jewish.
Moser portrays anti-Zionist Jews as part of the arc of history. he celebrates early anti-Zionists. But he ignores how so many anti-Zionist Jews changed their minds.
In 1885, the American Reform rabbis declared in their Pittsburgh Platform:
We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and, therefore, expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.
That was anti-Zionism before Herzl from one of the major American Jewish organizations. Moser should celebrate that, right? Except....by 1937, the Reform movement had changed its position. Its Columbus Platform recognized Jewish peoplehood and declared the obligation of Jews to help build Palestine as a Jewish homeland. The Central Conference of American Rabbis describes this as a reversal of its earlier position.
This was before the Holocaust and before Israel was reborn. Jews who were uncomfortable with Zionism, many for good reason, reconsidered as they faced a world that was more and more indifferent to the fate of Jews in Europe.
And it wasn't only liberal Jews. Many Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism because they rejected secular Jewish nationalism or believed Jewish sovereignty should be restored only with the coming of the Messiah. Yet many of them subsequently accepted the existence of Israel, participated in its political institutions and worked to ensure its continued existence as a Jewish state. They did not necessarily become ideological Zionists, but they no longer opposed the Jewish state.
Which brings up the category error: Moser equates anti-Zionists before 1948 with today's anti-Zionists. They are not the same thing. Before 1948 there were fears among Jews that their position in their own countries would be threatened if a Jewish state was established. Before the Holocaust the idea that it was a moral imperative to have a state to be a refuge for Jews did not seem so important. Things change with history and after Israel was declared, the vast majority of former critics of Zionism dropped their opposition. Moser doesn't acknowledge that.
There were individual holdouts, of course. Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism continued to oppose Zionism long after Israel was established. But he represented almost no one. No one is suppressing Jewish history, as Moser claims. The history is easy to research. But it has a much larger scope than Moser pretends.
Moser's introduction makes a sweeping historical claim:
I would have learned that in almost every country and in almost every branch of Judaism, Zionists were a tiny minority, and that to the vast majority of Jewish people, Zionist nationalism, separatism, and militarism seemed like a decided step backward.
What years is Moser talking about? What evidence does he have about the opinions of Jews who were not members of political organizations? How does he distinguish Jews who opposed Zionism from Jews who were sympathetic to Zionism but had no desire to join a Zionist organization or move to Palestine?
Moser explains the initial opposition to Zionism this way whining about the history he didn't know growing up:
I would have known that the Jews cherished the rights they had gained from the end of the eighteenth century, especially following the American and French Revolutions, and saw Zionism as an attempt to unravel them.
American or British or French Jews around 1900 often did view Zionism as a threat to the civil rights that they had finally achieved after centuries of persecution. But notice the logic: if they truly felt secure in their countries, why should a political movement threaten their position as equal citizens?
His claims that most Jews were anti-Zionist may have been true in 1905. Some Jewish newspapers like the American Israelite of Cincinnati remained anti-Zionist. But most Jewish periodicals in the US - even another newspaper in Cincinnati - became more and more Zionist between the 1900s and 1930s. Again, no one is suppressing history; the debates in those papers are easy to look up. And the direction was clear.
But beyond that, Moser is making sweeping judgements of Jews as if most of them lived in Western democracies in the early 20th century. The Russian Empire, where millions of Jews lived, was not exactly the beneficiary of the American or French revolutions. Jews were restricted in where they could live, subjected to a variety of legal disabilities and periodically massacred. I suspect that many Jews who watched their relatives being beaten to death by Cossacks would have viewed the idea of Jewish self-defense in a somewhat different light from a Reform rabbi in Cincinnati.
And France itself, the country most closely associated with Jewish emancipation, gave us the Dreyfus affair only a few years before the First Zionist Congress. The spectacle of mobs screaming for the death of Jews in the very country that had pioneered Jewish emancipation might have given a thoughtful Jew reason to reassess whether emancipation really was an adequate long-term solution to antisemitism.
One of the problems with this claim is that Moser's twelve subjects cannot possibly answer these questions. Selecting twelve anti-Zionists to write about proves that there have been at least twelve anti-Zionists in the past 150 years. Mazel tov.
Moser writes:
But though their stories have been suppressed—though they themselves were subjected to every form of ostracization, including banishment and death—the Jews who resisted Zionism never went away. This was in large part Zionism’s own doing.
Moser has every right to investigate cases where Jewish anti-Zionists were actually persecuted. But he seems to equate the declining relevance of anti-Zionist ideas with the suppression of those ideas. Berger published many anti-Zionist articles in the 1950s and 1960s. He wasn't silenced. He was irrelevant. Israel existed.
But the question is why Jews came to support Zionism. Did Zionists somehow hypnotize millions of Jews into supporting them? Or is it possible that the events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made the Zionist argument considerably more persuasive?
Moser doesn't seem particularly curious about this.
He is also willing to make some astonishing historical assertions in order to minimize the importance of Zionism to Jews. He claims that Jews had never demonstrated a desire to immigrate to Palestine, even though such immigration had been possible for centuries and was:
in fact, at no time forbidden.
Here is a letter from the Ottoman minister to the American Secretary of State, dated September 9, 1898:
By order of my Government I have the honor to inform your excellency that the entry of foreign Israelites into Palestine is prohibited, and that the imperial authorities have received orders to prevent the landing of Jewish emigrants.
So much for "at no time forbidden."
The larger issue is that Moser wants to demonstrate that Jews had no particular desire to return to Israel. If Jews could have moved there and did not, then their absence is evidence for his thesis.
He ignores that rabbis, often with their disciples, have been emigrating to Eretz Yisrael forever. Yehuda Ha-Levi, Nachmanides, many Tosafists, the Ari, Yosef Karo, waves of Chassidic leaders, followers of the Vilna Gaon: it is a rather long list. There were serious economic and logistic obstacles to aliyah, that does not prove that Jews did not want to go.
But there is another major question that anti-Zionists like Moser avoid answering at all costs: How many Jews might have been saved if there had been a Jewish state in 1939?
In May 1939, months before the start of World War II, the British White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over five years, after which further Jewish immigration would require Arab consent. Tens of thousands of German Jews had already found refuge in Palestine. How many more could have been saved if Jews, instead of the British and the Arabs, had controlled Jewish immigration?
They like to portray Zionism and Israel as unmitigated evil because of the sin of moving into a land that had some 550,000 Arabs in 1900. But they do not reckon with the alternative crime of allowing millions of Jews to die.
You know...nuance.
To Moser, Jewish live lost in the Holocaust pale in importance to the Palestinian Arabs who mostly chose to flee in 1948.
And what about the Jews who were actually saved by Zionism, both before the Holocaust and afterward? The Jews who had been imprisoned by the British in Cyprus as they desperately attempted to reach Palestine? The Jewish communities who found refuge in Israel after they were no longer welcome in Arab countries?
To Moser and the other anti-Zionists, such context is to be avoided. Zionism is evil, and the idea that it saved lives and provided rights for Jews who didn't have them is a distraction, and certainly not something they want you to think about.
Moser's declaration that Jewish anti-Zionists were ultimately proven right is based largely on his characterization of what Israel has done to the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Moser bizarrely conflates Zionism with his false recounting of Israel's supposed crimes like "genocide." But is he saying that Zionism is inherently genocidal, or that Israel's implementation was flawed and it could have been done better? Zionists accepted two states in 1947, was that also genocidal? Moser moves back and forth between "Zionism" and his hate for Israel today, and the two are not the same thing.
Moser has resurrected the arguments of some of the Jews who rejected Zionism. That is a perfectly legitimate historical enterprise. But to pronounce them "ultimately proven right," he has to answer their opponents' arguments as well.
He won't engage in that argument, because he would lose.
(h/t Isaac C)
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