Anti-Zionism
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—a region partly coinciding with the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.
Before World War II, opposition to Zionism was common among Jewish communities. Secular critics viewed Zionism as a form of nationalism inconsistent with Enlightenment universalism, while some Orthodox groups opposed it on theological grounds, regarding the establishment of a Jewish state as contingent upon the arrival of the Messiah. Support for Zionism increased during the 1930s as conditions for Jews rapidly deteriorated in Europe due to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and Zionism began to prevail over opposition to it in the Jewish diaspora. With the Second World War, the sheer scale of the Holocaust was felt and support for Zionism increased dramatically.
After the establishment of the State of Israel in the 1948 Palestine war, anti-Zionism shifted from opposition to the creation of a Jewish state to opposition to Israel's existence, with many postwar movements advocating its replacement by an alternative political entity. Most Jewish anti-Zionist movements disintegrated or transformed into pro-Zionist organizations, though some, including the American Council for Judaism, continued to oppose the ideology. Outside the Jewish community, opposition to Zionism developed primarily among Arab populations, particularly Palestinians, after the mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war, which many Palestinians and scholars consider a form of colonial dispossession. Several advocacy groups that explicitly support Palestinian solidarity also oppose Zionism, viewing it as a form of colonialism. These include organizations from within the Jewish community, including Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States and Jews for Justice for Palestinians in the United Kingdom, as well as broader activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the International Solidarity Movement.
Anti-Zionism comes in various forms. Some anti-Zionists seek to replace Israel and its occupied territories with a single state that would putatively give Jews and Palestinians equal rights. These anti-Zionists have argued that a binational state would still realize Jewish self-determination, as self-determination need not imply a separate state. Some challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Some are anti-Zionist for religious reasons, such as Haredi Jews, and others seek instead the oppression or ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews, although this position was historically rare in Western countries. The relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is debated, with some academics and organizations rejecting the linkage as unfounded and a form of weaponization of antisemitism used to stifle criticism of Israel and its policies, including the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip, while others, particularly supporters of Zionism, argue that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic or new antisemitism.
Anti-Zionism before 1948
Early Jewish anti-Zionism
In Europe
From the beginning, there was resistance to Zionism and Theodor Herzl's call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Opposition came from diverse sources: many Orthodox rabbis held that a Jewish state before the messiah was against divine will; assimilationist Jewish liberals feared Zionism threatened efforts at integration and citizenship in European states; and various left-wing Jewish movements, such as the Bund and Autonomists, promoted alternative forms of Jewish identity. In Western Europe, established Jewish communities often preferred loyalty to their nation-states over Jewish particularism. Some Reform rabbis removed references to Zion from liturgy, while others criticized Zionism as unrealistic. By contrast, the Mizrachi movement represented religious Zionist support, though more traditionalist groups like Agudat Yisrael opposed cooperation with secular Zionists. In the Soviet Union, the Yevsektsiya curtailed Zionist activity as part of its campaign against "Jewish bourgeois nationalism".Outside Europe
In regions outside Europe and North America, Zionism was often met with disinterest and regarded as a foreign ideology.In Morocco, for example, it was introduced by Europeans in port cities and met with skepticism by the local Sephardic populations, who regarded it as irreligious and not concerned with their interests. It was later actively promoted by envoys from the Zionist fundraising organizations Jewish National Fund and Keren Hayesod. Urban, elite Moroccan Jews were divided on the question of Zionism: some supported modern secular Zionism, but some who were invested in the project of Westernization saw Zionism as an obstacle to achieving assimilation and integration with the Europeans; others saw Zionism as an obstacle to a favored Jewish-Muslim alliance and coexistence in Morocco. L'Union Marocaine, a francophone Jewish newspaper, spoke for the alliancistes associated with the Alliance Israélite Universelle, who saw Zionism as an obstacle to assimilation with the Europeans, and challenged L'Avenir Illustré, which published Zionist propaganda. Rural Moroccan Jews lived in relative isolation in their villages and were not very involved with Zionism until the Jewish Agency and Mossad LeAliya actively recruited them for migration by in the 1950s and 60s. There was no significant migration of Moroccan Jews to Palestine before the 1948 war and the establishment of the State of Israel.
In Egypt, Zionist activity began at the start of the 20th century, but there was limited engagement with it among Egyptian Jews until 1942–43, with the arrival of Zionist emissaries from Palestine and Zionist activists among the Allied forces in Egypt. According to Joel Beinin, "because most Egyptian Jews were relatively secure and comfortable during the 1930s, few saw the point of risking their position by ostentatious support for Zionism", and those who did express support for Zionism rarely migrated to Palestine themselves. In 1946, Jewish members of Iskra, an underground communist movement, founded the Jewish Anti-Zionist League.
Zionism in Iraq started to spread in the early 20th century. Although Iraqi Jews started to learn about the Zionist Organization through newspapers and periodicals published in Hebrew in Europe and Palestine in the 19th century, Iraqi Jews only made contact with the ZO in 1913.
Early non-Jewish Arab anti-Zionism
Arabs began paying attention to Zionism in the late Ottoman period. In 1899, compelled by a "holy duty of conscience", Yousef al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem and a member of the Ottoman Parliament, wrote a letter to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France to voice his concerns that Zionism, which he called a "natural, beautiful and just" idea, would jeopardize the friendly associations among Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. He wrote: "Who can deny the rights of the Jews to Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!" But Khalidi suggested that "geographically, no hope of realisation"; since Palestine was already inhabited, the Zionists should find another place for the implementation of their political goals: "in the name of God", he wrote, "let Palestine be left alone."According to Rashid Khalidi, Alexander Scholch and Dominique Perrin, Yousef Khalidi was prescient in predicting that, regardless of Jewish historic rights, given the geopolitical context, Zionism could stir an awakening of Arab nationalism uniting Christians and Muslims. Kahn showed the letter to Theodor Herzl, who on 19 March 1899 replied to Khalidi in French arguing that both the Ottoman Empire and the non-Jewish population of Palestine would benefit from Jewish immigration. As to Khalidi's concerns about the non-Jewish majority population of Palestine, Herzl replied rhetorically: "who would think of sending them away?" Rashid Khalidi notes that this was penned four years after Herzl had confided to his diary the idea of spiriting the Arab population away to make way for Jews.
The Maronite Christian Naguib Azoury, in his 1905 The Awakening of the Arab Nation, warned that the "Jewish people" were engaged in a concerted drive to establish a country in the area they believed was their homeland. Subsequently, the Palestinian Christian-owned and highly influential newspaper Falastin was founded in 1911 in the then Arab-majority city of Jaffa and soon became the area's fiercest and most consistent critic of Zionism. It helped shape Palestinian identity and nationalism.
Palestinian and broader Arab anti-Zionism took a decisive turn, and became a serious force, with the November 1917 publication of the Balfour Declaration – which arguably emerged from an antisemitic milieu – in the face of strenuous resistance from two anti-Zionists, Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu, then the Secretary of State for India. Other than assuring civil equality for all future Palestinians regardless of creed, it promised diaspora Jews territorial rights to Palestine, where, according to the 1914 Ottoman census of its citizens, 83% were Muslim, 11.2% Christian, and 5% Jewish. The majority Muslim and Christian population constituting 94% of the citizenry only had their "religious rights" recognized.
Given that Arab notables were almost unanimous in repudiating Zionism, and incidents such as the Surafend massacre stirred deep resentment against Britain throughout the area, the British soon came to the conclusion, which they confided to the Americans during the King–Crane Commission, that the provisions for Zionism could only be implemented by military force. To this end, the British Army calculated that a garrison of at least 50,000 troops would be required to implement the Zionist project on Palestinian soil. According to Henry Laurens, uneasiness among British troops stationed in the region over the task of ostensibly supporting Zionism, something that clashed with their customary paternalistic treatment of colonial populations, accounted for much of the anti-Zionist sentiment that UK military personnel based in Palestine expressed.